YouSaid · the spoken record

Jesmyn Ward

lines on the record: 26
first: 2023-11-29
most recent: 2023-11-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“William Faulkner, right? Natasha Treadway. And then here I am. You know, Eudora Welty, and then here I am down on the Gulf Coast. That was very special to me because I remember being a kid in my elementary school library and seeing that map, that literary wall, and thinking, wouldn't that be amazing if one day I could be on the literary map? I don't know.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I mean, every time I'm a finalist for an award or actually win an award, it is always very meaningful to me because, you know, my past and being like a hungry writer in my 20s and wanting this. With everything in me, like all of that still feels very present, right? No, that's good. That's good. So I always appreciate everything. But I do have to admit, on the day that I saw my face on the illustrated map of Mississippi and Mississippi writers, and like, it's like Richard Wright.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no way they're going to give me this. And then it happens. And I was, again, it's always surreal, just completely flabbergasted. It was amazing. But I think it's still, I don't know if I, it is still not real to me.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't even know what to say about that. I mean, I don't even know what to say about that. I mean, she's Tony Morrison, right? I mean,”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might get some flack for saying this, but William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a book that I love and that I read over and over again because I love the poetry of it. There's something about the South that...”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, that's so magical, but I could never do that, right? And then I wrote a poem for Arbor Day when I was in sixth grade. And my teachers loved it. And it was the first time that I'd ever written anything and that people responded Positively to it. And so that planet, the seed in the back of my head, and I thought maybe this is something that I could do when I get older. And so I began writing mostly poetry. And then I tried to tackle fiction when I was in high school.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't. So I've always loved reading, right? Because you're a reader before. I've always loved reading when I was much younger. What authors did seemed like a sort of magic. Yeah. Right? Like when I was in elementary school. I”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a part of your characters that abide with you. I think. I mean, I think, you know, all the books that I've written, those people are still with me. Because I love all the characters that I write. It's actually a thing where with every book that I ever finish, I always cry at the end once I send it off because it makes me sad that I'm not able to live with the people that I'm writing about day in and day out anymore, that now they'll go out in the world and they'll take on other lives and other meanings to the audience to readers. But they still remain with.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty early on in the rough draft because, like you, it just came to me. Like I think it was maybe part of her, like she was saying this would happen. This person would find me, this Safi, this person would sort of pull me from my grief. This person would remind me that there are lighter things in there.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of liberation I think that we can all learn from Annis. I think that so many people, as you said earlier, are struggling right now. They're struggling with grief, struggling with a changed world, struggling to make their way into a future that looks very different from what they thought that their lives would look like, right? And so I think there's something to be said for following a character like Annis who finds her way through that, who is able to create a new and hopeful future for herself in the midst of hardship and tragedy.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the book. And so that's what when I was done, right, especially with the big sort of final draft, the big final version of it, that's what I sort of surfaced out of the narrative, you know, like holding on to that idea, that living requires hope.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resistance against hopelessness. I think and resistance against giving up and resistance against sinking into despair. And so writing with Anis helped me, I think, find my way to that realization.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to answer that question because I don't want to spoil anything at the end. But I can say this. Part of what I learned in writing my way south with Anis and in sitting with her on her journey was that I learned that to wake up in the morning is resistance, right? To breathe is resistance, to stand up, to walk, to move at your own pace through the world, to choose to live is resistance.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's nothing Was a part of it. I did. I think that that was part of what silenced me in those first months as well. But then I just heard this voice and this voice said the last thing that he would want is for his loss to silence. And I said, okay, you know, it felt like a communication. And so I said, okay. And then I dove back into the book. But I think the writing of the book, you know, because that took like. Two years, right, after that, where I was working on the rough draft and then working on multiple revisions, I mean, I was still working my way through grief then. And to be honest, like, I'm still working my way through grief. Of course you would be comes and it comes and it goes. It never leaves.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think at the heart of what I do is hope, right? I mean, I feel like that's part of my motivation for writing about the people that I write about and writing about the places that I write about, right? It always comes from a place of love and a place of hope that through my writing and through my work that by telling these stories that can do some good in the world. So I think that I was just so admired in grief with my partners leaving that I didn't have that hope and then so I sat with that idea that I wouldn't write anything again but did you get”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I didn't write anything for six months after my partner passed. And I got to a certain point where because that's so strange for me, I'm always writing. I write five days a week, at least two hours a day. I'm always working. And so when I went those six months without writing and I just felt so hopeless, you know, I'm going to end low. And I was admired in my grief. And so I thought, okay, what if this is it? Like what if you're done? What if you've written the last book that you'll ever write? And that was very sad for me. And it was painful to think that that was the case.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think I did open myself to Anis. You know, she's, it took me a long, something like four or five years to figure out the way that I could understand Annis was through her emotion and through her grief. And before, like in the first five years that I was working on the book, I think was actively resisting. Her for whatever reason, I could not I don't know, I couldn't sink into the moment with her and I couldn't clearly hear her but then when I began to wrestle with my own grief, then I could sit in that moment with her and be vulnerable with her and feel like her longing for her mother, right? And then also I think bear witness to the work that she does to move through her grief and make her way towards a new reality, a new world.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have worked a lot. You know, I've studied a lot. I've read a lot, right? So I've done that work. I have worked very hard. And that is part of it. But I also think that I think there's something to be said for inspiration. I think there's something to be said for the presence of the divine. I think there's something to be said for gifts and for intuition. Often when I'm writing I'm so again it's that word again immersed in the experience with the character that it feels like that person is sitting there with me telling me the story. And so in a way I'm just channeling it. I'm opening myself to it and hearing it.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I feel like in this country that we aren't often, we're not given that experience. Right, like when we learn about enslaved people in history, when we talk about enslaved people, they're flattened, right? They're just sort of flat types, right? And we're never able to, I don't know, we're never able to humanize and to see them as”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes me feel like I did something right because part of what I wanted to do with lettuce to send is I wanted To crowd the reader into Annis's life and into her experience. And I wanted to immerse the reader in Annis's life.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Right, and I wanted to push back against that and try to do what I could in my work to write enslaved people like Annis back into the public consciousness because I talk to, actually spoke to Tanehasi Kotz about this because I was feeling some anxiety when the water dancer came out because I was working on Lettuce Descent. And I was like, I don't know if there is there room for this. And he said he said, You know, Jasmine, there were millions of enslaved people, so there are millions of stories to tell about enslaved people. And it's a very simple thing. It's a very simple statement, but it just made perfect sense.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got the idea from a show that I heard on NPR that was about New Orleans history, right? And on that show, and this was around eight years ago, on that show, they said that out of the dozens and dozens of slave pens that were located in the city of New Orleans during the height of the domestic slave trade, that there were only two markers eight years ago, two markers in the city of New Orleans where there were slave pens, and one of them was in the wrong location. That was shocking to me and also it made me emotional. Like I started to tear up when I heard it because it because it felt very wrong. That idea.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it serves my work, it serves my writing, because it keeps me honest, right? Because I'm surrounded by the kind of people that I write about. You know, I have a really large family, a really large extended family of solid community. And so being around them, yeah, it keeps me honest and also I love the landscape of home. You know, it's very beautiful to me. And it inspires me. And so I think that there's worth in being like surrounded and enveloped by that landscape too. Because it speaks to me. And I feel like that speaking finds its way into my work.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I, you know, I made the decision to return home and to live and work and write at home as an adult because I just wanted to see what it would be like because I've basically fled when I graduated from high school, I thought I need to get out and go somewhere else. Right, right. But then I returned and I think”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when you're actually sitting down doing the work, I don't think I'm necessarily aware of it. I think I... He becomes so immersed in the worlds and with the characters that I'm writing about that I'm just sort of less aware of it. And it feels like, I don't know, it just feels like I'm in some liminal space with real people because my characters, whenever I'm sitting with them, they seem very alive to me.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that most of the time it doesn't feel like it's a given, right? I think like most writers, if I struggle with it often.”
2023-11-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Jesmyn Ward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source