Catching Up, or Why I Was Gone

I have been a very uneven blogger here lately, in part because this past winter has been a physical disaster for me. After developing Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA), a major illness that requires me to be on massive steroids in a maintenance dose for possibly years and the pain and difficulties I went through with that before it was diagnosed and treated, I then contracted the awful H3N2 flu that turned into bronchitis and knocked over a month out of my life. 

As we began to come into spring, and I was just getting starting to get back on my feet slightly after the flu and bronchitis, I fell and shattered my right shoulder. This has left me almost totally disabled. I am right handed, and it's not just the arm that I cannot use but the shoulder, as well, so it's basically the whole upper right side of my body that cannot be used. You would be surprised how much you cannot do if you cannot use the upper right side of your body. Even hauling yourself out of the recliner you must spend most of your time in can be difficult—or impossible, in my case. (Luckily, I have a lift recliner chair arriving Tuesday, which should allow me more independence.)

My right arm and shoulder have been immobilized by the doctors. Because I'm on all the steroids and because I have lymphedema in that arm from my radical mastectomy for breast cancer, I am a really poor risk for surgery, even though that shoulder requires a complete shoulder replacement. We are, instead, trying to get the shoulder to heal in some jury-rigged way without surgery.

I have, after the first week, continued to do work on freelance writing and editing contracts and teach a large, intensive online class in writing a novel. The only way I am doing this is with voice recognition software, which is also how I am completing this blog. Because of all this, I will probably still be rather hit and miss with this blog for awhile here. Voice recognition software has not reached a great pinnacle of efficiency. It does save me a lot of time and a lot of work with my left hand, which is excellent, because my left shoulder and elbow have damage from lupus, and I don't need to injure them further. But after dictating, I must go over and correct multiple mistakes that the software puts into my text. Random capitalizations all over the place. Words that may have been mistaken for others. Typos. Egregious misspellings. It's quite time consuming. (So please forgive any typos I've missed.)

Just as I went down with the flu, my next book of poetry was published. Dark Sister is truly a book of my heart. It is a book of poems that are based in my family, in my heritage, and in my community. They deal with some of the things that are most important to me in the world. Unfortunately, I have not been able to do what I planned or would have wished to promote this book. I hope to be able to do more in the future. I would greatly appreciate anyone who is interested in buying or reviewing the book. Dark Sister is my 10th book to be published, rather a significant milestone that I would like to celebrate by promoting the book and helping it to find its readership. It had been seven years since my last book of poetry, Heart's Migration, which brought me awards and opportunities, but in those seven years, I published seven other books, including several anthologies of other poets' work.

I also had hoped to bring back my blog series, Books of Interest by Writers of Color. So many wonderful writers of color are publishing terrific books right now. This is a golden age for these books by diverse authors. Unfortunately, most of them are from very small houses without promotion and publicity budgets, and they get very little distribution and very little publicity. So I would really like to be once again promoting these books and letting readers, teachers, and librarians know about them with links to buy them. That will, unfortunately, have to wait until I am a little further along in recovery, I'm afraid. That's a big disappointment to me.

I do hope, however, to blog more regularly here, as I get better at using the voice recognition software and begin to heal and regain use of my right arm and shoulder little by little. So I hope to visit with you more often and begin my Books of Interest by Writers of Color series again soon. There are SOOOO many terrific books I want to tell you about!

The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band by Frances Washburn—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

The engaging protagonist of Frances Washburn’s novel, The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band, Sissy Roberts, a self-aware and sassy young Lakota waitress, lead guitarist, and singer for the eponymous band, is beautiful and smart. Sissy is also gifted (or cursed) to have people confide all their secrets to her, whether they want to or not and whether she wants to hear them or not. Sissy graduated from high school four years earlier and wants to find a way to leave the reservation to go to college and avoid the common fate of her pregnant and unmarried friend, Speedy, who lives with Sissy and her family.

Part tightly paced mystery, part humorous, affectionate community chronicle, Washburn’s third novel takes place on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota and begins on Fourth of July 1969 when a hail of beer bottles chases Sissy and the guys in the band out of the Longhorn Bar in Scenic where they are scheduled to play. That same night, Buffalo Ames is murdered outside the Longhorn, drawing Tom Holm, an FBI agent, toward Sissy with her talent for hearing secrets as his unwilling entrée into the close-knit and suspicious reservation community.  The book ends four months later after much romantic and other intrigue and after many of Sissy’s friends and loved ones have become suspects in the murder at one time or another before she solves the crime.

Rich in particulars of reservation life and unforgettable characters, Washburn creates a believable, well-drawn world in which she sets her emotionally complex story of the coming of age of a young woman with the gift of being a receptive listener who pays real attention to what people tell her and the truths behind what they say and the story of a downtrodden, complicated community in a pivotal time, forming and reforming itself. Washburn’s pared-down style is ironic and taut and, even when venturing into tragedy or love, never touches on sentimentality. This richly textured novel of a strong young woman’s and her community’s development and self-determination is a fine literary work with interlocked stories and telling details that bring Sissy and her world to life on the page.

As always, I suggest that you buy the book from the university publisher and support the publishers who bring you diversity in literature. Without university and small press publishers, we would have only the few most famous writers of color, and even they were usually initially published by the university and small press community.

http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2476.htm

Bio

Frances Washburn was born on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and grew up there. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico and was a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska before being hired at the University of Arizona where she is an Associate Professor in the American Indian Studies Program and the Department of English. She is the mother of two children, Lee and Stella.
Washburn is the author of the novels, Elsie's Business and The Sacred White Turkey, in addition to The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band. She has also published a biography of Louise Erdrich, Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works, as well as scholarly and academic articles and essays.

Marjorie Agosín—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

UPDATE: Marjorie Agosín receives Pura Belpré Award from the American Library Association for I Lived on Butterfly Hill.

This is part of a special #diverselit, #WeNeedDiverseBooks intensive for my regular series of posts, Books of Interest by Writers of Color.

I’ve written before about Marjorie Agosín, her brilliant books of poetry, memoir, essays, and scholarship and her amazing career as a human-rights activist. Her 2014 book, I Lived on Butterfly Hill (Simon & Schuster, 978-1416953449), is her first novel. Semi-autobiographical, it tells the story of a young girl in Chile with parents allied with the democratic government, who is forced into exile in the United States because of a dictator’s coup and its vicious aftermath. Agosín herself fled to the U.S. with her parents at the same age from Pinochet. Agosín has compressed the length of the dictatorship in her already expansive book, as well as other details—for story purposes and because, as she said in an interview, “I could not bear to make Celeste Marconi endure 17 years of a fierce dictatorship. Three was enough.”  

Probably because of the age of the protagonist, the novel is marketed as a book for older children/young adults, but this luminous, poignant novel actually makes compelling reading for anyone of any age. The charming illustrations by Lee White are paired perfectly with the lyrical prose of Agosín, an award-winning poet, the enchanted life the protagonist lives in Chile before the Pinochet-like dictator, and the mysterious and mystical events of her life on the coast of Maine and back in Valparaiso  after the dictator’s death.  I Lived on Butterfly Hill was published to universal praise, including a starred review from Booklist and a nomination for the Cybil Awards in children’s and young adult literature. It has recently gone into a second printing.

Grandchild of Holocaust refugees, Celeste Marconi is a happy dreamer, who loves her room at the top of her house high on a hill overlooking the harbor where she can make friends with pelicans while her grandmother and her Indigenous nanny take care of all the daily household work. She lives cocooned in the love and protection of friends, neighbors, and family in Valparaiso, Chile—until the time comes when even dreamy Celeste can’t deny the political unrest that is sweeping through the country. Warships fill the harbor. Classmates disappear from school. No one talks about any of the terrible things that are happening. There are just holes in the world as there always were when her grandmother talked about her life in Nazi Germany before she had to flee to Chile. Celeste doesn’t quite know what is happening, but one thing is clear: no one is safe, not anymore.
 
The country has been taken over by a government that declares artists, protestors, and anyone who helps the needy “subversive” and dangerous. So Celeste’s parents, doctors who help poor people, must go into hiding before they, too, “disappear.” To protect their daughter, they send her to her eccentric aunt on the coast of Maine in the United States. Plunged abruptly into the very different seaside world of Juliette Cove, Celeste has no knowledge of English, of American society and popular culture, of winter or snow, of housework, and has never been lonely in her life—before this. She goes to school, tries to help her aunt around the house, and learns to adjust to life in Maine, even as her heart stays wrapped up in Valparaiso and her family there. This section of the book is one of the most evocative and tender expressions of the experience of the immigrant, especially the child immigrant, who lives in and between two worlds each day and the emotional roller coaster that entails.

Eventually, just as Celeste begins to feel at home in Juliette Cove, the dictator dies of a nasty cold (Agosín’s little joke to get back at the long-lived Pinochet), and Celeste is called back home to a Valparaiso and Chile that she hardly recognizes. Her parents are still gone, perhaps dead, and she wonders if anything can ever be the way it used to be. The magic and mysticism that permeate all levels of Chilean society are important elements of the book, part of the powerful threads of imagery and metaphor that weave throughout, but here they play a major role in the denouement of the book’s bittersweet ending.

Beautiful language, captivating characters, and a gripping story make this rich, ambitious novel a winner for anyone who wants to know what it was like living through the horrors of the Pinochet regime or wants to understand the experience of the exile or immigrant or simply wants to fall into a lush world of fear, loss, hope, and courage and live in that fascinating environment for the duration of a book by a spellbinding storyteller.

To read more about this inspiring author, visit this past post:

http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/2011/12/books-of-interest-from-writers-of-color.html

And this one:

http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/2010/09/honored-by-un-and-winner-of-numerous.html

Usually, I send readers to the small or university presses who have published the writers I discuss in order to support those midwives to #diverselit, but this book of Agosín’s is published by one of the big titans in New York City, so I’ll just give the Amazon link. I’ve also given the ISBN number with the first mention of the title, so you can also order it from your local independent bookstore, which would be even greater. Any way you go about it, get this book. You will thank me after reading it.

http://www.amazon.com/Lived-Butterfly-Hill-Marjorie-Agosin/dp/1416953442

Next time, I’ll look at Frances Washburn and her new novel, The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band. Until then, branch out in your reading. Step outside your comfort zone and broaden your capacity for empathy. Read #diverselit.

Erika Wurth—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

This is the first in my restarted blog series in honor of #diverselit and #WeNeedDiverseBooks. For a number of years, I did a regular series of post, Books of Interest by Writers of Color. Last year, just as I was about to do a month’s intensive of that series in honor of the then-new #diverselit movement online, I went into a series of medical emergencies. Now, I’m back with all the authors and books I’d wanted to feature.

I first encountered Erika Wurth’s work in her book of poetry, Indian Trains (West End Press, ISBN 978-0-9753486-7-3), which I found a remarkably moving first book. Poems like “Time to Dance,” “Genocide Fists,” “Mama Don’t Let Your Quarterbreeds Grow Up to be Cowboys,” “You Didn’t Want a Dollar, You Wanted Me,” “Grandma Was a Beat Poet,” “How to Finance an Illusion,” and “Colfax Reservation Television” offer the reader a glimpse into lives full of wreckage, ironic humor, harsh truths, but also holding tenderness and hope. Using sharp imagery, sometimes biting and sometimes lyrical language, and nuggets of story at the heart of her people and herself, she creates a brave, intimate book about the urban mixed-bloods who make up 70 percent of the Indian population.

In “Time to Dance,” she sums up her hopes for her people with “I want our lives to be a fancydance, for every Indian to run straight into the imagination without stopping for a drink first.” In “Mama Don’t Let Your Quarterbreeds Grow Up to be Cowboys,” her lines are like a prophecy for her next great book, her novel Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend:

“They move, their muscles pulling tight, their

arms wearing secrets

Crazyhorse tattoos under their shirts, filled with

spirit, filled

with the knowledge of death, running always

with the horses”

Wurth’s novel, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 978-1940430430), came out in September 2014. It’s an intense, gritty story of a sixteen-year-old mixed-blood Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee/white girl living in poverty and hopelessness in a violent home on the outskirts of Denver who is determined to get out of that situation. Unfortunately, the ways she chooses—drug dealing and a sexual relationship with a “cool” loser—aren’t going to work to free her from her misery, especially after she becomes pregnant.

Wurth pulls the reader into Margaritte’s life and her surroundings with sharp, haunting images, tough, realistic dialogue, and emotionally troubling situations and conflicts. As Margritte struggles to survive and find a way to escape her fate and actually thrive, the reader despairs and hopes for her. This gripping narrative is raw and realistic, but Wurth always shows compassion for her underdog protagonist and the people surrounding her in the trap of poverty and dysfunction. Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend is serious medicine using visceral language, but for the strong of heart, it is an empathetic, passionate journey.

Wurth is one of the most promising among a bright crop of newer Native writers. Look for much more from her in both poetry and fiction.

Bio

Erika T. Wurth is Apache / Chickasaw / Cherokee and was raised on the outskirts of Denver. She teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and was a writer-in-residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Boulevard, Fiction, Pembroke, Florida Review, Stand, Cimarron Review, The Cape Rock, Southern California Review and Drunken Boat.

As usual, I recommend that you buy books from the small presses or university presses that produce them as a way of supporting those necessary midwives of literature. The majority of #diverselit is brought out by these presses, and without them, the only diversity we would have in our literature would be the occasional Sherman Alexie or Louise Erdrich. Much as I love both of those writers, I also know they would be the first to tell you there are many more fine Indigenous writers out there who are published by less well-known presses.

For Indian Trains, visit West End Press at:

http://www.westendpress.org/catalog/books/indian_trains.shtml

For Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, visit Curbside Splendor Publications at:

http://www.curbsidesplendor.com/books/crazy-horses-girlfriend

The next installment in this series will be Marjorie Agosín’s marvelous new YA novel based on her own teen years having to flee the Pinochet regime in Chile.