Excerpt from Salvage The Bones

Posted on January 27, 2015 Updated on January 27, 2015

I did not manage to make it to Jesmyn Ward’s Visiting Writer’s speech. However, I did some research on her. She was born in the deep south, Mississippi to be exact. She has lived in the south for the majority of her lifetime. She even survived Hurricane Katrina. She has been through a lot of adversities from the sounds of it.

Salvage the Bones seems to be pretty reminiscent of that. After all, she says that this book “wrote itself” and I’m also aware that she is brutally honest with characters and stories. She definitely portrays this book to be set in the deep south in a time not too far removed from today. It is the way she narrates the story that sounds so familiar to me: “Won’t let nobody touch her but Skeet.” I grew up with the double negatives, country sounding nicknames, and sentences that were really just fragments. But it’s not necessarily improper English. It’s just a dialect. So if you never grew up with it, of course it sounds wrong.

I think it is really cool that she chose this style of writing. A lot of people would have just written in regular English, subject and verb included. She chose the most authentic form possible, which I totally respect.