Writer Jesmyn Ward calls her maternal grandmother, Dorothy, the "first storyteller of my life." Dorothy was a twin, but her sister was stillborn. Her mother, Ward's great-grandmother, was so devastated she struggled to care for her surviving baby.
"My grandmother's twin was buried in a shoe box, and my grandmother was, like, put in a drawer that was her crib," Ward says. "That story is one of the first stories that my grandmother ever told me."
Dorothy also talked about being born with "a membrane across her face," which midwives associated with supernatural vision. "So at the same time that my grandmother is telling me this traumatic, devastating story of her twin's stillbirth, she's also telling me that she was born with this gift that enabled her to have prophetic dreams and to have this very strong, intuitive voice," Ward says.
Ward says her grandmother's stories became a model for the writer she would become: "I want to twin the hard, harsh reality ... with this sense of magic, with this sense of ferocity of life," she says.
Ward would go on to write two National Book Award-winning novels: Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. Her new book, On Witness and Respair, is dedicated to Dorothy, who died in 2025.
A collection of non-fiction essays written over the course of the past two decades, On Witness and Respair takes its name from Ward's 2020 Vanity Fair essay about the sudden death of her partner, the father of her children, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. The years following his death Ward struggled with depression and hopelessness. Ward says she learned the term "respair" — an obscure English word meaning the recovery of hope after despair — from a poet she followed on Twitter at the time.
"I definitely think that a lot of us were feeling a strong sense of despair," she says. "And so this poet was sort of talking about how they discovered this word and they were holding it close to them ... and I was so struck by that idea: that there was a word that existed that was the opposite of despair."
Interview highlights
On writing about her brother, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2000
I was in my early 20s and my brother was hit and killed by a drunk driver when he was 19. When you're in your early 20s you never think that anything bad will happen to you and to the people that you love, right? … I thought bad things will happen to other people. …
I knew next to nothing, and I was searching for art that could help me understand what I was living through and that could help me better bear it. It was difficult for me to find work that did that. And so that's part of what I want to do. I want to write about these issues because I know that people are living through them, and I think about what I wanted someone to share with me, how I wanted someone to connect with me when I was living through whatever I was living through. And so that's one of the reasons it was important for me to write that essay, even though it can feel uncomfortable.
On already grieving at the time of George Floyd's murder
At that time, as I'm experiencing that first terrible wave of grief ... I am also very aware of my history, my family's history, my community's history, what it meant to grow up Black in Mississippi. ... And so, one of the sort of motivations for me in pursuing writing was this idea that I would push back against our erasure, or what I understood as our erasure. ... This is the context that I was coming to the summer of 2020 with. And I felt like in my lifetime — I was born in 1977 — I'd never witnessed a movement or a collection of people coming together, bearing witness to that systemic erasure and then standing up and pushing back against it. I think that definitely happened in the civil rights movement, and then in the '70s, with the Black Power movement. But I'd never seen it, I'd never witnessed it.
On always returning to writing
There are powerful actors everywhere who do not have my best interests or people who are like me, our best interests, at heart. And what I can do in order to push back against that is I can return to the word, and believe in the power of storytelling.Jesmyn Ward
In the past year and a half, I continue to return to the work, but then that's what I've done my entire life, right? So when I lost my brother, I did that. Losing my brother was actually one of the things that made me commit to pursuing writing. And then after Hurricane Katrina, when I was in another moment where I thought about quitting, I returned to the writing, and to the good that I think that the writing is accomplishing in the world. And then after my partner died, again, I almost quit, and then I returned to the writing. And I feel that way, I feel it very strongly now. Because so much about what is happening right now feels, just as it did in 2020, it feels like it's outside of my control.
There are powerful actors everywhere who do not have my best interests or people who are like me, our best interests, at heart. And what I can do in order to push back against that is I can return to the word, and believe in the power of storytelling, and believe that storytelling leads us to empathy, and leads us to connection. ... And then I can just sit down every day and do the work. I've worked harder in the past year and a half than I've in a long time.
On the vulnerability of writing about such painful things
It's good to feel like you're seen, right? Like it's good to be witnessed. It's good to feel like your story resonates with people and it makes them feel. I'm very invested in being honest. And so this work does that. And even though it can make me feel uncomfortable and sometimes very vulnerable — because it's so intimate — still I believe that I'm fulfilling my responsibility to the people and to the place that I am writing about.
When I was on book tour for Men We Reaped … I began to meet readers, to meet people who would come up to the table as I'm signing their books and we're having a conversation. And they would get very emotional and I heard this over and over again, they would say, "I felt like you were writing my life." Because they were struggling with some loss, some grief, some person who they love [and] they're just trying to figure out how to navigate it. And at first, hearing that, it's a little jarring, because a memoir is so particular to the person who writes it and so particular to you. But then I realized I was so grateful that readers shared that sentiment with me, because it made me feel less alone.
On why she returned to live in Mississippi
I chose to return because this is the place that inspires me. These are the people, the community, my family, my extended family. They inspire my work and inform the stories that I tell. And so I want it to be in that place and to see if I could create in that place, and then also I felt like working as a writer and living as a writer in Mississippi would keep me honest, because I'm living around the people who I'm writing about. So it's more difficult for me to gloss over the details and for me to make the story easy.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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