Diane Glancy - Böcker

The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet's vision and a storyteller's voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre's outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today. Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures—English and German on her mother's side, Cherokee on her father's—Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.

In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world. Ada Ronner, a librarian at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, hears books speak and senses their restless flow as they circulate. The same relentless energy and liberation of the story is also felt by Ada as she roller-skates at the Dust Bowl, a local skating rink, floating far ahead of her husband, Ether, a physics professor. Hearing "the old Cherokee voices" when she skates and works in the Manuscript and Rare Book room in the library, Ada grows increasingly aware of the continuing power of Cherokee tradition today. Coming from a culture based in oral tradition, Ada discovers the potentially liberating role of the written word, and she finds her own empowerment as its promulgator and reinventor in the twenty-first century.Designs of the Night Sky moves between the turbulent history of a tribe and the experiences of the survivors of that history still caught in turmoil. Rolling from past to present and present to past, Diane Glancy's story provokes and illumines while it invites us to reconsider the form and effect of Native American stories in today's world.

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as "trouble causers," arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy's work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners' predicament.

Like poets of legend, Diane Glancy has spent much of her life on the road. For years she supported her family by driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools. Claiming Breath is an account of one of those years, what Glancy calls "a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters . . . and a final acceptance of the broken past. . . . It's a year that covers more than a year."

Incorporating elements of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, Diane Glancy's stories are lyrical yet down to earth, often tough and gritty. Experimental, sometimes surreal in form, they nevertheless concern people who are very real-a color-blind young boy who watches planes in flight and imagines color; a shy stamp collector who speculates that he and his friend, like the stamps, could go anywhere via the U.S. Post Office; an old woman who dies in the cold landscape of her inner life but retains her vision; a cynical woman reluctant to take risks with yet another traveling man.In spite of life's hard realities, Firesticks is filled with humor and hope and a stitching together of cultures, as the crossblood characters search for their identities.

In The Mask Maker, Diane Glancy tells the story of Edith Lewis, a recently divorced mixed-blood American Indian, as she travels the state of Oklahoma teaching students the art and custom of mask-making. A complex, subtle tale about f1esh-and-blood human beings, this enchanting novel shows how one woman copes with alienation, loss, and questions about identity and, in the end, rediscovers meaning in living.Through Edith's daily life and efforts to teach, Glancy explores the power of the mask and mask-making. When Edith tries reaching out to a listless, alienated student, she knows enough to ask, ""Where would you want to go?"" He replies, ""Nowhere,"" to which she responds with the advice, ""Then make a mask to take you nowhere.""For Edith, masks go beyond the limitations of words and surface gloss. ""A mask is a face when you have none,"" she reflects. Yet some stories need to be confronted, so Edith struggles with the question of how to use masks to tell stories without using words.Glancy's Edith is no idealized sage but a very human character struggling as best she can while enduring clueless officials and teachers. When Edith explains to one teacher how the art of mask-making reaches students on a creative, intuitive level, she is chided as impractical: ""We're supposed to reach them through math and English.""In The Mask Maker, Glancy provides the reader with intriguing new ways of looking at identity, at language, at intangible values, and at love. This captivating novel on the human need for self-expression will delight readers of all ages.

It is February 1839, and the survivors of the Cherokee Trail of Tears have just arrived in Fort Gibson, Indian Territory. A quarter of the removed Indian population have died along the way, victims of cold, disease, and despair. Now the Cherokee people confront an unknown future. How will they build anew from nothing? How will they plow fields of unbroken sod, full of rocks too heavy to lift? Can they put aside the pain and anger of Removal and find peace?Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears tells the story of the Cherokees' resettlement in the hard years following Removal, a story never before explored in fiction. In this sequel to her popular 1996 novel Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, author Diane Glancy continues the tale of Cherokee brothers O-ga-na-ya and Knobowtee and their families, as well the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead, a Cherokee Christian minister. The book follows their travails in Indian Territory as they attempt to build cabins, raise crops, and adjust to new realities.The novel begins with a nation defeated - displaced, starving, broken, still walking that hated Trail in their dreams. Debate rages between followers of the old ways and converts to Christianity, and conflict between those who opposed and those who authorized resettlement eventually erupts into violence. In the aftermath of confusion, despair, and turmoil, a new nation emerges.

In American Gypsy, a collection of six plays, Diane Glancy uses a mélange of voices to invoke the myths and realities of modern Native American life. Glancy intermixes poetry and prose to address themes of gender, generational relationships, acculturation, myth, and tensions between Christianity and traditional Native American belief systems.The six plays included, ""The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance,"" ""The Women Who Loved House Trailers,"" ""American Gypsy,"" ""Jump Kiss,"" ""Lesser Wars,"" and ""The Toad (Another Name for the Moon) Should Have a Bite,"" run the gamut from monologues to multi-character pieces and vary in length from fifteen minutes to over an hour. Glancy concludes the collection with a thought-provoking essay on Native American playwriting.

Incorporating elements of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, Diane Glancy’s stories are lyrical yet down to earth, often tough and gritty. Experimental, sometimes surreal in form, they nevertheless concern people who are very real-a color-blind young boy who watches planes in flight and imagines color; a shy stamp collector who speculates that he and his friend, like the stamps, could go anywhere via the U.S. Post Office; an old woman who dies in the cold landscape of her inner life but retains her vision; a cynical woman reluctant to take risks with yet another traveling man.In spite of life’s hard realities, Firesticks is filled with humor and hope and a stitching together of cultures, as the crossblood characters search for their identities.

In The Mask Maker, Diane Glancy tells the story of Edith Lewis, a recently divorced mixed-blood American Indian, as she travels the state of Oklahoma teaching students the art and custom of mask-making. A complex, subtle tale about flesh-and-blood human beings, this enchanting novel shows how one woman copes with alienation, loss, and questions about identity and, in the end, rediscovers meaning in living.Through Edith's daily life and efforts to teach, Glancy explores the power of the mask and mask-making. When Edith tries reaching out to a listless, alienated student, she knows enough to ask, "Where would you want to go?" He replies, "Nowhere," to which she responds with the advice, "Then make a mask to take you nowhere."For Edith, masks go beyond the limitations of words and surface gloss. "A mask is a face when you have none," she reflects. Yet some stories need to be confronted, so Edith struggles with the question of how to use masks to tell stories without using words.Glancy's Edith is no idealized sage but a very human character struggling as best she can while enduring clueless officials and teachers. When Edith explains to one teacher how the art of mask-making reaches students on a creative, intuitive level, she is chided as impractical: "We're supposed to reach them through math and English."In The Mask Maker, Glancy provides the reader with intriguing new ways of looking at identity, at language, at intangible values, and at love. This captivating novel on the human need for self-expression will delight readers of all ages.

There is a saying in Native American tradition that ""wholeness is when the shadow of the rider and his horse are one."" Although we usually focus our attention on what seems most real, Diane Glancy shows us that the shadow of our past has substance as well. The Shadow's Horse is a new collection of poems in which Glancy walks the margin between her white and Indian heritage. In poems that conjure the persistence of fallen leaves or juxtapose images of Christ and the stockyards, she powerfully evokes place and spirit to address with intelligence and beauty issues of family, work, and faith. In some of these poems Glancy recalls growing up with her Cherokee father, who worked in a stockyard, radically applying Christian theology to the slaughter of non-human creatures: The cattle go up the rampdragging their crosses.Their voices are Gregorian chantsrising to the blue sky,the cold clouds. In others she examines the walk of history through the ordinary details of life-history seen from two points of view, early Euro-American and contemporary Native American. She sees her Native heritage as shortlived and fragile, yet as enduring as leaves, and she asks, ""If you line up all the leaves that fall / how many times will they go around the earth?"" Writing in a cross-boundaried, fragmented voice-a voice based on the memory of the way language sounded when it was stretched across the cultures or walked in both worlds-Glancy has fashioned a book about speaking oneself into existence. The Shadow's Horse is the story of one culture made to sing the song of another until the Native voice is so erased it is nearly an illusion. Yet as readers of these poems will discover, the shadow of the past is as real as the horse it rides.

Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and author of more than thirty books, Diane Glancy has established herself as one of the country's most versatile and prolific writers. Distinguished by her laconic honesty, her unflinching eye, and her skillful articulation of the commonplace, she presents Native American lifeespecially the ways it intersects with nonnative culture?in all its complexity and nuance. In her new collection of poems, she explores the history of loss that has marked the Cherokee community. In a voice that is as economical as it is eloquent and as sophisticated as it is exhilarating, she describes the loss of family, the loss of cultural heritage, and the loss of old worlds as new ones encroach. In one poem, a farm auction becomes an auction of culture, of heritage, of the past. In others, ancestors meet in a twenty-four-hour cafe, lunch is shared with a great-grandmother who has been traveling the universe, Christ appears as a cowboy in an apocalyptic vision, and Clytemnestra is discovered in a snakeskin. Some of the poems are as campy as a duck-decoy Custer in a shooting gallery. Some glitter with dime-store glue.Others speak with the reflection of sunlight off a stream. Sometimes the verse produces a shortstop language on the baseline of experience. In whatever form they take, Glancy's poems stimulate and challenge the reader with their unfettered, unadorned, and unpretty purity. This collection is not only a spirited ride across the Great Plains, it is also an important addition to the literature of white Native American cultural relationships.

Constructed as a series of reports to the Department of the Interior, these poems of grief, anger, defiance, and resistance focus on the oppressive educational system adopted by Indian boarding schools and the struggle Native Americans experienced to retain and honour traditional ways of life and culture.

The story of a 17th century Mohawk woman's interaction with her land, the Jesuits, and the religion they brought.In The Reason for Crows, award-winning author Diance Glancy retells the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Mohawk woman who converted to Christianity and later became known as the "Lily of the Mohawks." Left frail, badly scarred, and nearly blind from a smallpox epidemic that killed her parents, Kateri nevertheless took part in the daily activities of her village-gathering firewood, preparing meals, weaving, and treating the wounded after skirmishes with the French and enemy tribes. When the Jesuits arrived in her village, she received their message and converted to Christianity. After her conversion, she was scorned and persecuted by her fellow Indians and eventually left her home along the Mohawk River for a village the Jesuits had established for Christian Indians, where she died at the age of 24. In Glancy's imaginative and poetic retelling, Kateri's interior voice is intertwined with the interior voices of the Jesuit missionaries-the crows-who endured their own hardships crossing the ocean and establishing missions in an unfamiliar land. Together they tell a story of spiritual awakening and the internal conflicts that arise when cultures meet.

Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Those who claim a Native cultural identity often have family stories of tenuous ties dating back several generations. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship.With essays by Trevino Brings Plenty, Deborah Miranda, Steve Russell, and Kimberly Wieser, among others, Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”-non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits-and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.