LIVE! #65
1 December 2024
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics training
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Meet today's author: Jesmyn Ward
- Jesmyn Ward's MFA is from the University of Michigan.
- She has received a MacArthur genius grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renée Grisham writers residency, the Strauss Living award, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
- Her memoir Men We Reaped (2013), novels Salvage the Bones (2011), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), which both won the National Book Award, were all on the NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
- She has published four novels and three non-fiction books.
- Ward writes 2-4 hours a day, 5 days a week. She needs complete silence.
- She says she's a pantser.
- Ward's favorite punctuation mark is the colon. It helps her think about rhythm and pacing as she reads her books out loud during editing.
- She is an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in De Lisle, Mississippi with her 3 children.
"What I normally do is, I try to render my characters and try
to make them as real and as complicated as I can . . . I just try to make them live and breathe on the page as human beings."
- Jesmyn Ward
"I feel like incorporating the supernatural and the mystical into my work
is a more honest reflection of who they are."
- Jesmyn Ward
What do I feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Voice
- • Character development
- • Horizontal structure
- • Pacing
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
Writing Let Us Descend
- In 2017 Ward listened to an NPR program Tripod featuring New Orleans history, and learned about their slave markets, called slave pens. There were only two markers to mark where the pens were, and one was in the wrong location. She realized that all of that history had been erased.
- The character of Annis popped into Ward’s head immediately.
- Ward spent 2 ½ years researching American chattel slavery--the form of slavery practiced in the US, where slaves are personal property.
- After writing the first 3-4 chapters, in 2020, her partner Brandon died.
- Ward continued Annis’s journey as an exploration of her grief.
- She writes linearly, but had to go back and rewrite the first three chapters after her editor Kathy Belden convinced her to put the scene of Annis and her mother first.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer and Colin Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, out at the same time, feature the supernatural.
- Ward did not want to make Annis or her mother Christian, nor follow the Hoodoo religion of Aza's Benin. She wanted the spirits to belong to America, and these particular rivers, places, and storms.
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Black & African American Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
- Genre: Historical Magical-Realism Long-Form Archplot
- Print Pages: 320; Word count: 75,858
Reading Grade: 6th; Avg. wds/sent.: 12.83
Lexical Density: 46.88; Flesch Reading Ease: 84.80 - POV: Annis; Person: 1st; Tense: Present
- Publish date: October 24, 2023
- Publisher: Scribner; Simon & Schuster
- Audio book length: (8 hours, 12 mins)
- Narrators: Jesmyn Ward
- Recognition: A best book of 2023: The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Time, The New Yorker.
- "I figured out pretty early on that I couldn’t write a novel about an
enslaved person that did not have some sort of mystical, magical, divine elements to it."
- Jesmyn Ward
WritersWhoRead.com/LIVE
January 5: Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar (USA, 2024)
February 2: Good Material - Dolly Alderton (UK, 2024)
March 2: James - Percival Everett (USA, 2024)
April 6: Burma Sahib - Paul Theroux (USA, 2024)
May 4: Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates (USA, 2024)
June 1: Margo's Got Money Troubles - Rufi Thorpe (USA, 2024)