Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Leslie JamisonRead
When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Adversity can inspire writers to find deeper narratives in their experiences of suffering.
Leslie Jamison's quote reflects the idea that for writers, personal challenges can create opportunities to craft compelling stories. The process of experiencing difficulty not only fosters the potential for narrative but also brings about a heightened awareness of how one's suffering can be translated into art, inviting introspection on the story behind the struggle.
Themes
WritingNarrativeSufferingStorytellingArt
In practice
Example use cases
A writer sharing this quote during a workshop about overcoming obstacles in creative expression.
More from Leslie Jamison
All quotes →The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
Leslie JamisonRead
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
Leslie JamisonRead
I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got.
Leslie JamisonRead
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.
Leslie JamisonRead
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