Diane Glancy – författare

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.

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.

Many towns have their murderers, but are they also members of a church, a Boy Scout leader, or president of the congregation? Could they be trusted to bring a covered dish faithfully to church suppers? This novel takes the BTK murders in Wichita, Kansas, as inspiration to question issues of evil. How could a man commit murder and yet sit in church all those years until he was caught? What is a Christian? What is Christianity? Can a Christian murderer go to heaven? Mark Cabot and Ralph Gheary, minister and assistant minister of the church to which murderer Thomas Fout belonged, disagree as they face the shame, quandary, and confusion Fout leaves in his wake. How could they not have known? How can they face their congregation, the news reporters, fellow pastors, and the public? How long does it take to recover from the shock? Both men''s wives, Grace Cabot and Zelda Gheary, are also left reeling in the upheaval. The questions remain: Can a man be good without God? Can a man be good with God?

Crippled in childhood, Mary Wesley, sister of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, speaks of the Wesley household in first-person narrative built on the facts of her life.Mary lived in a strict Christian family, one of 19 children, 10 of whom survived. Her mother, Susanna Wesley, imposed a regiment where "not one child after a year old was heard to cry out." Her father, Samuel Wesley, a minister at Epworth, could not provide for his family, and spent time in debtor''s prison. The family taunted Mary''s awkwardness and showed little sympathy for her affliction.At one point Mary addresses her family from the outside. "There go the ragged Wesley''s. Beggars themselves. They are in a house so crowded love could not grow. Only survival. As plants overcrowded in a garden bend and twist their way toward sunlight, out of necessity smothering those closest to them."Mary Queen of Bees is a study in hardship in early 18th century England. Through the rigors of despondency in the aftermath of her wounding, the brightness of Mary''s spirit emerges. The novel of reactivated history pokes Mary''s voice from childhood to her death in childbirth at the age of 37, when the bees leave.

Love in one form or another is the commanding force of this new collection of short fiction. The Servitude of Love holds the revelations of love in different manifestations--love of work, love of another, love of journey, love of mission, love of justice, of foolishness, of duty. These thirteen stories take place along the north/south corridor of the central plains of America, in Afghanistan and Spain. Fictional characters such as Noe in Brownsville, Texas in the first story, and actual historical characters such as Joanna the Mad in 16th century Spain in the last story, speak of the difficulties and demands of love. Noe, subsumed by love for his family and his art, imagines The Maker, El Senor, to be a workman like himself. Joanna, madly in love with her husband, finds she must live without him. Minneola Peavine, in a dull marriage in West Texas, dreams of nightly visits with Genghis Khan. The four daughters of a preacher travel the north shore in Minnesota in search of something other than the cold. A dyslectic boy reverses the letters, p and b. Another boy, Malchas, loses his ear in an accident involving fireworks, and begins to hear the faraway sea. There is an experimental story about land rights told in several voices in several versions. Two brothers serve in Afghanistan. Two other brothers deliver pizza in northwest Kansas once inhabited by Indians and cavalry troops. The historical, Sister Maria Jesus de Agreda, bilocates between 17th century Spain and the Jumano tribe in the American southwest. Most of them are awash in a river of circumstances that could drown them.

A minister''s wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband''s work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter''s shed, where she makes different forms of ziggurats that she places in her kiln, a little symbol of hell. Though Eugena rejects Frank''s insistence that there is a heaven and hell, she finds that she has worked with the shape of both and never knew it. In the end, she realizes that heaven and hell are in the shape of ziggurats, one rising and the other sinking. Her beloved ziggurats become the ironic witness of what her husband preached. Meanwhile, Frank and Eugena struggle to make sense of their lives after the death of their addict son, Daniel. When he is killed in a car accident, Frank and Eugena argue over whether Daniel''s death was truly an accident, or whether his car may have been pushed off the road. The novel begins, "Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it." When Eugena dies, she travels through hell to find her son, Daniel. Frank sends the last chapter from heaven. The novel was influenced by Dante''s The Divine Comedy and begins with an epigraph from The Inferno, "What I was living, that I am dead."

A 1994 trip to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency began the group of poems for The Collector of Bodies. The manuscript stayed in a file until the Civil War began in Syria, March 18, 2011, the author''s 70th birthday. The poems were retrieved, and the manuscript continued.Glancy wrote as an observer--as someone who had talked to the students in the universities--who had experienced a foreboding of what was ahead for Syria, especially after listening to the unrest of the students. In the bright sunlight, as they walked toward her, smiling, she felt an inexplicable point of grief. She heard the desire of the people to be free. Later, following the uprising of civil war on the news, she knew she was seeing the price the Syrians would pay for that desire. A visit to a foreign country leaves part of oneself in that place. But something in return is taken. This collection of poems explores the "something that is taken" with implications for the Christian believer and the issues involved. What can be done in a world full of refugees? Is there anything to do other than stand back and watch?

No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen''s first-person narrative and Solome''s third-person narrative in accord with the breaking text of their lives. "Once there was a common Indo-European language with words for winter and horse, but no word for the sea." The history of the English language has an inland origin. As they find themselves stranded in the destructive effects of Stephen''s Alzheimer''s, there also is an exploration of resolution that comes from such an experience. Mark 8:36 asks, "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" No Word for the Sea asks, "What if a man gains his soul, but loses the world?"