A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.
Interpretation
Real life can often be stranger and more complex than fiction.
Jesmyn Ward's quote reflects the idea that the experiences we encounter in everyday life can surpass the most imaginative and bizarre elements crafted in storytelling. It suggests that reality holds a unique depth and intricacy that can often defy the boundaries of fiction, challenging our perceptions and understanding of what is 'normal.'
In practice
A speaker at a literary festival discussing the intersection of reality and storytelling.
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.
He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.
Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior.
So, the world happens twice--_x000D_ once what we see it as;_x000D_ second it legends itself_x000D_ deep, the way it is.
Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.