{"id":3009,"date":"2013-10-07T00:28:11","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T04:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=3009"},"modified":"2013-10-07T00:28:11","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T04:28:11","slug":"life-stories-44-jesmyn-ward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2013\/10\/07\/life-stories-44-jesmyn-ward\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Stories #44: Jesmyn Ward"},"content":{"rendered":"
Subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a><\/h5>\n

\"Life<\/a>
\nphoto: Tony Cook<\/font><\/p>\n

Two years ago, I met Jesmyn Ward<\/a> just after she’d won the National Book Award for her second novel, Salvage the Bones<\/i>. Up until then, she and her publisher had had a hard time getting the mainstream literary media to take a look at her work—a situation that’s happily improved for her new memoir, Men We Reaped<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In this episode of Life Stories<\/i>, we talk about why Ward says writing this memoir, which is not just about her life but about the deaths of five young men in the poverty-stricken Mississippi community where she grew up, was the hardest thing she’s ever done, and how one of the greatest opportunities of her life—when one of the men for whom Ward’s mother worked as a maid agreed to pay her tuition at a good private school, setting her on the path to college—also put her in the direct path of some of the worst, most overt racism she’s ever faced (although perhaps not, she observes, as insidious as the systematic racism her brother dealt with in the public school system). And she explains why she hopes her infant daughter will find the world improved when she<\/i> comes of age…<\/p>\n

(Note: When Ward discusses the racism of her high school classmates, she does so with total frankness. I have chosen not to censor her use of a certain word, because it accurately reflects the ugliness and hatred directed at her. I expect hearing that word will offend some of you, but the world Ward describes is real, and ignoring it isn’t going to make it disappear.)<\/p>\n

Listen to Life Stories<\/i> #44: Jesmyn Ward<\/a> (MP3 file); or download this file directly by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). You can also subscribe to Life Stories<\/i> in iTunes<\/a>, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesmyn Ward’s memoir is about her own life, growing up in a poverty-stricken Mississippi community, and how she was able to make a better path for herself–but it’s also about five young men who weren’t so fortunate, who basically died, as she puts it, of being poor and black in the South. We talk about why telling their stories is the hardest thing she’s ever done as a writer, and why she never expects that she’ll be done grieving for them.<\/p>\n

(Why the explicit tag for this episode? In our interview, Ward describes the racism she faced in high school using a word–directed at her–that will offend some listeners. I’ve left it in because what she’s describing is an ugly truth we need to confront.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[643,184,132,640,642,305,641],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3009"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3014,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions\/3014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}