Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.
— Jesmyn Ward
I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars.
I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.
I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.
I've always used Southern rappers in epigraphs for my novels. For 'Sing, Unburied, Sing,' I wanted to use Big K.R.I.T. - because I have so much respect for the lyrical depth of their music.
When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.
As a reader, sometimes, I just want to not think. You know, I want to read something that is purely enjoyable: that is, like, escapist.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
People ask me about staying here. I think they assume that I wouldn't want to come back to a place like Mississippi, which is so backward and which frustrates me a lot. The responsibility that I feel to tell these stories about the people and the place that I'm from is what pulls me back.
I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.
'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.
On one hand, I am very pessimistic, but on the other hand, if I didn't believe that speaking up would do something, I wouldn't have spoken.
It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
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.
I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.
As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.
I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.
I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I've set aside for the task. I don't work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me.
Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.'
One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.
I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.
Faulkner's characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.
My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.
The women here are the ones that hold the families together. So if my mom were to be unhappy with me, in a way, it would be like I would have lost my entire family.
If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.
At every turn, Molly Antopol's gorgeous debut story collection, 'The UnAmericans,' is firing on multiple cylinders.
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. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.
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.
We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.
If I could chat with anyone, it would be Claire Messud, because I think she could tell me how to get better as a writer as I age.
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
I recently read a collection of stories called 'Boondock Kollage,' by Regina Bradley. The stories follow multiple characters through the South, through the past and present. I loved reading that book: the first time I read the opening story, I was breathless and incoherent.
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.
As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
I hope that I never have to work in a place that sells large quantities of jeans ever again. Jeans are rough! It used to kill my hands. I know that sounds prissy - I'm not prissy at all. But it did; it killed my hands. It was awful.
In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.
I'm always curious about other writers' routines.
In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.
I was pleasantly surprised with 'Salvage.' I went to Australia and New Zealand for the novel and met a lot of people who had experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch. They responded very strongly to the book because they had been through these natural disasters and were trying to figure out how to rebuild.
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.
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.
