By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle between personal experience and creative identity, highlighting the difficulty of translating lived events into writing.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward shares her internal conflict regarding writing about her own life experiences. Despite recognizing the significance of her story and feeling an inevitable pull towards writing a memoir, she initially resisted doing so because she was focused on her ambition to be recognized as a fiction writer. This struggle reveals the broader theme of reconciling personal history with artistic aspirations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a writing workshop to discuss the challenges authors face when deciding what to write about.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
I leave no trace of wings in the air, but I am glad I have had my flight.
Real value isnβt in what you own, drive, wear or live. The greater value is found in love and life, health and strength, friends and family!
I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable
If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.