SOURCE: “Gayl Jones,” in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate, Continuum, 1986, pp. 89-99.

In the interview below, Jones discusses her writing method, her intent in writing, and the differences between men and women writers.

Gayl Jones was born in 1949 in Lexington, Kentucky where she lived until she attended Connecticut College and Brown University. Her first novel, Corregidora (1975), appeared when she was twenty-six years old. It is a bizarre, romantic story exposing the intimate family history of three generations of black women in rural Kentucky from early to mid-twentieth century. Eva's Man (1976) is a young Woman's recollections of the events leading up to her confinement in a mental institution. A collection of short stories, White Rat (1977), depicts brief encounters with seemingly ordinary black people, also in rural Kentucky, Jones's latest work, Song for Anninho (1981), is an extended lyrical ballad about a slave revolt in eighteenth-century Brazil...