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.
For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.
Among the attributes of God, although they are equal, mercy shines with even more brilliance than justice.
Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
That's all an angel is....an idea of God.
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