A Conversation with Diane Glancy

Diane Glancy, who is of Cherokee, German, and English descent, is a full professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches creative writing and Native American literature. An accomplished poet, playwright, essayist, and fiction writer, Glancy has published over thirty books and received numerous awards and fellowships. This conversation took place in April2003 at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where Glancy was spending her sabbatical. JENNIFER ANDREWS: I want to start by asking you about the purposes of poetry. You talk about this in Claiming Breath: how it heals, clarifies, creates. But I think that every art form has its limitations. I'd like to hear what you find difficult about writing poetry and how you've overcome it. DIANE GLANCY: I think poetry also documents—that's one word you didn't mention—because as I was trying to find out where my voice was, poetry became the road on which I traveled and found out what I needed to know. I was always outside the generally recognized voice, so I used poetry to examine this. The next challenge, after uncovering my Native heritage, was that all Native heritage was supposed to be Plains Indian. But we would go back to my father's people, the Cherokee, and they were farmers. I never saw a buffalo, I never saw feathers, a war bonnet, no tepees; we had a house, a row of corn, a pig. When you were first able to write about your Indian heritage, editors and publishers wanted Plains Indian material. They didn't want the truth of the kind of Indian you were. So first of all I wrote of the Plains Indian: there was a buffalo in some of my poetry and so forth. Then I began to dig deeper: Why are there differences? I used poetry to document my journey and to make that discovery. I do find a limit to poetry, but that's when I move into the realm of fiction, plays, and essays. You can't talk very well about ideas in poetry; you can't talk about poetry with poetry. But I do love poetry. It's a very elastic genre. There are the narrative poems, and then there's the very experimental, subconscious dream world that you can bring forth, too. And those are two different things, just like the Plains Indians and the Woodland Indians. It's been very exciting. I've gotten very heavily into novels lately. Although when I was [End Page 645] writing Stone Heart, which is my new novel—Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea —it was through poetry that I entered the book. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson, the president, bought the western part of the United States from France. He didn't know what was there, so he sent out Lewis and Clark in 1804, and they had a magnificent two-year journey. There is a myth in America that Sacajawea led the men upriver. She did not lead them at all. She did not know where she was going. She was a young girl, sixteen years old; she'd just had a baby; she had an abusive husband. She was sick most of the way; she died within five years after the journey. So I traveled for two summers along the Missouri River and the Columbia River, from South Dakota back to Oregon, to the Pacific Coast. I had the Lewis and Clark journals on tape, so I listened to them in the oral tradition as I drove along. It was the poetry that I picked up from the land, so it's a poetic novel. When I give readings, I can read some fiction and I can read some nonfiction and poetry, and I've received comments that it all sounds the same. And I guess it does. I would say poetry probably defines my voice, even though I find that I write less and less poetry. But I turn

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cherokee · Conversation · Creative writing · Literature · Media studies · Poetry · Sociology · Visual arts · American Literature and Culture · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Publishing and Scholarly Communication

• Walk-in-2-Worlds”

  Rachel Luckenbill Rachel Luckenbill, Rachel Luckenbill•Studies in American Indian…•2015

  Add to list

• Even the Snow Is White

  Open Access•Kenneth Hada•American Indian Culture and…•2009

  Add to list