Where the Line Bleeds (Ward) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—DeLisle, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A. Stanford University; M.F.A, University
   of Michigan 
• Awards—Farrar Playwrighting Award; 5 Hopwood Awards;
   Stegner Fellowship, Stanford.
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, LA

Jesmyn Ward is from DeLisle, Mississippi. The first person in her family to attain a college degree, she received a BA in English and an MA in Communication from Stanford University. In 2005, she earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Farrar Playwriting Award and five Hopwood Awards, as well as an honorable mention in Zoetrope magazine’s 2004 All-Story Short Fiction Contest.

Her first published short story appeared in the fifth (January 2008) issue of A Public Space. She teaches at the University of New Orleans, and has just been awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford for 2008. (From the publisher.)

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(From a 2008 interview with Agate Publishing.)

Q: When did you decide you wanted to become a writer?

A: I grew up black and poor in the South in the 80s. Where we lived, we only got two channels on the television: ABC and PBS. Whenever my brother and my cousins and my sisters and I were not outside playing, I was reading. I knew I wanted to write by the time I was twelve.
That naïve need to create was transformed in high school. I went to a small, private, majority-white and upperclass school for five years. For much of that time I was the only black girl in the school. There was a profound disconnect between my poor, rural, brutal, beautiful black town and the privileged world of my high school. Kids called me nigger in the halls, and sat on the desk in front of me and taunted me with nigger jokes. What would it take for these kids to see me and the people of my community as human beings? As equals?

When I was in college, I tried to get away from my love of writing and stories. Everyone told me writing was impractical. But every time I explored a major other than/ English, I would literally get knots in my chest. But when I was in an English class, reading Shelley or Hemingway or Adrienne Rich or Toni Morrison, I felt as if I was doing something right. I finally realized that I couldn't fight it—that I had to write, because there was beauty, truth, and hope in the world, because writers were able to communicate that through writing, and because that is the responsibility I feel as a writer.

Q: What inspired you to write this story?

A: When my younger brother died seven years ago, at the age of nineteen, I decided to stop being afraid; I decided to write seriously. I applied to an MFA program at the University of Michigan and while there I began working on this novel. I wanted to write the life that my brother might have lived.

Q: In what ways did your own experiences growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast affect how you created this book?

A: The small town I grew up in (where everyone is related to everyone else), the back roads and the casinos, the bayou and the Gulf and the Bay and the rivers and the woods and the storms, all of these things affected my style, and also spurred my desire to write this book. There was a sense of desperation to the process, too, driven by the fact that I grew up poor, and still feel poor. At Michigan, I was aware that I had limited tools and limited time, and I was desperate to do the best that I could with the time and tools that I had been given. I was desperate to get it right, to get it down on the page, to make it true.

Q: Do you feel that the lives of people who are like the characters in your book are underrepresented in fiction? In American culture in general?

A: Yes. I think that a large percentage of the population of the U.S. is like the people in my book: poor, rural, struggling. It's hard for me to find many contemporary writers who write about places and people like this; to see them reflected on movie screens or televisions is practically impossible. However, they are often overrepresented in music, particularly hip-hop. So much of hip-hop is geared toward exaggeration, especially of people’s ideas of what will sell, but hip-hop does contain some truth—of course.

Q: Which writers have influenced you most?

A: The writers who have influenced me most are those who write about ordinary people fighting and surviving through extraordinary circumstances: William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, Annie Proulx, and Jean Toomer. They also taught me how important place can be in fiction. Poets like Li-Young Lee and Louise Erdrich taught me to pay particular attention to language, to rhythm, and to the power of the word. Ernest Gaines' work is so evocative of rural Louisiana, and of the hard truths of living there. Junot Diaz is so in tuned to his characters' lives. The same goes for Edwidge Danticat. And of course, the writers I studied with at the University of Michigan were instrumental in my development as a writer.

Q: You earned both BA and MA degrees at Stanford—how do you feel about returning there this fall as a newly minted Stegner Fellow?

A: I am suffering from several feelings I felt as a college freshman: awe at the prospect of working with such amazing writers, nervous excitement at wondering if I can cut it, and anticipation at being given the opportunity to create.

Q: What do you hope that readers will get out of Where the Line Bleeds?

A: I want Joshua and Christophe to stay with these readers after they close the book. I want them to feel as if they were friends with these young, black, poor kids for a while. I want them to fall in love with the characters and with Mississippi, and to see the people in this place as human beings and not drug dealers or loafers or niggers. I want them to find beauty, truth, and hope. (From the publisher.)

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