Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones, is continuing her legacy of relevant literature with a new book: Sing, Unburied, Sing. This novel draws upon themes popularized in Homer’s The Odyssey and takes place in Mississippi and deals with race, death, and growing up through the eyes of several members of a rural African-American family.
“When I first set out to write Sing, Unburied, Sing, I didn’t have the Odyssey in mind,” said Ward. “I was thinking about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and how this family was doing on a strange journey of theirs. And it wasn’t after I had completed the first draft and had some revisions that I began to think about the Odyssey. I think the reason that I began to think about the Odyssey was because I had realized at that point that the characters were searching for home. They all define home in different ways. Once I realized all the characters were trying to find a place of home and nurturing, then I could think of the parallels my story had to the Odyssey. I could to look to it for guidance and inspiration,” said Ward.
Medea is Ward’s favorite myth. She turned to Euripides and his tragic leading lady for Salvage the Bones and has not turned away since. “I am very fond of Medea,” said Ward. “One of the reasons I like that so much is because the character has such a rich texture. She is so strong, but also fallible. She makes terrible mistakes. I think that she stands out for me because she’s so different from most of the mortal women that you see in myth. I still have a soft spot for her.”
Much like the Odyssey, which features many ghosts that refer to mistakes and tragedies long past, Sing, Unburied, Sing features ghosts who still have lessons to teach. “When I first began writing, I didn’t exactly know that ghosts were going to be so important. I didn’t even know that they were going to pop up in the text. I knew from the beginning that Leonie would be seeing this phantom of her brother, but as I was writing it, I didn’t know if he was a ghost or if she was super high. It wasn’t until halfway through the novel that I realized he was an actual ghost. I had to do a lot of research for this novel because I knew nothing about Parchman, the last time I’d studied it was state history in 7th grade! Once I started doing the research, I came across stories about kids as young as 12 or 13 who were charged with small petty crimes and then sent to Parchman Farm. Once I read about that, I knew that one of those kids would have to be a ghost in my story,” said Ward.
“I know there are writers who write everything out from the beginning. They know a lot about their characters. They know their background, what they’re bringing to the story, their motivation, and they also know what will happen with the plot. I have never been able to write that way. I feel like if I did try to write that way, I would never begin because I’d feel like I never had enough. I’d feel ill-prepared. I enter the story with the most important characters in a beginning situation and they’re talking to me. When I began writing Sing, Unburied, Sing, I knew who JoJo and Leonie was. JoJo was the one who began talking to me, but I didn’t know everything about him before I began. I knew these two characters were going to take a trip to Parchman, but that was it. The story grew organically out of that beginning situation. I think that makes the process of writing a little less daunting for me.”
Ward is just as capable with creative nonfiction as she is fiction. Sing, Unburied, Sing was written like a conversation between writer and muse, but for Ward, memoir is much different. “Writing a memoir is definitely a lot harder for me,” said Ward. “The first reason is because writing creative nonfiction requires you to be super introspective. You have to write towards subjects that can be very painful. That’s hard to do, it’s difficult. You have to sit with these very painful things and dissect them on paper. The second reason memoir’s harder for me, you have to plot everything out. It’s because I’m working with so much material. I have to know what my overarching story is, what my argument is. I have to know what my scenes will be, what I’m going to explore, what examples I will use. I have to funnel everything and really focus on the specifics. That’s not something that comes naturally to me, I have to work on writing that way. For both of those reasons, creative nonfiction is definitely harder for me than writing fiction.”
Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing combines mythology and ghosts to create a tale of familial woe and journeys. The characters are infinitely human and relatable, with Ward’s ability to write from multiple perspectives shining light on a moving family-wide search for home. Look for Ward and Sing, Unburied, Sing Tuesday, September 26 at 5:00 p.m. at Lemuria in Jackson.
