Confidence definitely did not get me here! More of, like, desperation.
That larger story in ‘Salvage the Bones’ is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters’ experiences that make their stories universal stories.
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.
I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother’s employer’s family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.
I am grateful to the activists and women who created the Black Lives Matter movement because I feel like they let me know I wasn’t crazy.
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
I think that fiction has a certain power.
The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.
One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.
Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members – I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.
I’m always thinking about time. That’s one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people’s everyday lives.
In my family and in my community, I see people struggling with drug addiction, with poverty and the effects of generational poverty; I see people struggling with lack of access to healthcare.
I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.
One of the things that is so striking to me about the South, especially living here now as an adult, is that I see a lot more mixed-race couples than I saw when I was growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. I feel like living across the color lines has become something that’s more expected.
I’ve always used Southern rappers in epigraphs for my novels. For ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing,’ I wanted to use Big K.R.I.T. – because I have so much respect for the lyrical depth of their music.
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