Jesmyn Ward on the Power of Detail in an Age of Distraction
4 min read
Jesmyn Ward has spent months conversing with her younger selves. The best-selling author of Salvage the Bones, Men We Reaped, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and more is a MacArthur Fellow; the youngest person to have received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction; and a two-time National Book Award for Fiction winner. And yet, when confronted with the words she crafted in her earlier years, Ward’s initial reaction was much like any other writer’s: She cringed.
“The ’90s teen is still very much alive in me, that looks at the self and judges,” Ward admits when we speak in early April. “Sometimes, when I think about my earlier work, on the surface, I’m like, ‘Oh, God. I was terrible. Everything was terrible.’” But that perspective shifted when she began to compile her new nonfiction collection, On Witness and Respair.
Up until “a couple years ago,” the 49-year-old Ward says, she hadn’t been fully aware of just how much nonfiction work she’d produced since the early aughts. In hindsight, the volume shouldn’t have surprised her: “I wrote the essay that did a lot of work to nudge me along, to reveal to me that this was the path I wanted to walk in my life, when I was still in high school,” she says, citing her college admissions essay, itself a work of personal narrative. “I’ve been writing these small essays, where I’m wrestling with different ideas and different events in my life, since I was a teenager.”
She continues, “To actually go back and sit with [the earlier work] enabled me to see beyond that ’90s, self-conscious, self-judging teen. To sit with another version of myself and see that version tenderly, almost.”
On Witness and Respair—so titled after an essay she published in the wake of her husband’s death in 2020—collects more than a decade of Ward’s nonfiction works and previously unpublished speeches. Her renowned essay about Hurricane Katrina precedes her study of William Faulkner, which itself precedes pieces on figures from Prince to Ta-Nehisi Coates. Ward writes of the legacy of Gone with the Wind; of her family and her home in Mississippi; of hope and of “respair,” defined as “fresh hope after despair.”
Ward says it was relatively clear to her which of her essays deserved a place in the final collection: “Going back and rereading them, there were some that quickly rose to the top,” she says, “not necessarily because [of their] quality, but because they were more deeply engaged and wrestling with the material in a more frank, open way.”
Anyone familiar with Ward’s storytelling will recognize that this frank openness is a trademark of hers. She doesn’t know any other way to exist in the world. She always has, and always will, as she puts it in the speech-turned-essay “Why Fiction Matters,” “write toward what hurts.”
Ward imbues the word “witness” with great meaning; to Ward, “witnessing” is not an act of casual observation. No true witness is a bystander. To witness is to commit to absorbing an experience—a moment, a memory, a story—and carrying it forward.
After her husband’s death, Ward sank into “hot, wordless grief,” but she did not ultimately stop writing. Some days, she wrote one single sentence. Others, she drafted thousands of words. (Those words would eventually form the best-selling novel Let Us Descend, a book that prompted The New York Times to compare Ward to Faulkner himself.)
And she continued to witness: the pandemic making its sweep across the globe, the protests outside her doors. She paid attention, not because it was easy, but because Ward believes doing so is a necessary precursor to any real and lasting solace. She expands on this idea for me. “If you are present for and aware of grief and loss and trauma, then that perhaps leads you toward being present for the expressions of joy.”