Embedded Files
Click the image to listen to Jesmyn Ward's NBA Acceptance Speech
"A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written... It's an old story- of family honor, revenge, disaster- and it's a good one... Ward deftly plays with her reader's expectations: where we expect violence, she gives us sweetness. When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood." Parul Sehgal, The NYT Book Review\
Salvage the Bones puts us into a REAL event with a fictional family to guide us. How do History, Truth, and Art create a cycle of understanding? How can we look at our world and see, not just the facts, but the human stories those facts represent?
On Hurricane Katrina: "It also helped create Jesmyn Ward’s art. Ward’s vocabulary tends toward the epic; she alludes to the Old Testament and Greek mythology with equal frequency and intensity; for her, Katrina is comparable in significance to the Egyptian captivity or the aftermath of the Trojan War. Only one of her books, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), which won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction, takes Katrina as its primary subject, but the storm lingers, ghostlike, in the others, operating as a grand, whooshing metaphor for the vulnerability—physical, emotional, environmental—of the residents of rural Bois Sauvage, the fictional Mississippi-coast town in which all her novels are set."
The Lyrical Language of Jesmyn Ward
"The signal characteristic of Ward’s prose is its lyricism. “I’m a failed poet,” she has said. The length and music of Ward’s sentences owe much to her love of catalogues, extended similes, imagistic fragments, and emphasis by way of repetition, as well as to her tendency to cluster conjunctions, especially “and.” The effect, intensified by use of the present tense, can be hypnotic. Some chapters sound like fairy tales. This, and her ease with vernacular language, puts Ward in fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner..."
Cunningham, Vinson. "Jesmyn Ward's Haunted Novel of the Gulf Coast." The New Yorker, 4 Sept 2017.
Conversation Topics
teen pregnancy, consent in sexual relationships, the pressure of sex as a form of social acceptance, single parent homes, the loss of a parent, poverty, dog fighting, grief/coping, family bonds, "found" family, love, ingenuity, loyalty, the influence of mythic stories and archetypes in our contemporary life
Spend some time today researching current events and discussing how some of OUR 'history' will be translated through the art of the future. Can you see novels, poems, plays, music, paintings, etc growing from the moments we are living through? What 'thematic ideas' in literature & art would we link to these events? Consider events of the last 5 years or so, your teenage cultural experience... someday THIS will be history.
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