I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'
Interpretation
The quote highlights the tension between fictional storytelling and real-life experiences in writing workshops.
Jesmyn Ward's quote emphasizes the often surprising gap between a writer's reality and how others perceive their stories. In writing workshops, the feedback from peers can be incredulous, as they struggle to reconcile the extraordinary nature of the narrative with the author's claim that it is based on true events, illustrating the sometimes surreal aspect of real life compared to fiction.
In practice
Using this quote in a writing workshop to frame discussions about the challenges of sharing personal stories.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.
When I am through learning, I am through.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.
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