Books of Interest by Writers of Color—Red Weather by Janet McAdams

Click here to buy the book!

 

Janet McAdams, Red Weather Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series (University of Arizona Press) 192 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8165-2035-0

Janet McAdams’ suspenseful debut novel is a lyrical portrayal of a woman’s search for herself in the guise of her search for long-missing parents, who had fled imminent arrest for their involvement in a 1970s nonviolent Native American protest action that went wrong. Her protagonist, Neva, has lived in the South all her life, passing as white in fear of what might happen to her if those around her realize she’s part-Creek. Even her controlling, abusive husband never knew until the one person in whom she confided told him.

As her desperation to be free of this narcissistic husband and her loss of self grows, Neva discovers a clue to the possible whereabouts of her parents and flees her life in Atlanta to seek them in the tiny, war-torn country of Coatepeque in Central America. She finds work teaching the children of the wealthy elite, love with a sensitive man of shadowy  connections, and friends for whom she can care and make a commitment. As the chaotic war around her escalates, Neva faces danger and heartbreak on all sides. Surrounded by violence and havoc, she begins to remake herself as a whole person.

Within Neva’s perspective, we move back and forth in time and space from her memories of her parents’ increasing commitment to activism as they learn of the heartrending forced sterilization of Native women in the United States to the constantly escalating battle the wealthy elite wage against the surrounding Indigenous populace in Coatepeque to memories of her husband’s selfishness and cruel domination, the personal version of these other large-scale attacks on Indigenous peoples. Her eloquent prose guides us through these transitions, and her beautifully rendered characters and places lure us on in this journey from grief and longing to the potential of a new life.

One of our most compelling and imaginative poets, McAdams weaves a spell of loss, forgiveness, and redemption that will grip the reader’s mind long after the last page is read.

Janet McAdams Bio

Janet McAdams is the author of two collections of poetry, Feral (Salt 2007) and The Island of Lost Luggage (Arizona, 2000), which won the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and the American Book Award. With Geary Hobson and Kathryn Walkiewicz, she is co-editor of the anthology, The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal (Oklahoma, 2010).

In 2005, McAdams founded Salt Publishing's award-winning Earthworks book series, which focuses on indigenous  poetry, and has since expanded to include contemporary Latin American poetry, translated and edited by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez-Nunez. More about the series can be found at Salt Publishing.

Of mixed Scottish, Irish, and Creek ancestry, McAdams grew up in Alabama, has taught in Alabama, Central America, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, and the U.K. She now lives in Gambier, Ohio, and teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry.

Books of Interest by Writers of Color—Fred Arroyo

This review is later than planned due to illness and computer problems, but this is a book and an author well worth waiting for.

 

Fred Arroyo, Western Avenue and Other Fictions Camino del Sol: A Latina and Latino Literary Series (University of Arizona Press) 120 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8165-0233-2

Pre-order for April 12 publication date here.

Fred Arroyo’s impeccably crafted collection of short fiction, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, brings to life a set of characters locked into the dead-end squirrel cage of immigrant workers. Some of these characters will be familiar to readers of Arroyo’s brilliant debut novel, The Region of Lost Names, also published by the University of Arizona Press. This is not one of the trendy novels-in-stories, which so frequently dot the current literary landscape, but the collection does form a narrative, circling back through time and the perspectives of different characters within the narrative.

Each story is introduced by a short flash fiction/prose poem focused on the landscapes and people of the larger narrative, though not necessarily of the stories touching it on either side. The line is thin between the forms of flash fiction and prose poetry, and these bridge pieces tend to fall to the prose-poetry side with their lyrical evocations of just one moment in time. Set-pieces redolent of other times and worlds, they connect the stories into a powerful chain of narrative.

Arroyo offers the reader a loving view of even the less savory or likable characters, showing how the world of grinding poverty, racism, and classism in which they live has twisted them into the people they have become, destructive to themselves and others. There are no easy villains here, even in the stories where women and children are deserted or abused.

Perhaps the most haunting story in the collection is the one which contains none of the recurring characters, “Someday You’ll See.” It is bound to the rest of the collection through the concerns of love and family amid a world where fathers are destroyed and driven away while a whole population struggles with survival amid poverty and the capricious dangers of a system that may swoop down and rip families apart with impunity or send thugs to beat a son to death for daring to live in the white part of town.

In “A Case of Consolation,” one of the characters, who is a destructive force in other stories, is shown being “slowly transformed into a man without likes or dislikes, without a strong sense of desire or remorse, a shell alone on an empty beach without the inner, passionate song of the sea found in that place where shell, ear, and sea meet in the radiance of music.” Boogaloo, who has left a string of damage behind him before becoming sober, loses a new chance of intimacy, relationship, and love, perhaps through an immigrations sweep but almost certainly through his own fear of himself.

“First Love,” “In the Fields of Memory,” and “Western Avenue” take the boy, Ernesto, from childhood, trying in loving innocence to understand and care for a broken father who beats and adores Ernesto’s mother, to a fifteen-year-old, struggling to keep that father sane and alive as they descend into migrant-worker hell after his mother leaves, to a young man seriously injured in a tragedy at a factory where he works, who takes his convalescence time to get a GED and go to college while watching his friend sink unsalvaged into the desperate, dehumanizing life Ernesto is determined to escape.

These stories are about people who do unthinkable damage to each other and make inconceivable sacrifices for each other. Arroyo’s gifted command of language, adept characterizations, and lush, poetic realization of place through a sharp eye for the telling detail make Western Avenue and Other Fictions a treat for the reader--to be savored slowly and reread often.

Fred Arroyo is currently the Andrew Mellon  Postdoctoral Fellow in English  at Whittier College. His novel, The Region of Lost Names, was a finalist for the 2008 Premio Aztlan Prize, and Arroyo was named one of the Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) in 2009 by LatinoStories.com.