tv Author Jesmyn Ward CSPAN June 17, 2018 7:49am-8:01am EDT
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[inaudible conversations] >> over the years booktv has covered hundreds of books on foreign affairs such as american university sarah snyder on america's inclusion of human rights activism and foreign policy. >> sees been going about the cities literary scene. up next to speak with professor and first female two-time recipient of the national book award, jesmyn ward.
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>> the winner of the national book award for fiction is jesmyn ward. [cheers and applause] "salvage the bones." >> these are things i've been obsessed with us idea of what the idea of history and how history bears on the present and how our past isn't really our past. how our past is also present. i think this is one of the reasons consumers i wrote about incarceration in prison, writing about inccerati, incarceration of black people, black men, black boys. and how dehumanizing that is, how traumatic that is. and then how i guess the specific circumstances of that mass incarceration might have
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changed. maybe our prisons today don't look so much, don't really look much like parchment presented. they are not working plantations, but they are still dehumanizing places. they are still places where, you know, like a generation of black men and black boys are dehumanized and also traumatized. i think that another sort of thing i'm writing about that i've been writing but recently it's also like intergenerational trauma. so what does it mean for, say, the grandfather in "sing, unburied, sing" to suffer trauma while he was incarcerated? and then how does that affect his relationship with his wife? how does that reflect his relationship with his children? how does that affect his behavior and out, like how does
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the trauma affect his behavior so that he passes it on to his children? and then how does it work their sense of intimacy or family or ideas of safety and how does it affect the way that they interact with each other and the way they interact with their children, right? those are things i've been thinking about lot lately in my work. the reason that i write, that most of my work is fiction and not nonfiction is because writing nonfiction is actually really hard for me. writing fiction is easier. it comes easier. the process is more intuitive and it feels more organic, whereas when i write creative nonfiction, not only do i have to sort of work against my usual
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process, because my usual process is, i began with my main characters and i have a vague idea of where they're going. but nothing is plotted out, where as with creative nonfiction i can put everything out from the beginning. i have to plan everything from the very beginning. so not only is the process much different and much harder for me because it's much more deliberate i guess, it's also, creati nfictio is more difficult for me because it demands honesty. it demands also a certain amount of, like, intimacy in making yourself vulnerable on the page and writing towards uncomfortable situations and uncomfortable subject matter, right? especially when you're writing about trauma, about the weight history bears on the present.
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it's really, that's really hard stuff to write about. when i write about those subjects in creative nonfiction, it takes me a very long time, one, just to get a rough draft down, then i have to revise again and again and again and again because a lot of the times in my first two or three or four or five drafts i'm avoiding the painful subject. i'm sort of writing around it or i do want to confront it. i do want to sit with it. i don't want to live with it. in the ways that creative nonfiction demands. that's what i mainly stick to fiction, so writing about difficult subject matter in fiction is easier for readers because in a way they can read it and say, well, this is fiction, this is made up. i mean, i think that they
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understand that there's something of the truth and real life is present in fiction, but i think there's a different experience and, therefore, the reader. between like reading and a made up story that has difficult subject matter, and in reading a story that's based in real life. i think people are resistant to it a little bit. it's easy for them to experience a painful sort of story in fiction than it is in creative nonfiction, and memoir. i think sometimes that's why creative, like works of the creative nonfiction that are about difficult subject matter, i think that's why they are harder to sell sometimes. sometimes people just want to escape, and i think that fiction about a certain amount of escapism, where creative nonfiction really doesn't in a way. you were able to escape into someone else's experience, but if you know it is based on
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real-life i don't think this much like an escape sometimes. >> i'm so happy to be up and so happy to tell you who the winner is. "sing, unburied, sing" jesmyn ward. [cheers and applause] >> again, that was a surprise and it was a very even more of a surprise when i went because i thought, i don't know, i was convinced that i would not win twice. i mean, it's been done, it happens so rarely so i thought i'm not going to win twice. i mean, it's an honor just to make the long list and just to make the short list. there's no way they're going to give this to me again, so i was completely shocked. and, of course, very happy, very pleased when they gave it to me for the second time with "sing, unburied, sing." >> throughout my career when i have received come when i've
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been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, right, and it was of this. people will not read your work because these are not universal stories. i don't know whether some doorkeeper felt this way because i i wrote about poor people or because i wrote about black people because her book about southerners. as my career progressed and as i got some affirmations, i still encountered that mindset every now and again. i still find myself having uncomfortable conversations with reluctant readers who initially didn't want to read my work because they said what do i have in common with the pregnant 15-year-old? face it, why should i read about a 13-year-old or black boy or his neglectful ofdd drugted mother? what do they have to say to me? and you, my fellow writers and editors and publishing people the national book foundation folks who read my work, you answered plenty. you looked at me and the people i love and write about, you looked at my poor, , my black, y
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southern children, women and men, and you saw yourself. you saw your grief, your love, your losses, your regrets, your joy, your hope. and i'm people grateful to each and everyone of you who read my work and find something that seems to you, that moves you in it. i hope to continue this conversation with you for all of our days. >> i do feel a certain amount of pressure but it's a pressure that have to actively resist because i think it's the kind of pressure that makes me very aware of my audience, you know, now that audience has responded to my previous work, right? and so i do feel a certain sense of pressure because i'm wondering, okay, how are they going to respond to this, whatever this story is i'm trying to do and what i'm working on now?
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and is this what the audience wants from me, or do they want something else, or will they expect something else or why disappoint them? that was especially problematic for me after "salvage the bones" won the national book award. i became very aware of audience. when i sat down to begin working on my next book, i couldn't write anything, really difficult because i was very aware of the audience and i choked here i couldn't get anything out. then i spoke with nikki phinney, the poet who won the national book award for poetry in 2011 in the same year that "salvage the bones" one for fiction. i was telling her just how difficult it was for me to get anything doubt on the page and she gave me the best advice because she said forget all of this.
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forget the prizes, forget all of that. when you said that in front of the computer, remember the emotions that drew you to storytelling, that drew you to the page in the first place. try to hold that close to you and forget everything else. she's like, that is what is important, that emotion, that feeling that brought you to the page. and i took her advice and that's the only way i was able to push away that sensation, get rid of the sensation of pressure and that awareness of audience and really right again. that's when i began working, later "sing, unburied, sing." not only do i try to fit everything that a writing and just remember that emotion that brings me to storytelling what i
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also take all the awards dotted get, that i get and to bring them to my moms house. because if i don't have them, then it helps me to forget about them when it sitting in front of my computer and just really concentrate on the story, characters and telling the best story that i abose characters. .. >> or by visiting
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