In the face of devastating loss, Jesmyn Ward holds onto 'respair'

Dorothy, Ward’s maternal grandmother, was the first storyteller in her life. Dorothy was a twin, but her sister was stillborn, and the surviving twin’s mother struggled to care for her. Dorothy also described being born with a membrane across her face, which midwives linked to supernatural vision and prophetic dreams. Ward connected these accounts to a model for her own writing, aiming to pair harsh, traumatic reality with magic and intense life force. Ward later wrote award-winning novels and dedicated her new nonfiction collection, On Witness and Respair, to Dorothy, who died in 2025. The collection draws on essays written over two decades and centers on grief after her partner’s death, including learning “respair,” a word for recovering hope after despair.

"“My grandmother's twin was buried in a shoe box, and my grandmother was, like, put in a drawer that was her crib,” Ward says. “That story is one of the first stories that my grandmother ever told me.”"

"“So at the same time that my grandmother is telling me this traumatic, devastating story of her twin's stillbirth, she's also telling me that she was born with this gift that enabled her to have prophetic dreams and to have this very strong, intuitive voice,” Ward says."

"“I want to twin the hard, harsh reality ... with this sense of magic, with this sense of ferocity of life,” she says. Ward would go on to write two National Book Award-winning novels: Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing."

"Ward says she learned the term “respair” an obscure English word meaning the recovery of hope after despair from a poet she followed on Twitter at the time. “I definitely think that a lot of us were feeling a strong sense of despair,” she says."

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