I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult.… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth.… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of the African… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I think that voodoo as a spiritual tradition has been demonized for so long in popular culture. I wanted to write against that and… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And acknowledging that… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true.… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies,… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
