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" It's kind of funny that I've been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I'm doing is questioning and interrogating empathy. "
Leslie Jamison
Empathy
Lady
Kind
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" After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value. "
Leslie Jamison
Blind
Value
Story
" I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got. "
Leslie Jamison
Believe
People
Moments
" The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation. "
Leslie Jamison
Violence
Los Angeles
Past
" One of the big ways in which I felt my own writing life shaped by recovery had to do with my relationship to other people's stories. And one of the things I loved most about recovery was the way in which, in meetings and through fellowship, you are constantly kind of paying attention to lives outside of your own. "
Leslie Jamison
Relationship
Life
People
" It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite. "
Leslie Jamison
Story
Everyone
Infinite
" Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege. "
Leslie Jamison
Pleasure
Privilege
Subjects
" Somebody once asked me how I define sobriety, and my response was 'liberation from dependence.' "
Leslie Jamison
Somebody
Sobriety
Response
" The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering? "
Leslie Jamison
Me
Story
Believe
" Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel. "
Leslie Jamison
Important
Think
Past
" I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them. "
Leslie Jamison
Enough
Teachers
Learn
" The story of getting better can be just as compelling as the story of falling apart. "
Leslie Jamison
Story
Getting Better
Falling
" Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique. "
Leslie Jamison
Others
Person
Unique
" I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to figure out what to say at the dinner table. "
Leslie Jamison
Say
Dinner
Out
" You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh. "
Leslie Jamison
Sick
Beautiful
Color
" The 'here' of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. 'Here' is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf. "
Leslie Jamison
Water
Window
Animals
" It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did. "
Leslie Jamison
Writing
Character
Yourself
" I feel like I have a bit of a Type A personality. "
Leslie Jamison
Like
I Feel Like
Feel
" The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading. "
Leslie Jamison
Love
Language
You
" Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties. "
Leslie Jamison
Poverty
Writing
Community
" I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it's just a really profound connection. "
Leslie Jamison
Never
Connection
Myself
" I completely identify with finding freedom in boundaries. That's why I tend to have more freedom when I write nonfiction over fiction: because I'm running up against actuality and beholden to the truth in a different way. "
Leslie Jamison
Truth
Way
Why
" There's something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America. "
Leslie Jamison
Work
America
Work Ethic
" Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty. "
Leslie Jamison
Easy
Poverty
Truth