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Biographical note: James Mackay is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the European University Cyprus. His research interests are in Native American literature, the impact of new technologies on literary study, and the interface between evolutionary science and the humanities. He has previously published articles on Gerald Vizenor, E. Pauline Johnson, and the implications of evolutionary psychology for literary theory.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714285
ISBN: 9781844714285
Author: James Mackay
Title: The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy
Series: Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CSBH
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Feb-10
Extent: 220pp
Height: 228 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight: 330 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 14.99
Price: USD 21.95
Rights: World
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description/annotation: Diane Glancy is one of the greatest modern Native American writers: this companion provides various readings of her work. Also included are an interview with Glancy herself and a bibliography. This volume will therefore serve as introduction to Glancy for newcomers and in-depth look for those familiar with her work.
Main description: Diane Glancy is one of the outstanding Native American authors of modern times. Working in multiple genres – poetry, novel, theatre and nonfiction – she has created a vast, ceaselessly provocative oeuvre (more than 35 volumes) and an instantly recognizable voice. Her subject matter is astonishingly diverse, encompassing everything from the Cherokee Trail of Tears to the New Testament character of Dorcas, from the lives of small-town Midwestern women to the joys of classic automobiles, from grade school maskmaking to the recuperation of personal heritage in the archives.
The essays in this groundbreaking volume represent the first attempt to systematically survey this challenging writer. Ten outstanding scholars approach her work, mapping out controversies and providing readers of Glancy with various contexts and comparisons through which to understand her ideas. These chapters take a variety of ideological and methodological positions (feminist, Christian, postcolonial, literary-nationalist and more), the better to draw out the complexities of a writer whose work never lets the reader come to easy conclusions.
Also included are an original interview with Glancy herself, a survey of previous criticism and a bibliography of her writings. This volume will therefore serve equally well as an introduction to Glancy for newcomers and as an in-depth survey for people already familiar with her work.
The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy is part of a unique series of companion volumes to Native American poets. Previous subjects include Carter Revard and Jim Barnes.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
James Mackay: Introduction: Red State Poet
Chadwick Allen: Esther in the Throne Room, Zaccheus
in the Tree (Sequoyah in His Cabin): Diane Glancy’s Voice Between
Polina Mackay: Highway to Home: Diane Glancy’s Travel Poems
Jerry Harp: Claiming Faith: Border-Crossing – Theology in the Writing of Diane Glancy
Molly McGlennen: Diane Glancy’s Creative/Critical Poetics
John Wilson: Ghosting: The Possibility of a Rewritten Life
Helen May Dennis: Diane Glancy’s Flutie: Living on the Edge of Enormous Quiet
Karsten Fitz: Employing the Strategy of Transculturation: Colonial Migration and Postcolonial Interpretation in Pushing the Bear
Crystal Alberts: In the Talking Leaves: Diane Glancy’s Reclamation of Voice and Archive
Birgit Däwes: “Fox-trot With Me, Baby”: Diane Glancy’s Dramatic Work
A. Robert Lee: Whole Parts: Scripting Diane Glancy’s Short Fiction
James Mackay: “That Awkwardness is Important”: An Interview with Diane Glancy
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index View excerpt as PDF:
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Excerpt from book:
Introduction: Red State Poet
James Mackay
“. . . drawing her and all her multitudes” (Ezekiel 32:20).
With immense skill and moral courage, Diane Glancy has crafted an instantly recognizable poetic voice on what might strike others as the stoniest of ground. Working across genres including poetry, novel, autobiography, spiritual meditation, short story, theater and the essay, often fracturing and merging these to form new, unstable hybrid forms, her drive to express a perspective that is both difficult and unfashionable has remained consistent. This is all the more remarkable considering the sheer volume of her oeuvre: thirty five books, published at a rate of almost two books a year since the late 1980’s (though she has been writing all her life). To get to grips with a writer who is both so prolific and so restlessly experimental is no easy task, but it is all the more daunting when one takes into account her commitment to tropes of paradox, fracture, and immiscible moral forces.
Consider, for example, the question of her identification as Cherokee, based on a great-grandfather, Woods Lewis, who left the nation of his own volition and whose grandchild, Glancy’s father, seems to have been uninterested in preserving (or unwilling to preserve) their tribal traditions. Glancy herself, for all her intense identification with this recovered heritage, remains unenrolled: as she puts it in Firesticks (1993), she is “not a card-carrying Indian. Not a card-carrying white either [. . .] Yipes” (14). This marginal identity has been the source of some controversy. At least one Native playwright has been happy to imply in print that she does not have the right to call herself Indian, and it is possible to distinguish the same accusation, more politely veiled, in other critiques and reviews of her work.1 Far less remarked on is the honesty with which Glancy herself confronts this question. There are, after all, plenty of other self-identified Native American writers and academics who emerged at around the same time as Glancy began publishing in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s whose Indian “credentials” are as tenuous, especially if the primary question is one of upbringing within tribal tradition rather than the extremely problematic question of racial heritage, or pure bloodline. Yet while many such writers’ work is filled with certainty and proclamation, Glancy takes it upon herself to question and self-question, to represent the marginal of the marginal, those whose uncertain trace of Native heritage, while not such as to fall within the strict legal requirements of the 1990 Indian Arts & Crafts Act, nonetheless marks their understanding of the world.
Consider in this context her willingness to enter territory on which few other Native American writers have chosen (or dared?) to tread, in writing novels that animate not only the present-day experience but also the historical experiences of Native American peoples. Pushing the Bear (1996), the most taught though in some ways the least typical of her books, takes the Faulknerian technique of multiple narrators and uses it to animate that most difficult of Cherokee narratives, the Trail of Tears. Following the ordinary Cherokees uprooted from their houses and farms and forced into a thousand-mile trek, Glancy sets the old religion against the missionaries, the leaders against the lead, the white soldiers against the Indian men (refusing easy stereotyping of either), and, most memorably, husband against wife to bring home the microcosmic effects of these vast historical forces. Stone Heart (2004), tries to find space for the real Sacajawea, neither the ignored and patronized figure of Lewis and Clark’s diaries nor the schmaltzy figure of modern myth, and creates a space for an exhausted, frequently ill woman with no knowledge of the places to which the expedition goes. A different technique emerges from The Dance Partner (2005), which considers the Ghost Dance in the (retold) words of its participants and obliquely comments on them in stories of insane asylums and historical rapes. Two more novels, promised for 2009, will, respectively, continue with the characters of Pushing the Bear in Resettlement, and retell the story of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint. With these novels Glancy stakes a claim as one of the few to dare to not only research but to re-imagine the unimaginable experience of contact and conquest.
Consider, too, the other all-important thread running through her work, that of Christian faith, in its most evangelical form. Glancy clearly carries the imprint of a personal revelation, perhaps akin to that afforded her protagonist Hadley Williges in Fuller Man (1999):
Was it just a brush fire burning windbreaks leaving us open to the elements being dust we would recognize our pitiful state and accept Christ and be jerked out of this poke-town small backwater where waves ate us and what was left was served on plates to our parents to take apart the rest with their teeth and I was petrified I would do the same to my children and lived far down in the basement of myself and would not let it out.
In the pounding of my head Christ put his foot on the neck of that fear and broke it until it was paralyzed never to rise but waiting my redemption after death when it would be jerked out at the end of the long tunnel. (174-75, italics in original)
Breaking the neck of fear, breaking the neck of self-willed silence, escaping from some form of oppressive atmosphere, seems to be near the core of the author’s faith. Yet, again, she does not choose the easiest path. One collection of poetry is titled (Ado)ration (1999) and that seems absolutely right: the joy and bliss of adoration is strictly rationed in Glancy’s world, which is notably more at ease in the harsh world of the Old Testament than it is with the Gospels, more fascinated with the prophets and the Crucifixion than with the minutiae of Leviticus (for this reason I have chosen the epigram for this introduction from Ezekiel: Glancy would no doubt enjoy the irony of the context). The blood of Christ, not necessarily the teachings of Christ. This can lead to challenges and confrontations within her work, especially given her engagement with Native American history. One thinks of the problematic, self-problematizing essay “The Bible and Black Elk Speaks” in The Cold-and-Hunger Dance (1998, 37-48), where she explicitly describes Black Elk as a new prophet and excoriates Native Americans who have not listened to his message. Or the harsh moment in Claiming Breath (1992), in a chapter entitled “A Confession or Apology for Christian Faith” where she declares that “the sacred hoop of the Indian nation was broken because it wasn’t the sacred hoop of God” (97). And yet alongside these it is also necessary to think of the sudden connection she feels in her essay “Sun Dance,” connecting “as the holy men pushed the skewers under their skin” (Cold-and-Hunger 29), or of the recognition of the crimes carried out by Christians against Native children in The Dance Partner, where the nun “never asked what caused our welts and bruises” (76).
Unpublished endorsement : This is an outstanding, necessary project to recognize an important Native American author. Gerald Vizenor Unpublished endorsement: Diane Glancy oversees the traces of ancient memories and a native sense of presence in her marvelous poetry. She creates the heart of natural motion in every imagic scene and tease of perception. Glancy clearly reveals in her poetry and prose a remarkable literary practice of proper praise for the contradictions of history. Gerald Vizenor, author of Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Unpublished endorsement: The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy brings together an impressive range of critical perspectives to the diverse content and contexts of Glancy's prolific, provocative, and sometimes controversial body of work. Daniel Heath Justice, author of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History |
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