Its tough to imagine a writer as gifted as Jesmyn Ward struggling with a book.
Ward initially envisioned the setting as a sort of post-apocalyptic landscape, for instance.
And the ghosts that move throughSings pages werent always actual ghosts.
Beowulf Sheehan; Scribner
I think I was trying to find my way to the story that eventually becameSing, Unburied, Sing.
But in those first chapters, he wasnt related to Jojo.
I see why Jojo stuck with you.
I still want to scoop him up!Yeah.
I think thats part of the reason he was so compelling to me from the very beginning.
I couldnt leave him out there in fictional character limbo.
You blend so many themes together so smoothly: poverty, race, drug addiction, grief.
Of course you didnt have a checklist.Yeah.
At first, I thought his mom was white.
At that point in time, I was thinking aboutAs I Lay Dyinga lot.
But then I thought, Well, maybe Ill play around with the narrative form a little bit.
Again, because I was thinking aboutAs I Lay Dying.
I venture to grow as a writer with every book that I write.
Because as a writer, Im like, Oh God, shes a terrible parent.
Shes abusive to her children, shes neglectful, shes so selfish and self-centered.
Shes just a really bad mom.
Its important to me that theyre complicated and that theyre human.
It couldntjustbe this self-centeredness.
Then I figured out the phantom that she was seeing.
It was a phantom of Michael that she was seeing.
I have no idea why.
In the beginning, Im thinking, Shes just hallucinating.
Shes using too many drugs.
She loves this man so much that shes seeing this phantom of him.
Was the phantom Michael dead?No, he was alive!
It wasnt revealing anything about who she was inside.
So I revisited it and I thought, Okay, so what if shes seeing someone that she lost?
What if this is someone who actually died?
Because at first, she was an only child.
[Ward writes about her brothers death in her memoir, Men We Reaped.]
I thought, What if people begin to confuse me and Leonie?
That was a concern at first.
But its also this experience that you haveThat I can draw from, yeah.
Making Given a part of her life does a lot of work to accomplish that.
I still thought there was a chance he might not actually be a ghost.
I thought, Maybe he really is just a hallucination.
Im making these terms up as I go along.
But you know what Im saying?
Thats when I saw it.
I knew nothing about Parchman Prison when I started writing this book.
Its calledWorse Than Slavery, and I picked it up and began to read it.
There were some white inmates, but it was basically like a black prison.
I mean, 98 percent of the inmates in the prison were black.
When I read that, I was immediately struck by that.
And they have to be real, and they have to be presentinthe story.
Like, I dont want this character to be a memory.
I want this character to be real, and to be in the present.
Thats when I knew it was going to be a ghost story.
Then Richie became really important to the story and to that world.
The whole vision of heaven or maybe purgatory that Richie sees is so beautiful.
All those swimming, dancing, singing people he sees kind of off in the distance.
Where did that come from?It came from my imagination.
Part of the reason I think thats the case is because I mostly write fiction thats rooted in reality.
And its almost like she gave me permission to do so, but also challenged me to do so.
I was like, I cantry,at least.
So I tried, and that was the result.
It was interesting because I had to do world-building that I had never done before.
But it was enjoyable!
Once I got over my initial fear and tried it, I liked it.
I dont think Ive ever gotten that one before.
Sing, Unburied, Singis available now.
