After the Senior Symposium Seminar class’ enriching semester dedicated to exploring the work of author Tayari Jones, Kingswood Oxford welcomed Ms. Jones to campus. Ms. Jones visited KO on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2023, the summation of an engaging and powerful semester of learning both about and from her and her fruitful novels.
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Ms. Jones attended Spelman College before attaining her MA in English from the University of Iowa and her MFA from Arizona State University. She has published four novels: “Leaving Atlanta,” “The Untelling,” “Silver Sparrow,” and “An American Marriage.” Her most recent book, “An American Marriage,” was a New York Times bestseller, awarded the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, an Oprah’s Book Club Selection, and made former president Barack Obama’s 2018 Summer Reading List.
In English teacher Bill Martino’s two Symposium classes, students began their deep dive into Ms. Jones’s work by first reading “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison, the author from which Ms. Jones has shared that she draws the most inspiration. From there, students read “Leaving Atlanta,” then moved to “Silver Sparrow,” “An American Marriage,” and culminated the class with “The Untelling.”
On the second day of Ms. Jones’ visit, she sat down with the KO News, where we had the pleasure of picking her brain and learning about her life.
Growing up, Ms. Jones never believed that she could be an author. She attended a math and science high school, but her true passions were writing and reading. When Ms. Jones was a junior, her English teacher encouraged her to enter a city-wide story-writing contest, in which she won first place. Ms. Jones considers this victory the beginning of her journey of self-discovery. “Even if I hadn’t grown up to be a writer, it was the first inkling that I could grow up to be a something,” she explained.
As she began writing more, she truly found her voice and believes that being what she referred to as an “invisible” girl worked to her benefit. Ms. Jones continued, asserting that the greatest gift in her life was that no one believed she could be a writer. “The lack of encouragement I had meant that I had to develop my voice without any self-consciousness,” she said. “I never worried what anyone would think because I never thought anyone would think anything about me. It wasn’t that I had to be this brave person that said ‘I don’t care what others think.’ Others didn’t think! So, the development was all an internal process. It did not take bravery.”
In college, Ms. Jones found herself drawing most of her inspiration from her teacher and mentor, accomplished playwright Pearl Cleage. Ms. Cleage ran a speakeasy, and she invited Ms. Jones to attend one night. “I saw all these people doing art,” Ms. Jones recalled. “They were playing the saxophone, they were reciting poetry, they were doing wild interpretive dances, and it gave me a window into the idea of a life of the mind as a wild, untamed thing.” It was this moment that cemented Ms. Jones’ desire to pursue a career as a writer. “This is the kind of life that I want,” she remembered saying to herself. “People are out here, exchanging their ideas, they’re disagreeing, but it’s all towards some goal of higher understanding.”
When Ms. Jones sits down to write, she has a very unique routine. An early bird, she prefers to do her writing in the morning; her alarm wakes her up every day at 6:00 a.m. Ms. Jones sits down at her typewriter, and, sans outline, begins writing.
Ms. Jones’ distinctive regimen allows her to follow the flow of her thoughts, free from the constraints of any set schedule. As a result, her favorite parts about writing often come when she least expects them. “Whenever you as a reader feel shocked, I did too,” she shared. “Roy thought he was surprised to find out the true identity of his cellmate, I almost passed out! I was like ‘Get out, what!’”
When searching for inspiration for her novels, she finds it most in the people and places in her own life. “When the story is going well, I draw inspiration from everything. I see the story everywhere,” Ms. Jones said. However, she occasionally finds herself in a rut, unsure where next to take her story. In these instances, she looks to a different source. “When the writing is not going well, I deliberately turn to other books for inspiration,” Ms. Jones said. She shared that, just recently, she read “Olive Kitteridge” (a collection of short stories by former Symposium author Elizabeth Strout), which reminded her how to zoom in on a small subject in her writing. As a reader, Ms. Jones looks for authors who write with a different style than her own. “I need other people to do the things I’m not good at,” she explained.
In her own work, Ms. Jones considers her signature style to be her use of point of view. Her novels “Leaving Atlanta,” “Silver Sparrow,” and “An American Marriage” are all told by a chorus of different voices. Ms. Jones hopes that readers are able to learn from this style of writing, sharing that she wants readers to develop the habit of understanding other people.
In her use of multiple points of view, she does not shy away from writing from the perspective of the opposite sex, a task that is often daunting for many authors; in fact, Ms. Jones actually does so with great ease. “Women write men better than men write women,” she said. “We are socialized from a very young age to take men seriously. So we spend a lot of time thinking about what they may be thinking.”
Ms. Jones finds it most difficult to write about characters with different levels of trauma. “The reader’s heart is always going to go to the person in the most trouble— you can’t write your way around that,” she expressed. Ms. Jones continued, explaining that she encountered the most trouble balancing her characters in “An American Marriage.” “When I was figuring out how to have Roy and Celestial in the same story, the gravity of his situation kept blocking out everybody else’s story,” Ms. Jones said. However, she learned to harness this and use it to her benefit. “Instead of fighting it, I made it part of the story,” she said.
Ms. Jones’ favorite part about being an author is learning about how her novels have impacted people. She shared a story of how a teenage boy told her “An American Marriage” helped heal his relationship with his mother, who he resented for moving on after his father’s imprisonment. The boy told Ms. Jones that her novel helped him understand his mom as a woman, not just as a mother. Ms. Jones holds this story close to her, as a reminder of the profound impact she can have on readers, many of whom she doesn’t even know. “It is an honor and a privilege to take part in someone’s healing,” she said.
While she isn’t writing, Ms. Jones can be found sharing her passion with her students. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. Ms. Jones shared that, in her classes, she places the most emphasis on plot development— what she considers the most important aspect of writing a story. Ms. Jones put it simply: “The characters have to do things!”
Before we wrapped up, Ms. Jones imparted some words of wisdom she wished her younger self had been told, hoping KO students would bear them in mind as they navigate the next pivotal years of their lives. “Hang in there kiddo,” she said. “And have fun with it. It’s going to work out.”
