National Book Award Winner Says
One “Yes” Can Make All the Difference

An exclusive Authorlink interview with Jesmyn Ward,
author of Salvage the Bones

By Ellen Birkett Morris
March 2012

In Salvage the Bones author Jesmyn Ward paints a compelling picture of the daily life of the residents of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, a dirt poor town dug out of swampland that is in path of a Hurricane Katrina. The book won the 2011 National Book Award.

The appeal of the novel is not only in the tension created by the impeding storm, but also the vivid depiction of the day to day concerns of a motherless family. From page one there is a lot at stake for all of the characters. Daughter Esch is pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is nursing his pit bull and her liter in hopes that the liter can be sold to raise money for the family. Brother Randall is pinning all his hopes on being spotted by a basketball scout, while the youngest son Junior wants any attention he can get. Their father, a drinker, is trying to prepare for the storm and keep the family together.

“It was important that I didn’t let the storm overwhelm the narrative. That storm was one of several that summer and one of hundreds they’d experience in their lifetime. For people like these characters that storm was a greater tragedy in a long procession of everyday tragedies they experience,” said Ward.

The book’s protagonist, Esch, reflects on the mythical story of Jason and the Argonauts as drama unfolds around her.

Ward ‘s well wrought writing comes from experience. She grew up in a “mostly black, mostly poor, mostly uneducated community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” named Delisle. She lost a brother to a drunk driver, had a sister who was pregnant at twelve and lived through Hurricane Katrina herself.

Her mother’s employer saw something in Ward when she was in middle school and paid for her to attend private school. She went on to college, earned an MFA from University of Michigan, became a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2008 to 2010 and was named the 2010-2011 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

The MFA program, where Ward worked with writers including Pete Ho Davies and Thomas Lynch, taught her about pacing, tension and character development.

She had wanted to write about a girl who grows up in a world of men. The character of Skeeter emerged from a writing exercise she did at University of Michigan.

“I had Esch and Skeet. I knew they were brother and sister and that they would face a hurricane, but everything in the middle was a surprise,” said Ward. She said stories begin for her with a character that commands her attention. She often has a sense of how their story will end.

“For me it is about finding my way into the story and working my way to the end,” said Ward.

She researched the storms that occurred the summer of Katrina and drew from personal experience to create scenes, including the dog fight scene.

Like most writers, she felt the urge to quit writing when things got complicated.

“About three-fourths of the way through I’m always tempted to quit. There are so many balls in the air and it’s hard to figure out a satisfactory conclusion to the story,” said Ward.

She found it challenging to write about Hurricane Katrina, which she’d experienced firsthand.

“I had to separate my experience from the characters’ experience in the narrative. I found I had lots of emotional dead weight that I hadn’t dealt with,” said Ward.

She wrote the first draft of Salvage the Bones during her Stegner Fellowship. She kept the feedback she got from her peers during that time and used it later to revise the book.

“She’s a really insightful editor and got what I was attempting to do.”

Ward connected with her agent Jennifer Lyons when Lyons and other agents visited University of Michigan.

“I gave my work to several agents. One didn’t want to work with me, one was mulling it over, and Jennifer was interested in working with me. It was an important lesson. It’s not about the merit of your work. It is about whether or not an agent is passionate enough about your work to sell it,” said Ward.

She knows rejection and blogged about a point in her life when she almost quit writing and planned to go to nursing school.

“My first novel was published three years after my MFA program. It felt like a long time. I had moved home to Mississippi and was working at the University of New Orleans. I was driving through areas that looked the same way they did immediately after the storm. I had one story accepted, but my novel felt dead in the water. I felt a sense of devastation and loss and a dread that things would never be the same. I thought maybe I’m not meant to be a writer.”

Before she could quit writing her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, got accepted by Agate Publishing.

Ward continued her work and ended up winning the National Book Award.

“Things have been insane since then. I am still in shock. I’ve haven’t fully come to terms with what this means for my book and my career. I’m honored and humbled by it all,” said Ward.

While she processes it all, Ward is continuing to write, devising notes on a memoir and mulling over her next idea for a novel.