I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.'
I need the lightness of children's lit.
I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.
My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.
I was a freshman at Stanford University the first time someone called me a 'bama.' One of my new friends from D.C. said it, laughing, and even though I didn't know what it meant, exactly, I got that it was some kind of insult. I must have smirked or shrugged, which made him laugh harder, and then he called me 'country,' too.
I hope that I never have to work in a place that sells large quantities of jeans ever again. Jeans are rough! It used to kill my hands. I know that sounds prissy - I'm not prissy at all. But it did; it killed my hands. It was awful.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
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.
We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
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.
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.
It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
