AWP IN SEATTLE: PACK YOUR UMBRELLA

Note: I can't promise you Seattle will look anything like this photo; the PNW in March is, in general, not a pretty place.  But just IMAGINE this scene as you pack umbrella and boots and raincoat.  

Seems like I just returned from a trip out West ... but on Wednesday I'll turn back around and do it again.  Some weeks are like that.  This trip takes me back to one of my homes, however, and I'm looking forward to seeing not just many amazing poets and writers, but my two grown children and my grandbaby, Turtle!  

Tamiko Nimura, a writerly friend who lives in Tacoma (about 35 miles south of Seattle), has written a TERRIFIC blog post called "An AWP14 Welcome Mat: Eating, Writing, Reading in Seattle" that covers all those bases and more.  Check it out - it will save you enormous amounts of time sifting through restaurants and bookstores and more.

The entire AWP schedule is available online (follow the link) as is a schedule of most (not all) off-site events.  Author signings, too, have their own schedule (I will most likely do a signing for Heyday Books, their first time at AWP! and will post the time and place here when I know what it is).  If you use twitter, my handle is @badndns.

For those of you attending AWP in beautiful downtown Seattle later this week, here are the two panels I am on, and one off-site reading:

Thursday, February 27, 2014

3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

R240. The DIY Book Tour: Take Your Show on the Road

Room 615/616/617, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

(Ron Tanner, Jessica Anya Blau, Deborah Miranda, William Trowbridge, Benjamin Busch)

How can we find readers for our books? Most writers now live only online, through social media and blogs.  Recently some writers have taken to the road in innovative and enterprising ways and found new readers and expanded their networks as they could not have online. These writers, representing both small and large presses, first-book and multibook authors, will share their road stories, tips, and insights about how best to take your show on the road and maximize the potential of your book.

Friday, February 28, 2014

3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

F262. Weaving Stories from Strands of Truth: Native Writers on Nonfiction

Room 202, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 2

(Elissa Washuta, Debra Magpie Earling, Deborah Miranda, Ernestine Hayes)

Many Native American writers are currently working within the genres of poetry and fiction; fewer writers work in nonfiction. This panel considers the complicated history of Native self-telling alongside contemporary memoir, essay, and other forms in order to examine where nonfiction is situated among the recently published literary works by Native writers. The history of Euro-American influence on the oral storytelling tradition creates a distinct set of issues within Native nonfiction.

OFF-SITE on FRIDAY 2/28:

QUEERTOPIA 2-Part 2

Barnes & Noble, Pacific Place, 600 Pine St Suite 107, Seattle, WA 98101

Cost: Free

Url: http://www.storiesandqueer.org

The second of two QUEERTOPIA events at AWP. This year S&Q is proud to present QUEERTOPIA 2: a reading by LGBTQ poets & writers. The event at Barnes & Noble just steps away from the conference hotel will include 12 poets & writers in 120 minutes.

Also, my steady AWP roomie, Linda Hogan, has a session:

S276 Rounding the Human Corners: Writing the Truth about the Changing World

Room 613/614, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6 
Saturday, March 1, 2014
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Straddling mass extinctions and shifting ecosystems, how do we write about the more-than-human in a way that avoids simple metaphor? And how do we write of degradation and extinction in language that engages the (human) reader and remains truthful to these “other nations?” Discussing a diversity of approaches are five authors of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about horses, wolves, birch trees, killer whales, polar bears—the depth and range of the world just beyond our human skin.

See you there!

THE BAD INDIANS WINTER TERM SKYPE TOUR!

I'VE FINALLY DISCOVERED HOW TO BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE

I love visiting with students who are reading my book; the energy, questions, and stories exchanged on both sides is exhilarating and inspirational.  However, as a professor myself, I realize there is little time in the academic calendar for scheduling an author visit, not to mention all the expenses (airfare, hotel, meals, honorarium) involved.  So, I've adopted a grand idea:  If you are teaching Bad Indians and would like to schedule a Skype visit with me, and if you can arrange a nominal honorarium, now's the time to get your date on my calendar. To get a plan started, email me at mirandad@wlu.edu and I'll get back to you promptly.

In October, I skyped with David Carlson's class at Cal State University, San Bernadino.  We had a fabulous time!

IDEAS FOR A SKYPE VISIT:

Decide what kind of Skype visit you want: Q &A?  Writing workshop? Discussion of a particular piece from Bad Indians (or another book)?  Part reading from my work, part Q&A?  Let me know the general course curriculum ahead of time, too, so that I have time to plan what will work best for your particular focus.  For example, if you are coming from Women and Gender Studies perspective, I'll choose different material than if you are coming from a Creative Writing perspective.

Given your current group of students and classroom situation, think about where you will position the monitor where the students will see me; try to keep me at their eye level.  During Q&A, think about having someone responsible for turning the monitor/camera eye toward the student speaking, so I can see that student - or, have students with questions walk up to a particular spot within my range.

Visiting with a "talking head" can be impersonal on both sides; I love having your students introduce themselves to me before they ask a question.  Just a quick, "Hi, I'm Jessica" is fine, but more is great if they feel like letting me know their background or fields of interest.

Ahead of time, give the students my blog URL and encourage them to explore past posts, my bio, tribal website, and so on.  I think it helps them feel a little less shy and may help generate questions and conversation.

HONORARIUM?  

One hour Skype visit to a university classroom:  $300.

One hour Skype visit to your book group:  $150

One hour Skype visit to a Native community college, university or high school: free (seeing Native faces makes my day!)

One hour Skype visit to a high school:  free (but I do love thank-you notes, or copies of any interesting projects like a video book promo, a performance of a poem or story)!

MY TEACHING SCHEDULE WINTER TERM:

For your scheduling plans, please know that I am definitely not available during these times January through April 4 (there are, of course, the usual committee and department meetings, office hours and conferencing to work around, but these are the absolutely inflexible times - please keep in mind that I am in Virginia, and on east coast time):

M and W, 2:30-3:55
T and TH, 10:10 - 2:50

So as we approach the New Year, I'll make my toast to technology, and how it allows us to meet, talk, question, and exchange ideas despite obstacles of distance, time and funding.  Looking forward to hearing from you, and thank you again for the warm, loving support of my work.

Deborah

“In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus came to massacre you" (or, Why Storytelling is Still Important, and learning to Analyze stories is even MORE important)

--> What?!
 

It’s tempting to post and re-post all the wonderful anti-Columbus memes going around the internet today.  Columbus with a big bloody “X” scrawled across his face.  Cartoon Indians on the shore watching the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria looming on the horizon, saying to each other, “They better have their documents! No illegal immigrants here!” and so on.

But when I walked in to my office this morning, all I could see was this poster.

I found it in a local antique shop years ago, but never had the guts to hang it in my office until this year (maybe being a full professor has something to do with that).  After all, I teach first years; what would they think, walking into Professor Miranda’s office for the first time and seeing a full-blown massacre of whites by savage Indians?  Any chance of them taking Native Lit with me somewhere down the line would probably go straight down the tubes, I figured.

Now, I’m not so sure.  I’m not so sure first years would run screaming from the room (no one has yet, but more on that later), and I’m not so sure I don’t want to have a conversation with any of my students about this incredible poster.

For one thing, most students never seem to actually catch on that a massacre is happening at all.  They see the Holy Fathers rising beneath the IHS starburst (first three letters of the Greek name for Jesus Christ, which the Latin Church has traditionally rendered IHS as Iesus Hominum Salvator) surrounded by blond-haired, blue-eyed angels, and seem strangely comforted.  

 

True, the “massacre” (and by now I hope you realize I’m using this word sarcastically) is at the bottom of the frame, and much darker, both in coloring and in tone.  Easy to miss, to mistake as just foundational mass, nothing important.

If my students looked more closely, they would see these images:

A wooded settlement out in the wilderness.  Log cabins.  A beautiful lake.  And angry, nearly-naked, tomahawk-or-club wielding Indians cracking Catholic priests’ skulls open, burning one priest at the stake (with a handy iron kettle nearby, presumably to make Priest Stew afterwards).  Across the lake, more Indians set fire to what looks like a primitive church, with another Priest standing outside, arms outstretched, beseeching heavenly intervention.

Funny how we are in the fifth week of the semester and not one of my students, first year or otherwise, has noticed the juxtaposition of these two scenes, or at least, never commented on them.  Maybe my students are more concerned about the difference between a skeleton outline and a rough draft.  Maybe they think, Professor Miranda is REALLY religious!  Maybe sitting next to this poster, framed on my office wall, makes absolutely no impression on them at all.  Yet these same students comment on other artwork in the office – a student broadside of “Ironing After Midnight,” a Seafair Indian Days Pow Wow poster, the photo of Robert Latham Owens, first (and only) Native to graduate from Washington and Lee (Valedictorian, 1877; Law Degree, 1908), my collection of chapbooks and handmade books and so on.  Even the actual steel shovel with Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging,” hand-lettered on it by a creative student, which is tucked away in relative obscurity, gets an appreciative nod now and then.

Why not this picture?

I warn my students that if they aren’t uncomfortable or disturbed by the materials we cover in my class, I’m not doing my job.  In fact, it is my job to bring this material to their attention, help them engage with it, learn how to read it in multiple ways, and figure out the significance of both the material and their discomfort.  Over the past 13 years I’ve been teaching at universities, student evaluations have raked me over the coals for this, but they have also thanked me.  At this point, the “thanks” are beginning to weigh in a little more.  I must be getting better about being, as one student accused me, “A Native American Feminist!”

Oh, besmirch my name!  I love it!

So on Columbus Day, I am looking at this poster with new eyes.  I am trying to see why the righteous resistance of Native peoples to colonial and religious invasion is so hard to take.  I am trying to see why fighting back against a terrorism that was grounded in greed, racism and fear is so damn hard for people to recognize as resistance, rather than “massacre” by “savages.” 

Surely, the way 2/3rds of the poster is taken up by the priests being elevated to sainthood – all that light and glory, angels and rays of heavenly beneficence – has something to do with this unusual blockage of vision.  Whoever painted this poster – and I don’t know the origins or artist – knew what they were doing.  They were telling a story we all know by heart.  In short, the poster is meant to serve as a visual metaphor: the colonizers as goodness, rising above the savages even when the savages seem most likely to resist, and crushing that resistance with the sheer weight of a story told over and over again in the dominant voice, using all of the power gained by believing in that story, no matter how false.  No matter how self-serving.

The poster tells a story full of heroics, sacrifice, and lies.  My job is to point out the holes in this story.  Starting with this one:  resistance to terrorism is not a massacre.  Innocence is not always represented by the guy in the white hat - or, in this case, the halo.  And anger is not always a bad response to injustice. 

Once again this year, I will post anti-Columbus memes on my FaceBook page.  Once again, I’ll lose “friends” or get comments like “get OVER it already!” from people who consider themselves otherwise sane human beings. 

I’ll deal with it all.  Just more “microaggressions” to fuel my Bad Indian engine.

But this year, I’m going to look over at the poster next to my desk, and smile.  They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I say, resistance is in the voice of the storyteller.  

Hello, my name is Deborah Miranda.  I'm not just a storyteller.  Counter-narrative is my game, and if you send your children to the university where I teach, they will not emerge unscathed.  Beware.  Critical thinking happens here.

BAD INDIANS IN THE WORLD

-->

L to R:  Andy Smith, me, Dian's book, Dian Million, Jennifer Denetdale after Dian's book panel at Critical Ethnic Studies Association conference in Chicago, 2013

Hard to say goodbye to friends at the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference here in Chicago, but good to be heading home. 

So much to process.  So much work to do.  So many good human beings out there doing it!

Throughout the last few days, I have talked to many people who are teaching Bad Indians right now, all over the country. 

Pause.

Did I just write that?  yes, I did.  People are teaching  Bad Indians in universities around this country, and in Canada. 

Pause again, while the skeletons in museums get up and dance.

Hearing from these professors, what they see happening in the book on both literary and theoretical levels, responses from students, is heartening, exciting.  I’m so proud of those Ancestors whose stories are being told, whose actions and words are changing colonial mythologies and re-writing histories and taking root in a new generation.  Thank you, colleagues, for trusting this book to be included in your classrooms.

And along with the news from classrooms, something that I did not anticipate: the problematics of being an Indian professor who has survived violence but now must teach about it.  Teaching the book is often a trigger, particularly for women.

Of course it is.  But I could not see this until Jennifer Denetdale brought it to my attention.  I had completely denied this possible and quite reasonable reaction in all of my imaginings about Bad Indians in the world.

I worried about critics.  I worried about student reaction to having their knowledge about history and the U.S. Government being mercilessly challenged.  I worried about family responses.  I worried about Catholic Natives for whom the book might seem sacrilegious or disrespectful.  But curiously (especially as a Native woman who has survived violence and sexual violation), it never crossed my mind to worry about something that now seems obvious: It is hard enough for Native professors to claim authority in the classroom, for many reasons; who wants, on top of that, to feel vulnerable and fragile, in front of one's students? to cry in front of them, or to get angry?

And yet, as Jennifer repeatedly told me, the book must be taught.

In many conversations over the past few days, my colleagues and I faced this dilemma head on, with an honesty and passion and frustration that I can only appreciate and thank them for giving me.  We’ve decided to talk more about it, via email, and perhaps plan a pedagogy panel about teaching texts in which violence (especially against women and children) is portrayed and demands an intimacy from us in order to be discussed with students. 

There is, it seems, something about Bad Indians that brings old memories to the surface in a way that violence portrayed in fiction or even autobiographical poetry does not, particularly for Indian women.  I am still sitting with this knowledge and information, and it will take a long time for me to unpack my own feelings about this.  My initial response was horror.  And shock.  And forehead-smacking:  my own response to trauma has always been to internalize it, compartmentalize it into writing, where I am in control, where I decide what gets said or unsaid, written or unwritten – or at least, I can pretend I control that (as I’ve said before, writers often have no idea what we are unleashing from our depths until the words are already out there - and sometimes, this is a way of protecting ourselves from even more trauma).  I honestly feel horrified that I have “done” this to my colleagues, to the dear and brilliant Indian women teaching this book.  What kind of person would do that? 

Here I am, caught between being an author, and a loving community member.

But the book had to be written, and those stories had to be told, and as my colleagues at CESA have told me, they want to teach them.  They just feel unprepared for the way it hits them in the middle of the gut, in the middle of the classroom.

We need to talk about this.  And we did, and we will continue that conversation via email and phone and skype.  We have thrown some ideas around: a panel about the pedagogical aspects of teaching about violence that hits home.  Sharing techniques.  How to teach our truths brilliantly and yet not forget self-care.  How, as Dian Million says her new book Therapeutic Nations which we celebrated at the conference, not to get trapped in “the place where Indigenous women are posed as the abject victimized subjects of our present neoliberal states.”  How to walk into our classrooms in our Indian bodies claiming our experiences fully, and teach the truth about violence in our communities without being swallowed up by grief or casting a false, pathetic image of what survival looks like. 

This is a fierce charge.

I think I’m glad that Bad Indians is a good place to start this conversation. That little hesitation in my voice exists because it seems, in some ways, a frightening place to be, to have positioned myself.  And yet, as always, I am sure about the ways the Ancestors are guiding me.  I feel sure that I am feeling my way along this path in ways that, as I said during our panel on Sovereign Erotics, are reaching toward balance and away from fear.  It’s a felt knowledge, as Million says: something not always honored by others as real knowledge.

My first task is to finish reading Therapeutic Nations.  And then, I am certain, entering into a conversation with other Native professors and scholars that will change and clarify and re-charge how we do what it is we do.

POSTCARD PROJECT #30: "I Dream of a Red Bird"

POSTCARD # 8: "WIDE-OPEN" (CALAMITY JANE)

Dug this postcard out of my office mess as I unpack from yet another move.  Calamity Jane spent all of last year on my bulletin board next to my desk.  It's time she got back on that train and headed out for a stiff drink and a few dancing girls!

AUGUST POSTCARD POETRY PROJECT

Deceptively simple:  one poem, on one postcard, mailed to one person per day for the month of August: THE AUGUST POSTCARD POETRY FESTIVAL.

Yep, I'm already two days behind.  It's my first time, okay?!

So here are the first three postcards/poems for August 1, 2 and 3.  Although I typed and taped the poems to the postcard (handwritten is supposedly the pure form), and that's technically a cheat, I DID in fact compose them each in under five minutes and they are what they are (until someday I go back and either revise or put them out of their misery).

Obviously, I need to up my postcard collection FAST.  I mean, I had to fall back on Painted Cats and Smithsonian Indians!  'nuff said.  I also blurred out the recipient's names/addresses.  Although the list is public, they might not appreciate over-publication of their mailing addresses.

Stay tuned for my daily postcard.  If you really love me, send some unique (unused) postcards my way.  Perhaps you'll see them here, with poem attached!

AUGUST 1/FRONT

AUGUST 1/BACK

AUGUST 2/FRONT

AUGUST 2/BACK

AUGUST 3/FRONT

AUGUST 3/BACK

Trash

-->

When I was a kid growing up in a trailer park in rural Western Washington State, some of the best days were when my step-dad made a dump run.  Cedar View Trailer Park didn’t provide garbage pick-up, so we took our trash to the dump every week or so.  This dump was old-school: no limits, no guidelines, just back your pick-up truck to the edge - or in my step-dad Tom's case, his light yellow Eldorado pick-up - and heave-ho. (Yes, I know it seems odd that we'd have a Cadillac Eldorado yet live in a trailer; my step-father had a series of interesting cars acquired through poker games, barter, debts collected; like the amphibious car we took to Westport so he could drive it into the water and watch onlookers gasp as he flipped switches and turned it into a functional boat.  The effect was ruined, however, when the amphibious car stalled out and the Coast Guard had to tow my step-dad and his pals back into port.  We also had a huge brown boat that we dubbed "the Ark" sitting in our yard for a few years that we joked would come in handy if the rain failed to stop come July.)

The way my step-dad *imagined* his Westport debut with the "Amphicar."

What I liked about dump runs with my step-dad was that Tommy was a born scrounger, one of those guys who could make something out of anything, or sell it to someone who could.  When I got older, I wondered if Tom, from Minnesota, was Anishinabe or Lakota.  But my sister Annette DeLeonard told me once that she’d heard Tom was a Traveler, a gypsy.  He was very dark, as dark as my real dad, with similar dimples and wavy black hair, dark brown eyes - handsome in a slick way, and charming.  He never seemed to have an actual profession; he drove semi-trucks, towed and repaired trailers, traded, bought and sold just about anything, and always seemed to have a dozen "jobs" on the line at once.  He was the kind of guy who drove vehicles he’d bartered for down our little county roads with grace and style, a cigarette in one hand and a Coke can full of beer in the other.  

Me and Tom: fishing trip.  He'd gotten this little tear-drop trailer in trade somewhere.

Once he had a job towing trailers across the border from Washington State into Canada; he took my brother Kacey and me with him a few times (I had my first taste of deep-fried prawns at a little café along the way and decided this was absolute gourmet food) until our mom figured out that Tom wasn’t so much transporting trailers as smuggling something IN those trailers, and Kacey and I were along as innocent distractions for the border patrol.  I guess nowadays, you'd call my step-dad a con artist. 

Rare photo of Tom, circa 1970?

Anyways, I loved Tommy.  He was invariably sweet and kind to me, telling me I was “smarter than the average bear” and bringing home candy or pocket change for me.  He wasn’t exactly attentive, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and he was generous to a fault.  On dump runs, while he checked out potential scrounge-worthy trash, he'd let me rummage through the toys that had been thrown away to see if anything appealed to me.  I know, right? Letting your 6 or 7 year old paw through a garbage dump?!  A kid's dream.  I always found something - a naked doll, a teddy bear, a chalkboard, a book or encyclopedia, some used watercolor paints in a cool box. 

One day I found a doll about a foot tall, completely made of purple velvet fabric, with a real horsetail for hair.  I learned how to braid hair on that doll, but that's another story with an ending I don’t want to tell.

I'm thinking fondly of those dump runs with Tom because today is Father's Day, and as I gave a friend a ride back to her apartment, we passed a dumpster outside a large apartment complex.  There, abandoned on the asphalt, was a beautiful wooden dresser, and we could see all the drawers for it just flung into the trash.  Well, I had to look, didn't I?  Luckily my friend was just as curious and gorgeously uninhibited.  So we parked, got out, and looked into the dumpster.  UNBELIEVABLE! we said to each other: there's an entire apartment in there! 

We started with the brand new soccerball, for my friend's grandson.  Then we began seeing the really good stuff:  a whole bag of kitchen cooking utensils, top-quality, even some fancy knives still in their sheathes.  Baking dishes and pots and pans, glasses miraculously unbroken.  Unopened household cleaners.  A brand-new umbrella.  An ironing board.  A hand-pieced quilt, for heaven’s sake!  “I’ll bet he broke his grandma’s heart when he threw THAT out,” my friend said.  We figured it was a student, tossing out his apartment before leaving town; or, a property manager stuck with emptying a student’s apartment.  Either way, this stuff was primo scrounge.  We couldn’t believe no one had taken this to Habitat for Humanity, or called the Good Will, or even – as good manners around these parts dictate – just set it all outside the dumpster for easy pickings.  I mean, computer speakers?  Come ON!

“You know what the best part is?”  my friend asked me rhetorically as I balanced one of the dresser drawers on end so she could step up and lean over into the bottom of the dumpster.  “The best part is, you think this is fun too.  Thank you so much!  My daughter can use ALL of this stuff!”

It crossed my mind then that perhaps a newly-minted Full Professor shouldn’t be dumpster diving, at least not in her own university town.  It crossed my mind that you can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl.  And it crossed my mind that for five years, while my real father was in San Quentin far away, I had a daddy who taught me a thing or two about surviving at the bottom of the economic graph.  And not just surviving, but rising to levels of resourcefulness, creativity, and artistry that allowed me to become the woman I am now.  Yes, I am a professor of English.  And yes, I still love a good dumpster dive now and then: something there is about perfectly good household materials tossed out as trash that drives me absolutely fucking nuts. 

No, I am no longer that needy kid whose family lived by the “skin of our teeth,” as my mom used to say, but I know so many people who do – my friend, her daughter, her grandchildren, all trying to live on incomes that qualify them for food stamps, TANF, WIC and the food pantry.  No, I have no shame about dipping into that dumpster for that family, for the children who will be so delighted with that ball, for the mother who will wash those blankets and treasure that hand-made quilt and be grateful for a lamp in the bedroom.

And yes, though he was only in my life for five years, and things didn’t end well between Tom and my mother, and even though he died of a terrible cancer soon afterwards, that travelin’ man left his mark on me.  Thanks, Tommy.  Thanks for the practical application of survival skills you taught me.  I'll never know if you were Indian or Gypsy or any other ethnic combination.  But I do know that you were a kind man who saw opportunity everywhere.  I like to think some of that determination rubbed off on me, just a little bit.  One man's trash, you used to say, with a grin.  One man's trash.