Why the hell am I trying?” But the failures of some of his black characters-the lack of imaginative vision regarding them, the way they don’t display the full range of human emotion, how they fail to live fully on the page-work against that awe and goad me to write. The first time I read As I Lay Dying, I was so awed I wanted to give up. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.Īs a writer from the South, you are fated to be compared with Faulkner. While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein.
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. There is also an epigraph from the poet Gloria Fuertes. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language. Hip-hop, which is my generation’s blues, is important to the characters that I write about. How have these two disparate traditions informed your work?īiblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
You preface both your novels with epigraphs from Southern rappers and the Bible. Finally, I wrote about the storm because I was dissatisfied with the way it had receded from public consciousness. I was also angry at the people who blamed survivors for staying and for choosing to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after the storm. It was terrifying and I needed to write about that. Why did you want to write about Hurricane Katrina? She teaches at the University of South Alabama. Ward, the first person in her family to attend college, received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Bois Sauvage, also the setting of her first novel Where the Line Bleeds, was modeled on Ward’s hometown of De Lisle, Mississippi. Her alcoholic and abusive father readies the house for the storm her brother Randal dreams of a basketball scholarship her brother Skeetah obsesses over China, his prize pit bull and Junior, the youngest, clamors for attention.
It centers on Esch-fourteen years old and pregnant-and Esch’s family in the aftermath of her mother’s death in childbirth. Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, is set in the fictional Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.
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