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" I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers. "

Jesmyn Ward

Community

Black

Family

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" We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies. "

" I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to. "

" I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing. "

" Because everyone grows up together in my small hometown, everyone knows everyone else. And there are such large extended families that a lot of people are related to each other. "

Jesmyn Ward

Hometown

Together

" My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. "

" Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt. "

Jesmyn Ward

Doubt

Back

" I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. "

" Great trouble breeds great art, I think. "

" I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home. "

" I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write. "

" I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present. "

" I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people. "

" Without the library, I would have been lost. "

" While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader. "

" Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring. "

" History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices. "

" Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.' "

Jesmyn Ward

Childhood

Legend

" There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory. "

" My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me. "

" There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it. "

" I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it. "

" A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing. "

" I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild. "

" Physical books are still my favorite, but I own an e-book reader. They're convenient for travel. "