Jesmyn Ward VWS

Jesmyn Ward was invited to come speak to the Lenoir-Rhyne students January 19th, 2015 as part of the Visiting Writers Series 2014-2015. Before I took creative writing, I didn’t know who she was. When we read an excerpt from her book Salvage the Bones, that made me really interested in going to the reading and hear her talk about the books she wrote and about her life. I thought that she gave a great presentation. She did sound kind of shy at first but then she warmed up. She started off by talking to us about what she would talk about throughout the presentation.

She first read an excerpt from Salvage the Bones. During this section of the book, Esch and her family’s house was flooding. They had to go up to the attic but the water got to the attic and was rising fast so they had to climb out of the attic. I think they may have swam to get to her dads truck because the waters had swept it up. I wanted her to continue reading.

The next thing she talked about was her history. She talked about how she lost her brother, cousin and close friends over the course of 5 years. She told us about how she sent her book to publisher after publisher until one person said yes. Then she proceeded to read something from her memoir, Men We Reaped.  Overall, I really enjoyed the presentation and thought she was amazing. I could not imagine going through what she has and then writing about it.