Best-selling author Jesman Ward says she is terrible with directions.

She finds it hard to orient herself in a place using the standard north-south-south-east-west compass points.

She needs giant oak trees, country roads lined

with flowers, and places she knew as a child. That speaks directly to her writing, where she takes

that disorientation and pain and difficulty of contemporary life and turns them into portraits

of home. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

In her new book, she tells painful stories

to get to the solace on the other side.

She feels living a carefree life

isn't part of what defines her as a black woman,

nor does it define anyone living in contemporary America.

That's her truth, and she finds comfort in it. She hopes you do too.

Her collection of essays is called On Witness and Respare. And she spoke with me about it at a live

event at InterraBang Books in Dallas recently. Let's listen to that conversation.

Has been welcome. Good to be here. One of the things that you write that you wished for as a child that you didn't get a lot of was solitude.

Talk about why that was hard to come by.

That was hard to come by because for many years when I was younger, my family, my like nuclear family actually lived

with my maternal grandmother.

She had a four bedroom house, and then she converted the dining room in that house into

like a bedroom.

And that is where my parents, that's where they

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