Tayari Jones on Speaking in Metaphor

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Tayari Jones about her new novel, Kin. 

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I don’t know if you see things in the world metaphorically which leads you to be a writer, but can you attribute something in your childhood or growing up that led you to writing?

Tayari Jones: Well, one, I think southerners speak in metaphor a lot. The southern vernacular is very metaphoric and that is one of the things that I kind of go for in my writing, is to allow ordinary characters, ordinary people, to speak in metaphor. Because they do. They just don’t know the word metaphor. But they emotionally know what a metaphor is. So that’s one thing. But I think I became a writer simply because, like any other child, like many other children, I liked to read. I think the gift that led me to writing ironically was the way that girls are ignored. I wrote with no concern of what anyone would think of it because I never thought anyone would think anything of it. When girls like to read and they like to write, people think of them as nice girls, one less thing for your parents to worry about. You know, I love to say no one ever got pregnant in the library that I know of, and so I wrote only for my own pleasure and interest. And that is what I think really planted that seed for me. But when I got to Spelman College, when I was just a kid. I was 16, my parents sent me to college very young. When I got to Spelman, I met a writer, and she was my teacher, and she said to me, what are you thinking about these days? I got ready to tell her, and she said, No, don’t tell me, write it down. And with that, she took me seriously, and she became my first audience. And because she took me seriously, I was able to take myself seriously. And that is when I first started to think of myself as a writer. Also at Spelman College, there were, unlike my experience in high school or what have you, there were so many different ways for a young girl, a young woman, to be popular. You could be popular as a pretty girl, that was in pageants. You could be popular by being like a really assertive leader that served on a student government association. There were so many things. Some girls were popular because they could sing so beautifully, and they were always asked to sing at events. And then there was a girl who everyone knew because she was the one who knew how to write.

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Tayari Jones is the author of four novels including An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries. Her other works include Leaving Atlanta, Silver Sparrow, and The Untelling. Her new novel is Kin. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.