Diane Glancy, Indigenous Writer Creates Pathways for Others

In 1984 I joined the English faculty of Haskell Indian Nations University (it was a

junior college then). I had just finished an MFA, so my colleagues tolerated me teaching Creative Writing, as overloads. They also directed stray literary mail to my desk.

So, one day Brown Wolf Leaves the Res and Other Poems by Diane Glancy, a special chapbook issue of the Blue Cloud Quarterly arrived on my desk. This was my introduction to Glancy, but by no means her first publication. From the chapbook’s biography, I found that in 1984, already she had published in over 90 journals, won the American Indian Theater Co. playwriting contest and honorable mention from the Five Tribes. She had earned an MA from Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma—and I now know that she would receive an MFA at the University of Iowa in 1988. In 1984, this was her first book.

To give some context, not many Native-written books were on the shelves of the Haskell library, or anywhere. Momaday had published House Made of Dawn in 1968, and won the Pulitzer, but few other books by Native writers, besides as-told-to autobiographies, were available. In 1975, Duane Niatum published the poetry anthology, Carriers of the Dream Wheel, a beautiful volume with color illustrations by Wendy Rose. In its series, Harper & Row published books by Simon Ortiz, James Welch, Niatum, and others. Geary Hobson’s anthology The Remembered Earth, published in 1979, was very important and included writers from all regions of the United States, not just Albuquerque Renaissance writers. It exploded the perception that there were no Indigenous writers. In 1983, Joseph Bruchac edited the poetry anthology Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back, which includes Glancy, perhaps her first appearance in a national anthology of Native writers. I ordered this paperback as a textbook for Haskell.

I do want to witness to how courageous these writers and editors of the time were, how effective, how welcome. The doxology of Native as a primitive was everywhere, undisputed. At Haskell, where seniority determined all course staffing, a well-intentioned

Glancy and Carrie Cornelius in Norman, OK, Returning
the Gift Conference, Lifetime Achievement Award

White man taught American Indian Literature. Texts were traditional accounts and many stories by White authors about Indigenous Americans—think of Frank Waters, James Fenimore Cooper, Ruth Beebe Hill. When I questioned this teacher, he said there were no well-written books by American Indians. He did not object, nonetheless, when I began to order books by Natives. He continued to teach the cushier literature classes, so I integrated contemporary writers into my Basic Comp and Creative Writing classes, including the poetry of Diane Glancy. By 1999, I had more seniority, and when the anthology Visit Tepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours, edited by Diane Glancy and Mark Nowak, was published, I added it to reading lists. It includes post-modern works by Gerald Vizenor, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, Maurice Kenny, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Juan Felipe Herrera, Greg Sarris, and Peter Blue Cloud. My students and I explored these authors, and this was an essential text.

The publications Diane Glancy wrote and edited encouraged Haskell students from the start. Familiar attitudes helped them to engage with her works. The other Haskell English faculty in the 1980s taught Faulkner (a favorite of a Creek-Seminole professor), George Orwell, and New Yorker writers, so this poem by Diane Glancy, in contrast, was accessible:

Looking for My Old Indian Grandmother in the Summer Heat of 1980

The heat uncovers the window and attic-fan

that pulls in more heat.

It was like this in ‘54, they say,

and I remember, somehow, the hot, white air in the

percale curtains at the window.

It comes back to me now.

I think it was the year my grandmother died.

I look into the trunk, and under the rock

that is her grave.

It was in 1954. July 14.

Her hands and face turn hard before we arrive.

We are bleached clean from her responsibility.

It all happened before I was old enough to ask,

before she knew I would even want to know.

It was because I am more like her than the others

I want to know what rock it is

she left upturned.     (Songs from This Earth 77)

The narrator is close to the actual author, a Native stance familiar to Haskell students, not the stylized British-influenced literary persona. The poem begins with the body, the heat, and with natural forces—sun (implied), wind, rock. Family is present, alive in memory. Childhood is not left behind, but rather informs the present. Glancy’s narration reads the setting as a map of signs, from her grandmother’s face to the gravesite. Workings of the narrator’s mind turn and return to heritage as the she identifies her own future—deliberate and ongoing connection to her grandmother. Glancy enlarges the poem by use of oblique metaphors, “Her hands and face turn hard” reinforces the image of the “rock.” White assimilation, all too familiar to Haskell students, is clear in the phrase “We are bleached.” Alienation, fragmentation, the struggles of assimilation—these are themes quite real to Native readers and led to vibrant class discussions.

            The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy gives insights into axises of her work, and a vocabulary of critique. Chadwick Allen notes the “driving compulsion in these texts: to examine in detail a Christian faith embattled both from without and within; to explore a largely unknown indigenous descent; to describe the painful isolation of juxtaposed and asymmetrical identities” (15). Glancy is a border crosser, hybridizer, pasticher, and most of all authentic in her own values. Her writing is individual and communal. Notice how often Glancy collaborates with other editors and writers.

            In 1996 Glancy published Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, and in the intervening 25 years, her innovations in that book now seem commonplace: ruptured narratives, polyvocality (the cast of narrators), intertextuality (Reverend Bushyhead’s list of needs for the mission, real estate records), deep geography (maps, ecology), historicism, hybridity. Cherokee syllabary and terms challenge hegemony of the settler language tradition. This novel embodies disparate strands about the forced relocations of the 1830s, earlier than any other book, and with great heart. I remember Glancy reading from the manuscript at the Newberry Library in 1990 and her emotion as she described the harrowing writing process. A few years later, I remember hearing younger Native women talk about Glancy’s career, and how important she was as a model for their own writing and academic success. She is one of our valued elders, active through decades of evolving Native literary expression. She deserves our profound gratitude for navigating through those tough early years, keeping faith, and continuing to lead with innovative projects.

            In 2009, as Glancy was in Lawrence for film editing of Dome of Heaven, we began the habit of lunch, and one day she asked if my husband Tom Weso and I were interested in her next poetry manuscript for Mammoth Publications. I was, and it developed into Stories of the Driven World, a transgenre collection of travelogue, storytelling, field notes, womanist texts, and faith-based accounts. One of my favorite poems is “Horned Being”:

There are nights they come back as human

it’s a transformation of sorts

they don’t want to come

but something in them makes the change

the transference to other

AWP, with Eric Gansworth, Picott, Evalina Lucero,
Santee Frazier. Diane Glancy right.

to see what it would be to walk on nearly two legs

with antlers still on its head

buckskin on its bones

the world is always moving the last field report said

he’d discovered changing slots

whatever they are

it was the last we heard

but scribbled on the pages we received

one leg amputated from a trap

one hand forward, the other back

the four directions for a navel.    (75)

 This is about interspecies transformations, from animal to human. Tom coincidentally had a painting that exactly matched the poem’s hybrid creature, which we used for the cover. The poems are intersections of settler and Indigenous, of faith and science, of stasis and motion. The narrator crisscrosses the landscape—questing, commenting, reflecting, celebrating.

            Our press Mammoth Publications also did It Was Then: Elements of the Diagonal (2012), with some of my favorite poems about the Kansas area, and a book of personal essays about faith, Now It Is Snowing Inside a Psalm (2011).

            At Haskell, I saw many elders through the years—spiritual leaders, writers, alumni, tribal leaders. Most of them began the same way, as they spoke to Haskell students, “Indians are a very spiritual people.” That comes back to me as I think of Glancy’s work, which defies categorization. It is always spiritual. I turn to her own comments in the back of Pushing the Bear, which illuminate this quality. She recounts travels to the site of the old Cherokee capital north of Atlanta. She describes how the farms stolen from Cherokee people in the 1830s were burned by General Sherman twenty years later. She concludes, “Maybe, in the end, our acts cause little energy fields that draw their likenesses toward them” (Pushing the Bear 327). This interconnectedness is an aspect of faith. Glancy writes toward reconciliation. To conclude in her words, she writes in Claiming Breath: “I write with a split voice, of the experimenting with language until the parts equal some sort of whole” (xi). That “whole,” after 35 years, is a remarkable legacy for all writers.

Bruchac, Joseph, ed. Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back. Greenfield Review Press, 1983.

Glancy, Diane. Brown Wolf Leaves the Res and Other Poems. Blue Cloud Quarterly (vol. 30.1), ed. Brother Benet Tvedten, 1984.

-----. Claiming Breath. University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

-----. It Was Then: Elements of the Diagonal. Mammoth Publications (2012).

-----. Now It Is Snowing Inside a Psalm. Mammoth Publications, 2011.

-----. Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears. Harcourt, 1996.

-----. Stories of the Driven World. Mammoth Publications, 2010.

Glancy, Diane and Mark Nowak, eds. Visit Tepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours. Coffee House Press, 1999.

Hobson, Geary. The Remembered Earth. Red Earth Press, 1979

Mackay, James, ed. The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy. Salt, 2010

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. Harper & Row, 1968.

Niatum, Duane, ed. Carriers of the Dream Wheel, Harper & Row, 1975.

CARAZA, GLANCY, AND GOLDBERG featured at the Mammoth 2015 AWP Reading April 11, Book Fair Stage 1, 10:30 a.m.

Save the date! Thanks to Mammoth Publications authors XANATH CARAZA, DIANE GLANCY AND CARYN MIRRIAM-GOLDBERG. They will be featured at Mammoth’s AWP 2015 reading, Minneapolis Conference! April 11, Saturday, in Minneapolis, 10:30 a.m. We will have a great reading from Mammoth authors Xanath Caraza, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, and Diane Glancy, including the new book Syllables of Wind / Silabas de viento by Xanath Caraza. This is the largest literary book fair in North America. A one-day pass for all Sat. programming is $40, a bargain. See AWP 2015 on FB for details https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/overview

Book Launch of Runaway Pony, poets respond to paintings by Tom Weso, 7 p.m. Sat. Nov. 17, 603 Tenn. St., Lawrence, KS

RUNAWAY PONY: An Anthology of Verse after Paintings by Thomas Pecore Weso is a collection of “ekphrastic poetry,” poems written about specific artworks. The collection commemorates an opening and reading at the Runaway Pony Bed and Breakfast, November, 2012. The vivid, acrylic and black-light paintings of Weso inspire diverse, award-winning authors, including:  

Diane Glancy, Julianne Buchsbaum, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Xánath Caraza, Silvia Kofler, Denise Low, DaMaris B. Hill, Allison Serina Hearn, James Benger, and Kevin Cummings.

Critic Mick Braa writes of Thomas Pecore Weso’s paintings: “He paints mostly bright, high-contrast colors to records what he has discovered, borrowing styles and figures from varied Indian art traditions to symbolize what he sees senses, and learns. Forms can switch back and forth between foreground and background, perhaps illustrating our constantly changing sensations of place, spirit and things in between.”  (Lawrence Magazine 2012)
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DIANE GLANCY BOOK ABOUT WINTER & FAITH IS AVAILABLE

New book by Diane Glancy Now It Is Snowing Inside a Psalm. This book of short reflective essays shares a winter journal of doubts as well as triumphs. This skilled writer’s personal response to the Hebrew text gives new perspectives on language and its role as a tool of faith. This will help readers through the dark snowy days ahead. She writes:

“It has been a hard winter. The snow seems to get into everything, even the Psalms. There are gray mornings I need to plug into the Word for the will to get up and work at my projects for the day. There are energy pockets in the Bible, especially the book of Psalms. I have been through the Psalms many times over the years. What new could there be left?  Yet they always stoke the will, and I am able to do what is needed. This winter, I opened the Psalms for another familiar journey, but soon found them not familiar at all. They became a new journey on the same road. There were variations in the landscape of language, and new insights. I found resilience in the dreariness of a long winter. I also discovered little disruptions in the Psalms that matched the disruptions I felt in my own interior landscape. The little clumps of words I read fit the clump of circumstances I faced. The Psalms became cross-word puzzles of a sort as I looked between two different translations— King James Version and the New Revised Standard Version.  This winter, I walked through the snow with the Psalms as a map. Even the gray clouds changed each day. Month after month, there was snow and cold, and cold and snow, yet I walked the changing terrain in the Psalms. My sister-in-law told me about a newspaper photograph last summer at the Lake of the Ozarks. It was of ticks with their little arms upraised in the grass, waiting for someone to pass along so they could latch onto them. That is the way I felt as I read the Psalms. They held to me, not to take life from me, but to give it.”
 http://www.mammothpublications.com/catalog1.0.html Distributed by Mammoth or buy the Kindle edition. Order through mammothpubs@hotmail.com
*Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College in St. Paul. Among her 30+ books are: The Reason for Crows, a novel of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk converted to Christianity; Pushing the Bear, a novel of the 1838-39 Cherokee Trail of Tears; a collection of essays, The Dream of a Broken Field; and new poetry, Stories of the Driven World. In 2010, she made her first independent film, The Dome of Heaven. She has been the recipient of many awards including National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, and an American Book Award. Her website is www.dianeglancy.com .

Diane Glancy's film Dome of Heaven Is an Authentic View of Great Plains Life, Both Cherokee and Anglo

A private showing of this terrific film Nov. 18, 2011 was a highlight of the American Literary Translators Association conference in Kansas City. Diane Glancy is best known for books of poetry and prose relating to her Cherokee heritage, and this film does continue her explication of contemporary American Indian concerns. Cherokee characters are central to the film, but also this film gives an authentic portrait of small town life on the Great Plains. The film (and novel) Winter’s Bone tells truth through fiction regarding the Ozarks, and Cedar Rapids portrays upper Midwest life. Dome of Heaven has equal authenticity and quality. Glancy, who lives in Kansas City, was not present because she was attending the Los Angeles Skins Film Festival to present the film.

Small Great Plains towns often include Native populations as well as descendants of European settlers. I grew up in small town Kansas grasslands, not far geographically nor culturally from Vici, Oklahoma, the setting, in a family of mixed backgrounds. The film is shot on location, and local people participated as actors, extras, and musicians. I recognized the café, school, court, church and bar, and always the sky. The film is based on Glancy’s book Flutie, about her experiences as a visiting writer in Vici public schools. She wrote a script from the book at a Sundance Native American Screenwriting workshop. For more on the making of the film, see Glancy’s website www.dianeglancy.com.

The story revolves around a Cherokee veteran (Wes Studi, a subtle and strong performance) of World War II and his German war bride (Sylvia Kofler, a Kansas City writer and perfect fit). Their two children are Flutie (Thirza Defoe) and Franklin (Noah Watts). Franklin works with his father in a local garage as an apprentice mechanic; although he is bright, he has dropped out of high school. His sister Flutie wants to go to college, but she is morbidly afraid of speaking in front of people. She must overcome this phobia in order to pass high school and attend college. There are romances, arguments, tragedies, two marriages (Franklin's) and hope. The Greek myth of Philomela is another layer of the plotline. Well placed ambient shots of the area, including Southwest Oklahoma State campus, create the sense of the land being a character as well.

I viewed the film with a group of academics—people whose critical faculties are sharpened by decades of grading student papers and critiquing literature. Not an easy audience. Yet there was not a dry eye by the end of the movie. I heard others comment about the  well crafted dialogue, the use of silence as counterpoint to the panoramic views of the plains, the acting, the pacing, the musical score, and more. Country western is on most radio stations in that region, and the Randall family of Vici has listened well. Their ballads complement the script. Through a Looking Glass of Lawrence, Kansa, filmed and edited the movie, and their skill is apparent. I appreciated seeing the film with outsiders, because I was lost in the film’s verisimilitude. Dome of Heaven especially captures the humor. Glancy incorporates the overlapping Cherokee and rural humor, which is understated, self-deprecating, instructive, and inventive. A neighbor sees the father Mr. Moses driving a tractor down a road followed by a ten-year-old driving a truck (early driving is commonplace), but the kid’s head cannot be seen. The neighbor deduces that Mr. Moses is training the truck to follow. One of Flutie’s suitors creeps into her bedroom late after a night of drinking beer at the Cedar Shack. His hasty morning retreat, under the eyes of father and brother, is a classic.

Glancy brings skills of a trained writer to her script. After receive a graduate degree at the University of Iowa, she has published about 30 books of fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose, and drama. Among her awards are two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, an American Book Award, and the 2011 Best Native American Film at the Trail Dance Independent Film Festival (Duncan, Oklahoma). Her most recent poetry is Stories from the Driven World (Mammoth 2010). A new collection of nonfiction, The Dream of a Broken Field (University of Nebraska Press 2011). For a clip, see:
http://www.laskinsfest.com/films/dome.heaven