A Rising Star in the South: An Interview with Tayari Jones
- A Rising Star in the South:An Interview with Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones is a rising African American woman writer who has won both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and has been elected to the Georgia Authors Hall of Fame. Born-and still residing-in Atlanta, she is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta (2002), The Untelling (2005), Silver Sparrow (2011), and, most recently, An American Marriage, which was published in February of2018 and has been selected for Oprah's Book Club. This interview took place at Rutgers-Newark University on August 9, 2017. The interview covers Jones's writing inspiration, the legacy of black women's writing, and her new novel.
All your novels, including the new one, are set in Atlanta. What inspiration do you get from that city when you are writing?
As you know, Atlanta is my hometown. I was born there. When I imagine the story, that's just for me where the people are. When I wrote my first novel Leaving Atlanta, like many people, my first novel is about something that happened to me when I was growing up. When I was a kid in Atlanta there was a serial murderer that killed twenty-eight children and two of them were students at my school. So when I wrote that, it was just very natural. It was not a deliberate act to write about Atlanta. But since then I've been curious about Atlanta as the center of the urban South as I am a Southern person. I'm from the South but from a city and most of the time when people think of Southern writing they think of grandmothers and mules. I've never seen a mule. I do have a grandmother but I wanted to expand the understanding of what it means to be a person from the South. [End Page 82]
Some people label you as a Southern writer; do you like this label?
TJ: I don't mind labels. I know a lot of writers get very sensitive about labels because they feel that when they are given a label it somehow means they're not as important as someone else. I wear many of them. I'm a Southern writer; I'm a woman writer; I'm a black writer. I'm all kinds of writers at once. I don't fear my identities.
Your first novel is about the murder of children in Atlanta and the second novel, The Untelling, is about the impact of a family tragedy on the growth of a girl. Your third novel Silver Sparrow is about the relationship between two girls and also about family and marriage. Why do you focus on African American girls' or women's lives in your novels?
For years I was an African American girl like that. That was so much of my experience. I was a girl for years and years and I do think that girlhood or childhood is like time spent in a foreign country because childhood has its own world, right? Children have their own customs that adults do not. They have their own traditional garments and clothes that adults don't have. They speak a language that adults don't speak and all children live under a hostile regime known as their parents and adults. Children are controlled by adults, so writing about childhood for me was so much fun because it was writing about a secret world that exists within plain sight. And in some ways writing a novel about childhood is almost like writing a Russian novel. When you read the Russian novels the people are always trying to circumvent the regime. I also think that you can talk about the way a society truly works when you look at the way the society treats its most vulnerable members, its children, and then in the US you go to black children and the black girls. You can see how things work. I get a lot of pleasure from my writing. I think a lot of times...
