This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.  

Kase Johnstun: Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center, in conjunction with the Check Your Shelves podcast with Utah Humanities. I am Kase Johnstun, director for the Utah Center for the Book, Utah's representative to the Library of Congress, and the host of Check Your Shelves.

We usually record from downtown Ogden, Utah, on historic 25th Street, but today we are recording in my home, which is just as lovely but not as technically wonderful. But today our guest is two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

Right before this podcast, I sent an email to somebody at Utah State saying, “I'm going to be a few minutes late because I'm interviewing Jesmyn Ward,” and they sent back an email that said, “Oh yeah, no big deal.” And I said, “Yeah.” So it was a pretty funny exchange.

Ward is the author of Salvage the Bones, one of my favorite books — pre-COVID, Top 10 favorite books — and Sing, Unburied, Sing, both winners of the National Book Award, as well as editor of the influential anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race.

Her work explores the rural South, race, environmental justice, and historical memory. Her most recent novel, Let Us Descend, an Oprah Book Club Pick, was named one of the year’s best books by The Washington Post, Time, The New Yorker, and others.

The title, drawn from Dante’s Inferno, reflects the novel’s engagement with history and spirit. NPR described it as “the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”

Ward is the Professor of English and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University. And I have to give a shoutout to the Mellon Foundation, which saved the humanities councils across the country this year when we got cut by Dodge. The Mellon Foundation gave a donation and a match to all the humanities councils, which is why I still have a job. So I have to give a shoutout to that foundation.

So welcome, welcome, Jesmyn. I am so glad to have you. I’m trying not to show everybody that I’m fanning.

Jesmyn Ward: It is good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Kase Johnstun: Yeah. How is it there? Where are you right now?

Jesmyn Ward: I’m in Mississippi. I’m at home, actually. The summer season is hanging on for us, unfortunately. But it’s a little cool in the mornings, which is nice. We’re just trying to make it through the end of hurricane season without any storms.

Kase Johnstun: Still really humid?

Jesmyn Ward: Yeah, still. It’s drier, which is nice. The humidity has lifted a little bit, but I think we’re getting some weather this weekend, like some rain. Even in the fall, it always gets humid again right before it rains. We’re not in the easy sort of winter months yet.

Kase Johnstun: Yeah. You’ll come to Utah next week, which — and I will speak just for Utah, the entire state — Utah couldn’t be happier. I am stoked for your visit. I would bring lotion, because it is the second-driest state in the nation.

Jesmyn Ward: What’s the first?

Kase Johnstun: Nevada.

Jesmyn Ward: Oh, okay.

Kase Johnstun: So we have the second-driest climate and the second-least rainfall in the nation too. Utah’s a very dry place. Bring lotion — you will be coming from humidity, which you don’t think is humidity, to very dry air at 1%. But we are so excited to have you.

So, I’ve taught Salvage the Bones for more than a decade, which is really cool. I don’t teach for the university or the high schools anymore, but I teach at the Lighthouse in Denver, which I absolutely love. I teach a class called Writing the Novel, and students get to pick a mentor book to highlight and outline. A lot of my students have picked Salvage the Bones. Maybe not as many have picked some of your other books, maybe because Salvage the Bones has been around longer.

As their mentor book, they highlight, outline, and follow the writing, which is really cool. I love teaching it because students get to tell me why it’s their mentor book, and that’s really cool. But I have a couple of questions, and we might not get through three of them. As you can tell, I’m chatty and excited, so we could just talk back and forth.

This one stems from being a writer outside of New York City, outside of LA — a successful writer, nationally known, respected, taught in classes like mine. When it comes to place-based writing, I’ve heard so many budding writers told — or they come to me and say someone told them — not to stick with writing what they know. You know the advice I’m talking about: to expand outward from there.

They’re told this because teachers believe that writers writing about places people don’t know will not sell books. I believe both these pieces of advice are wrong. But if you think they’re correct, go for it. But you have proven that leaning into both of these can not only be rich in story, culture, place, and people that much of the country never gets to see in literature, but can also win National Book Awards.

What are your thoughts on this advice?

Jesmyn Ward: I think you have to follow what you love in your writing. That is what I’ve held onto throughout my career. I love to write about the people I grew up with, the people who live in my hometown, in my state, in my region. So I remain there, because that place and those people inspire me.

I guess I could have taken that advice and branched out, but my heart wouldn’t have necessarily been in it, because that wasn’t where I was getting my inspiration. That wasn’t the place and people that spark my curiosity, that make me want to explore human behavior.

So I understand the intent behind that advice. This is a difficult industry to succeed in, and I think people who give that advice believe they are helping writers clear one roadblock in creating compelling work. But if you love what you are writing about, if it genuinely moves you, that will bear out in the work. Readers will respond to that. The kind of work that is organic to you will find the readers who need those stories.

I teach creative writing too, and one of the things I always tell my students is this: one of the things you should attempt to do in your work is to write the particular, to write the specific. Write in a voice that reflects you as an author and your particular vision. The richer your work is, the more it’s rooted in specific details of a specific experience, the more readers will feel the experience is universal.

If it’s detailed and rich enough, it becomes compelling, even to people for whom the world is strange. They identify with it and empathize with the characters. I believe that. That’s what I attempt in all of my work, and that’s what I would tell students: the power comes in creating a rich, detailed, specific world that is particular to you and the place you’re writing about. If you do that well enough, your reader will feel empathy, even if you’re not writing from New York or LA or places that loom large in the American imagination.

Kase Johnstun: I’m going to get that transcribed and share it. And I wonder too if it takes authors like you to show that these places have global appeal because of the people and places you describe so richly. Maybe it’s just breaking that mold to show everyone that New York isn’t the only place where cool things happen.

Jesmyn Ward: When I was younger, it wasn’t easy for me to break into publishing in New York. That was a difficult experience. My second novel was my first book actually published by a New York publisher. My first book was published by a small independent press in Chicago called Agate — a great publisher, but without the resources of the larger houses.

The pushback I got on my first novel, when I was shopping it around, was that publishers couldn’t see an audience for it. That’s what they were saying in so many words: they didn’t think people would want to read it, because of who I was writing about.

I internalized that sentiment. I assumed I would only have a few readers, but I would love them. The first time I realized what I said earlier was true — that if you create specific, rich work, it resonates widely — was when I went to New Zealand for the Auckland Festival of Books.

I met readers there who had read Salvage the Bones. The Christchurch earthquakes had just happened, and a whole group of women came up to me and said, “We love this book so much. We identified with it because of the earthquakes. We experienced devastating natural disaster the same way your characters did.”

That was one of the first times I thought, huh, my work doesn’t need to be set in New Zealand or feature people who look like them in order for them to feel something.

Kase Johnstun: You give hope, honestly. Hope to writers and readers. There are so many rich stories across this country, across this globe, that people haven’t told yet. And when they are told, they connect more deeply than the ones that have been told forever.

That’s the reason I love your books: your knowledge and love of place. You can’t have that unless you truly know and believe in a place, or have your characters explore it. That comes out in your poetry of prose. As a literary author, I get stuck in your paragraphs because they’re gorgeous, and with your characters because they’re so big on the page.

Which leads to my next question. I’m going to mess up this quote, but the essence is true. “Every character you write has a part of you in them and a part of someone you know in them.” How do you see this? Do some protagonists live this more fully, and is there a point where they get away from that?

Jesmyn Ward: I think that is true. None of my fictional characters resemble someone one-to-one. But I take characteristics of people I know — family, community, people no longer here — and use those to flesh out my characters.

Kase Johnstun: Do you think there’s a purpose to any of it?

Jesmyn Ward: When I first committed to writing fiction, one of the reasons I felt compelled was because I didn’t see many characters in the books I read who seemed familiar to me — people like those in my family and community. I grew up in Mississippi, and there was a kind of erasure I saw happening everywhere: in the classroom, the newspaper, the local news.

That erasure was frank. One reason I wrote Salvage the Bones was because of Hurricane Katrina. I was home in Mississippi for it. It was traumatic. Afterward, I overheard and had frustrating conversations with people who would say, “Why would you ever go back? Why rebuild? There’s hurricane season every year. Everything can be wiped out. Why go back?”

To me, that flattened generations of people who have lived here. It suggested they were stupid for choosing to come back, rebuild, and remain rooted. I wanted to write against that. To push back against that erasure. In that way, yes, it’s purposeful.

Kase Johnstun: And as if it’s that easy to just not go home. As if everybody has the opportunity to just get up and change their lives. It’s not even just about money — though it is about money too — it’s about home. That’s what you know, and why you want to go back and make it better.

If it were that easy, I would’ve been out of Utah forty years ago.

So anyway, Jesmyn, thank you so much. I can’t believe how fast that went. But I want to respect your time. And I can speak for all of Utah: we are so grateful to see you next week at the Tanner Humanities Center.

Thank you again. I probably will go on Facebook and say, “I just had a half-hour conversation with Jesmyn Ward.” Why hide it, right?

You’ve been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box and Check Your Shelves. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you again, Jesmyn, for joining us. We can’t wait to see you in Utah next week.

Jesmyn Ward: I’m looking forward to it. Thank you.