Jesmyn Ward: 'I wanted to write about the people of the south'
On Wednesday night, Jesmyn Ward joined the likes of William Faulkner and Jonathan Franzen when she won the National Book Award for fiction. Her novel, Salvage the Bones, is a searing portrait of a poor African American family living in coastal Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina. Ward took a moment to talk to EW about her big win and share some of her favorite books that inspire her as a writer.
When Jesmyn Ward stood blinking before the great and the good of US publishing at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan last week, she came as close as you can get in the book world to having a Gwyneth Paltrow moment. The 34-year-old outsider for the National Book Award had just won for her second novel, Salvage the Bones, about a family living in the path of Hurricane Katrina. "I wanted," she said in her acceptance speech, "to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the south." And to prevent herself from freaking out, she fell back on something most novelists don't have recourse to: a martial-arts training. "Breathe," she told herself. "You can breathe through anything.
The events in the novel were partly inspired by what happened to her family in 2005, when Katrina tore through their town. In the novel, which is seen through the eyes of Esch, its 14-year-old female protagonist, the family escapes rising flood water through a hole in the roof. In real life, Ward's family managed to reach their truck and drive to the house of a neighbouring white family, where the real drama began..
When Jesmyn Ward stood blinking before the great and the good of US publishing at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan last week, she came as close as you can get in the book world to having a Gwyneth Paltrow moment. The 34-year-old outsider for the National Book Award had just won for her second novel, Salvage the Bones, about a family living in the path of Hurricane Katrina. "I wanted," she said in her acceptance speech, "to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the south." And to prevent herself from freaking out, she fell back on something most novelists don't have recourse to: a martial-arts training. "Breathe," she told herself. "You can breathe through anything.
The events in the novel were partly inspired by what happened to her family in 2005, when Katrina tore through their town. In the novel, which is seen through the eyes of Esch, its 14-year-old female protagonist, the family escapes rising flood water through a hole in the roof. In real life, Ward's family managed to reach their truck and drive to the house of a neighbouring white family, where the real drama began..
"And there we are," says Ward, trembling slightly at the memory. "Me, my mom, my mom's husband, my elderly grandmother, my grandfather and my pregnant sister, who at eight months was very big. We're soaking wet because we've had to scramble out of the house and swim part of the way. And they open up the door. And the wind is rocking the car and they're yelling at us and we're yelling back at them because it's the only way we can be heard, and trees are flying through the air. They shout: 'Are y'all all right?' And we're like: 'Are you serious? We're sitting outside in a category-five hurricane. Do we look O-OK?'" She stutters. "And they said: 'Well, y'all can sit outside in this field, until the water goes down, but we don't have room for you in the house. We can't let you in.' And I thought: this is some bullshit."
