American - Novelist | -
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.
Jesmyn Ward
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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.
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I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.
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At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.
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I was a freshman at Stanford University the first time someone called me a 'bama.' One of my new friends from D.C. said it, laughing, and even though I didn't know what it meant, exactly, I got that it was some kind of insult. I must have smirked or shrugged, which made him laugh harder, and then he called me 'country,' too.
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Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
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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.
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I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
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Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
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It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'
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My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.
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My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.
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