Giving Voice to All with “Sing, Unburied, Sing” Author Jesmyn Ward

Celeste Headlee:

Okay, so let’s start with you as not just an author, but as a cottage industry. The transition that occurred at one point to where you were at one point a writer, and writing is fairly solitary. And then you became a business woman. When did that happen and how did it go?

Jesmyn Ward:

I feel like it’s still ongoing. I think that I’m still working on figuring everything out. I think that earlier on in a writer’s career, you have to begin to learn how to cultivate a public persona. I mean, I guess-

Celeste Headlee:

Like branding?

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, branding. I guess that’s how people would talk about it. They’d tell you have to have a brand, so you begin to figure out the fact that you have to have one. I don’t think that when I was a beginning writer that I knew that I had to have a public face and a way of… I don’t know if talking to people and just talking points that revolve around the kind of work that I do and the kind of writing that I do. And so I had to learn how to, I don’t know, I guess how to brand myself. I had to figure out what I was going to say, how I was going to present myself to the world. What were the issues that were most important to me and how commit to using every opportunity that I had to talk about them, I guess.

Celeste Headlee:

Was it hard to accept that you had to do this?

Jesmyn Ward:

Yes, it was. Because, like you said, as a writer, when we’re baby writers, we think, I love writing, I love reading. I’m going to sit in this room by myself and I’m going to create this thing and then it’s going to go out into the world, but without me. It’s going to go out into the world as this product of its own and it’s going to find readers. The publishing company is going to make sure for people who don’t… The publishing company is going to make sure that this book finds readers. But that’s not the way that it works. And so pretty quickly when your first book is published, you realize that this is a business and that in effect, you are, in a sense, becoming, I guess, a business.

Jesmyn Ward:

So I don’t know, it’s interesting for me because I feel like I’m still in a transitional phase right now because my career is still growing. So therefore, the money that I bring in, the money that goes out, my thinking around how I’m going to invest the money that I have, how hopefully it will grow. I’m also beginning thinking about I have kids and thinking about estates and thinking about my legacy and what causes am I going to contribute to. So all of this, it still feels very new to me. And for me, like for the writers, it’s different. For some writers it happens all at once. They have this breakout, amazing book, and they become a household name. But for me, that hasn’t necessarily happened. I’ll win the National Book Award and I’ll get some recognition.

Celeste Headlee:

Which we should point out, 2011, National Book Award for Salvage the Bones. Okay.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yes. Yes. And then 2018 for Sing, Unburied, Sing. So for me, my success has come in stages, and it’s something that I still feel like, I don’t know. I still don’t feel like I am at… I still feel like there’s more work for me to do.

Celeste Headlee:

Let’s talk, then, about the process that still is just writing. Well, actually, let me take a step back. Do you think, because you also teach, do you think we need to have young writers who are in writing programs learn these things about business? How to read a contract, how to pay taxes. Do they need to learn that stuff in addition to the craft?

Jesmyn Ward:

I think so. I think it would be really helpful if you know if young writers in MFA programs, especially if they had access to classes that were all about the business of writing, because that’s something that I had to figure out. And like I said, I’m still figuring it out. But that’s something that I had to begin to figure out based on conversations that I was just having with my friends who were a bit further along in their careers than I was at that point, when I was studying at the University of Michigan, studying for my MFA.

Celeste Headlee:

Go blue.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, go blue. So yes, that’s something that I began to figure out then. Oh, you’re going to need an accountant. If you sell your book, you’re going to get this really big book advance.

Celeste Headlee:

But it comes in stage, it doesn’t come all at once.

Jesmyn Ward:

Exactly. Exactly.

Celeste Headlee:

And it’s a loan against future sales.

Jesmyn Ward:

Exactly. And I didn’t know any of that.

Celeste Headlee:

They give you that big check.

Jesmyn Ward:

Right, right. And then you don’t realize how much of it that you should set aside to pay the government in taxes, and just all these… There’s so much there that you just learn in this really haphazard way. Because I think even when I was talking with my peers and people who, like I said, whose careers were a little bit further along than mine was at the time, they didn’t know that I didn’t know all these things. So we’re sharing information, but they’ll share this piece of information, but I won’t hear the rest of it. You know what I’m saying? So it’s been very difficult to figure out exactly how to go about developing and supporting my career as a professional writer.

Jesmyn Ward:

So yes, I think that it would be really useful for MFA students, beginning writers who have not sold a book, who know next to nothing about the publishing industry, to have that opportunity to learn about the business of the industry. I feel like I had a very tiny leg up on my peers because I worked in publishing in New York City at Random House for two years. But even then, even with that background, I still didn’t know all of what I really needed to know.

Celeste Headlee:

So tell me about the part that is still just writing. Do you have a certain place that you always go to to write.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah. I wish I were more like some of my friends who are writers who can work in public places, who go to cafes and they go to coffee shops or bookstores. I can’t.

Celeste Headlee:

Too distracting?

Jesmyn Ward:

It’s too distracting. I have to work in a quiet space. I can work while I’m traveling as long as I’m working in my hotel room. But when I’m at home, there’s a room that I’ve set aside. It’s not really a proper library, but it is a room with a ton of books, so I call it my library. It’s very tiny and I’ve already run out of space in it because I have a problem with buying books. But I go there, that’s where I have my desk, and usually I’ll work there. And everything has to be quiet. Some of my friends who are writers can work to music. They’ll have whole playlists for whatever book they’re working on for that time, they’ll have devised a playlist, and it helps them to listen to music. But I can’t do it because I have to hear the rhythm of the sentences and the rhythm of the paragraphs and the rhythm of the dialogue.

Celeste Headlee:

Oh, so then the rhythm of the music would interfere.

Jesmyn Ward:

It interferes. Yeah, because I tried at one point. I thought, well, maybe. My friends are writing like this, I want to write to music. And so I tried, but it was too difficult for me. It was too distracting. I couldn’t hear what was happening on the page.

Celeste Headlee:

Is there a window?

Jesmyn Ward:

There is window right in front of my.. So I have my desk set up right in front of my window. So sometimes I look up and I’ll look out my window for a second. But if I’m in a really good groove, like I write five days a week, so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Celeste Headlee:

How long can you sustain on a day?

Jesmyn Ward:

At least two hours. It depends on where I am in a project. If I’m in a good space on a project, then I can go up to four hours.

Celeste Headlee:

That’s a long time to focus.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, it is a long time. Like I said, I’ll take little breaks where I’ll look up. And then sometimes too, if I’m working for four hours, I’m continuously working on little small projects. You know, like articles-

Celeste Headlee:

Yeah, you do a lot of stuff like editing and compilations and short stories.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah. So I’ll dedicate the first two hours to my novel and progress, and then the second two hours to whatever article I’m working on.

Celeste Headlee:

Are you a morning writer or evening writer?

Jesmyn Ward:

Now, when I was younger, I was definitely an evening writer because I am a night owl. Naturally with my circadian rhythm, I wake up late and I stay up late. Now because I’m a mom…

Celeste Headlee:

Funny how that happens.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah. Because I’m a mom, I am no longer… Well, I still have night owl tendencies, but because I have to get up so early in the morning to get my kids together to get them ready for school and get them off to school, I now work. Because I drop them off at 8:00 and then I go back home, and so I’m working by 8:30.

Celeste Headlee:

So let’s talk a little bit about the work. I interviewed you once before about your memoir, the only memoir you have, called Men We Reaped, which tells the story of the deaths of five men beginning in 2000 when your brother, Joshua, was killed. And you have said that in order to write the book, you had to learn how to love the men less in order to write about them truthfully. I wonder whether that’s also true when you’re not writing nonfiction. With other characters, do you also have to go through this process of learning to love the characters less?

Jesmyn Ward:

Yes. I think, I don’t know if… Maybe I would… It’s been a few years since we had that conversation, so maybe I would phrase it differently now. It’s not that I love the people that I write about less. It’s that I have to realize that if I am going to write about the people that I come from and the place that I come from, and if I’m going to be honest and truthful about the realities of that community and of that place, then I have to… There’s something that I like to call narrative ruthlessness. I have to have a certain amount of narrative ruthlessness. I have to realize that I can’t spare the people that I write about because I love them, because life doesn’t spare them. Life doesn’t spare us.

Jesmyn Ward:

Because I’ve taken on this responsibility of writing about the people that I write about, I have to be truthful. And I have to not separate myself from my characters, but I guess acknowledge the fact that I can still love them. I can love my fictional characters, I can love the people that I know and that I write about, and I can treat them with a certain amount of respect and tenderness and care. But at the same time that I do all that, I must be honest about the realities of the lives that they lead.

Jesmyn Ward:

And so I guess it’s just, I think that the way that I approach it is that I think I have to tell myself over and over again, like I have to remind myself of that fact, that I have to be honest, I have to be truthful. I have to write about difficult things in an honest manner and I have to avoid that impulse that I might feel, because I do love my character so much, to spare them and to prettify what the people that I love and the characters that I love are going through.

Celeste Headlee:

Well, you have returned to your fictional community, but it’s based on the small town that you’re from. I don’t mean small town like Macon, Georgia. I looked it up in the 2010 census, it had 1,147 people.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, it’s tiny.

Celeste Headlee:

It is tiny. So do the people of your town read your books and they then have things to say about the way you’ve portrayed your hometown?

Jesmyn Ward:

They do. There’s something that you should know. I come from a very large family on both sides, and so I’m probably related to half the people in the town. If you’re counting my mom’s people and my dad’s people, I’m probably related to half the people in the town. And so I think that they read my work, so to them, I’m not just this local girl who has done well for her town.

Celeste Headlee:

It’s a little tiny town, for those who don’t know, it’s a tiny little town in southern Mississippi, De Lisle.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, De Lisle. Right. So for them, I’m not just the local girl who has done good, I’m their little cousin or their little niece. You know what I’m saying? That’s how they perceive me. So yes, they do, they come to all my events, they read my books. They’re always very excited when they come out. Sometimes they’ll come to me for copies, so I end up giving them my author’s copies often, but they’ll get copies of the book and they’ll give those copies to friends or relatives that they might have who don’t live in southern Mississippi in my little small town. And so there’s a lot of that. I feel a lot of love and a lot of support from the people in my family and the people in my community in my career.

Jesmyn Ward:

But at the same time, especially with Men We Reaped, I think that it was difficult for some people in my community and for some people in my family too. It was difficult for them to read that book and to wrestle with that material because I was writing about us. I was writing about my brother and my cousins and my friends and being very honest about the circumstances of our lives and how we were living, and some of it was very ugly. There was mental illness, there was drug use, there were a lot of-

Celeste Headlee:

Infidelity.

Jesmyn Ward:

Right, infidelity. A lot of really tough subject matter that I was writing about. And I think especially, I mean people… First of all, if you’re being portrayed in something, in some sort of fictional piece of work, most of the time it’s just a natural human instinct, I think you want to be portrayed in a good light. You don’t want all these uglier characteristics or uglier events in your lives, you don’t want to see that reflected back at-

Celeste Headlee:

Or have other people read it.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah. Or other people. Exactly. And so I think that that was difficult for people. And too, I think that it was difficult because I was writing about these young men who I’d grown up with and who I loved and being very truthful about how they were living and how we were living. And I think that, especially when young people die unexpectedly, that in many communities and families, the immediate response is to make them into angels. And that’s just natural. You want to make this person who you’ve lost, who you love very much, you want to make them into an angel. You say things like, “Oh, I know they’re watching over me right now.” And then when you reflect back on their lives and when you tell stories about their lives, the default is that you only tell the good stories, and I wasn’t doing that. And so like I said, there are many people in my family and in my community who found that really problematic. And the way that I dealt with that is that-

Celeste Headlee:

Because around the time that you moved back.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah. The way that I dealt with that is… I a couple conversations with people about it who found it problematic. I don’t know how much good it did. I don’t think that I was able to change their minds. I tried to communicate why I’d chosen to write the book. And part of the reason that I wrote that book is because I believe that in telling our stories in all their awful, lovely messiness, that several things would happen. That one, telling our stories would show that we exist. Or that in the case of my brother and my cousin and my friends, that they existed, they were here, they lived. And that our lives and their lives had value.

Jesmyn Ward:

Both sides of my family… I mean, I grew up in poverty, and so I think that I wanted to make statements about that. I wanted people to see how growing up in that type of environment, growing up in poverty and as a black person and in the rural South, how that constrains your existence in certain ways. Because you never see people like us. Or back then, you never saw people like us portrayed in pop culture or living complicated lives in television or, I don’t know, or in literature. I wanted us to exist and I wanted us to be able to speak and to have voice and to have agency, and to assert that we are here and that we shouldn’t be confined to people’s ideas about us. But instead, we should be able to speak and to tell our stories and to show that our lives are just as complicated and just as complex and just as unique as everyone else’s.

Celeste Headlee:

It’s interesting, though, because you have, not in the memoir, but especially in Sing, Unburied, Sing and a couple other ones, you have this really gripping and gritty reality. As you say, unsparing. And then you insert magic into it, right? There’s these kids who not just see ghosts as the little girl can. Kayla can hear the ghosts, but Jojo can talk to them. And I wonder, why insert the element of magic into this very realistic story, which is, I think people keep calling it a road trip, which is odd, but this road trip to a prison and back?

Jesmyn Ward:

I’d always wanted to write something with magical realism in it. When I started Sing, Unburied, Sing, I thought that it was a road trip. I thought this is a novel about a journey and this is a novel that will take place in the modern South, in modern Mississippi. So as these characters are traveling through the state, I thought, well, they’ll be able to encounter people and encounter places that encapsulate what the South is, like what this new South, this new Mississippi is. And of course, so much of the new Mississippi is influenced and dependent on the past.

Celeste Headlee:

The old Mississippi.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, the old Mississippi. The past lives in the present. But at first I thought I was just writing a novel about a road trip. But I thought I’d always wanted to write something that had magical realism in it, in part because I so admired writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who use magical realism in their work to write about very difficult subject matter. And to give that subject matter, I don’t know, I think it gives it… It becomes more complicated. It allows you to add some sense of, I don’t know, of complication to it. It allows you to communicate to the reader that there are things that we don’t understand about this world and there are things that exist beyond what we see or hear or feel or touch.

Jesmyn Ward:

I grew up hearing ghost stories. I grew up hearing stories about my maternal grandmother who was born with what they call a call over her face. And so that meant that she has vision, that she has, I don’t know.

Celeste Headlee:

Supposedly she has the call of other sight.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, have other sight. So I grew up hearing those stories. I grew up hearing stories from my paternal great-grandmother about how her deceased husband showed up one night and had a whole conversation with her. So these are the kinds of stories that I grew up hearing. And so I thought, well, it would be interesting to, because I love magical realism so much and because I’ve always wanted to write it, this seems like this is an aspect of the community and the culture that I’ve up grown in.

Celeste Headlee:

They’re literally haunted.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah. So I thought, I want to incorporate this into this novel, this road trip. And so at first I thought, well, I’ll just have Ma’am and Jojo, they’ll have access to this sight, this way of seeing beyond the world.

Celeste Headlee:

The grandmother and grandson.

Jesmyn Ward:

Right, grandmother and grandson. But then when I began to research Parchman Prison, which is where they were heading to, because I didn’t know anything about Parchman Prison, and I found out that children like Richie, who is one of the two ghosts in the novel. So Richie is 12 years old, I think. He stole something when he was a kid and he was charged with theft, and then his punishment was being sent to Parchman Prison where he was basically re-enslaved, because Parchman Prison was a plantation. It was a working plantation in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. So he was sent to Parchman Prison. A child, 12 years old. And when I learned that kids like him existed I thought, I have to write about this kid. He has to be a part of this novel. But I wanted to give him agency. I wanted him to be able to act and react and speak, and I wanted to give him voice.

Jesmyn Ward:

And so because I wanted to give him all these things that a child like him had been denied in life. And so in order to do that, I realized the only way I could do that was by making him a ghost. Because I wanted him to have conversations with Jojo. I wanted him to be able to live and move and make things happen in the present. And so I thought, he has to be a ghost. I have to write about this kid, but I don’t want to write about him in a flashback. I want him to live in the present. And so he became a ghost.

Jesmyn Ward:

And then I realized I was not only writing a road trip, but I was also writing a ghost story, which I hadn’t planned on doing, but which I felt compelled to do. Because again, I grew up in Mississippi, I took Mississippi history. I had gone 30 years without knowing that children like him existed. And so it made me really, I think, angry. And also it was really painful for me to find out about him and the children like him, because I realized that their lives and that their suffering had been erased. And I wanted to do what I could do with my itty bitty platform-

Celeste Headlee:

With that one 2018 National Book Award.

Jesmyn Ward:

… to reach back in the past and pull him into the present, into the public consciousness, for the people who would read my work. And I feel like as I develop as a writer and as I grow as a writer, because I’m always trying to push myself and to grow. And so I feel like as I develop as a writer, as I grow as a writer, that that has become one of my motivations in writing, is to go to the past and find people like that.

Celeste Headlee:

That you can give voice to.

Jesmyn Ward:

Yeah, that I can give voice to. People who have been erased. Because before, one of my major motivations was writing about people in the present, who could be members of my family or members of my community, who have been silenced. That was really important to me earlier on in my career as a writer. And it’s still important to me, but now I feel like my understanding of what it means to be silenced and of what it means to be erased has expanded to include not just my community and my family and the present. But also all of the people, all of my ancestors, all of my forefathers and foremothers and forefolks, who came before me, who were erased or silenced. So I find myself looking to the past for a lot of my motivation now.

Celeste Headlee:

Jesmyn Ward, her latest book is called Navigate Your Stars. But frankly, enter her… at any point and you are going to enjoy what you read. It’s such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Jesmyn Ward:

Thank you.