American - Novelist | -
I lived in San Francisco and did the Stegner fellowship for two years, and it was amazing. From fall 2008 to spring 2010, I was there.
Jesmyn Ward
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The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.
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I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.
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There was nothing postracial about my experience, and there still isn't.
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I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'
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A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
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I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.
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We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
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We're all about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, et cetera - I think that's a harmful mythology, that the choices that we make and the things that we do in our lives are not connected to anything else. So I'd like to help to debunk that.
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I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.
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It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.
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It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
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