Photo by Lee Towndrow, courtesy of Little, Brown
Open the cover of the 10th-anniversary edition of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and you're staring at a flyleaf that reads: I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just highly INTELLIGENT.
When Part-Time Indian came out in 2007, it won a National Book Award; enraged throngs of neo-Puritans, who sought to ban it; and most importantly, created a new generation of book-kissers. While it could only win the National Book Award once, it's still charming young readers (and...shhh...grown-up ones) as well as sending repressed, uptight folks into apoplectic fits. (About a half-dozen attempts to ban it have been made in 2017 alone). This year, that classic YA novel found its adult counterpart in Alexie's memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which recounts Alexie's complicated relationship with his mom, Lillian. Moving back and forth between poetry and prose, it shimmers with the same humor, crafty storytelling and weird lyricism of Part-Time Indian, telling some of the same stories, but on a larger canvas and in starker tones.
Earlier this summer, Alexie took a break from the book tour for that memoir, overwhelmed with grief and feeling haunted by his mother. After several weeks of reading, writing, couch-napping and basketball—and deciding not to read from the memoir, with the exception of two final events—he's back on the road. He's also headed to St. Louis for the first-ever Bookfest (where there will be more than a few book-kissers). A joint project of Left Bank Books and the Central West End Community Improvement District, Bookfest aims to be a sort of LouFest of books, bringing together the best national, regional, and local writers.
Alexie is serving as keynote guy on September 22 with An Evening With Sherman Alexie at the Sheldon Concert Hall; he'll also appear as part of a YA panel with Zac Brewer and Nina LaCour on Saturday. We talked to him about the 10th-anniversary edition of Part-Time Indian, the new memoir, movies, feminism, music, political resistance, and the next wave of Native fiction writers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to start with Bookfest, and the event at The Sheldon—you’re known more as a performer, rather than a guy who just stands there reading from a book. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to readings?
I suppose you’d call it a combination of a literary reading, dramatic monologue, and stand-up comedy.
Will the focus be on the 10-year-reissue of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, or the memoir, or both?
It’ll probably be a blend. One is a fictional version of what really happened. I’ll be talking about both, and probably talking about how they inform each other; I’ll probably get college literary professor-y as well.
With the YA panel the next day—you’ve talked a lot about how your books are written for “the weird, brown kid,” and how The Snowy Day was such an important book for you when you were young. I’m guessing that'll be part of the conversation?
Yes. About diverse books, and having diverse characters, and appealing to diverse audiences is going to be a part of it. People have been working hard to bring more diversity into kids’ literature, but it’s still very, very, white. We still have to work on that, and that is going to take institutional change, not just change from authors, but from publishers.
So why is it that, despite evidence to the contrary, publishers don’t seem convinced that at the very least, this makes sense from a business perspective?
They are big machines. They’re big ships in the ocean, and it’s hard, and it takes a while for them to turn. It’s the same thing in Hollywood. They’re shocked when a movie with brown characters, or a movie with all women, does well. Recently, that was Girls Trip, a movie with four Black women. It’s great—and they’re shocked! If it was any other kind of thing, there would be 10 movies next year with Black women casts. So, yeah. The arts industry is a big ship that takes a long, long time to change direction.
On that note, I wanted to talk about Thunder Boy, Jr., your book for younger kids, which came out last year and is definitely helping to turn that ship around. You’ve mentioned that as a poet, your initial thought it would be easy to write, but that it was a really tough project.
I do write poetry. But I write poetry for adults! [Laughs.] It’s writing age-appropriate poetry that isn’t condescending. That’s the tough part. I wrote the text, and then we went looking for an illustrator. Yuyi [Morales] brought her own ideas to it and actually expanded upon it. She used art that allowed me to rewrite texts, or even drop texts because she so re-interpreted what I had written. So it really is a true collaboration with her. She’s very much 50 percent the author of the book.
How did that compare to working Ellen Forney, the illustrator for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian?
I chose her; she’s a friend. We were working together from the very beginning, from the very first paragraph. About the first third, I dictated what to do. The next third was collaborative. And the last third was her alone. So, over the course of a couple of years, she really learned Junior.
And 10 years on, the book is still getting banned—
There were four or five challenges this year in the United States.
That’s so odd. It seems like such normal boyhood stuff, very innocent.
It’s so quaint in the era of the Internet. You want to keep this book from your kid, but then you hand them a cell phone with access to all the porn that ever has been. People are very selective in their censorship. [Laughs.] Yeah, so, it’s quaint, and I’m always baffled. There’s this mythology that’s been built up around the book too, among the people with censorious impulses. There are these webpages and websites that pick and choose quotes from the book. Once you do that, you can render the book down to four masturbation lines. It gives the impression the book is some sex-filled Porky’s movie, and it’s not. I’m amused by all of it. And all it ever has done is help sales. So please, repressed Americans...Ban me, ban me!
So does the new edition have changes, updates, new stuff?
There are no updates to the text itself, but we added an afterword that I wrote. There are photographs of me and my family. There’s an unpublished chapter of the unfinished sequel. There’s an introduction by Jacqueline Woodson. There’s a little essay by a teacher who’s taught the book for 10 years. There’s fan art. So it’s stuffed full of great things.
I found some of the book-report trailers kids had made from the book on YouTube, and they were wonderful. Which leads me to another question. Will there ever be a movie version of Part-Time Indian?
I’m writing the screenplay now. I’m working with the Donner Company and Temple Hill Productions. My producers have made the X-Men movies, Deadpool, the Twilight movies, the Fault in Our Stars…I’m working on it right now.
I think a lot of people will be really happy to hear that. Especially because a lot of adults have secret YA book habits, and I’m sure that the book has a wider fan base beyond the intended demographic. Why do you think so many adults read YA?
Plot. [Laughs.] YA tends to have a plot, and older adult books tend to have less plot. I think it’s that old-fashioned desire for old-fashioned storytelling.
Why is it that plots get so thin with adult novels? It’s almost like a plot is taboo.
Well, it’s not taboo. It’s just…young adult books are written with a definitive audience in mind. There’s a focus on an audience. With adult fiction, there’s not a specific audience in mind. There’s not. There are all sorts of ways to write a book. The big thing is that when we readers became readers when we fell in love with a book, we were kids. So, I think in reading young adult literature, all of us adults bring ourselves back to that moment when we first fell in love with reading. For me, it’s like listening to Heart—reading YA brings me back to that youth.
Do you listen to music when you write?
Oh, I have music on all the time when I’m working. Sometimes I make anticipatory soundtracks for the thing I’m working on. I imagine what the characters might be listening to. I make theme mixes. So, yeah, I’m very involved in creating music to write to.
I wanted to switch gears and talk about your new memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. I thought your wife’s metaphor of the quilt was really apt, with the mix of poetry and prose. Can you talk a little bit about the process of putting the manuscript together?
You know, a new image just popped into my head—you know what it was like? It was like being waist-deep in the ocean. And then the wave would come and it would smack you, and then you’d go underwater with it, and then you’d swim through it, and then there’d be a calm. The weight hitting me was when poetry would arrive. And the calm in-between waves was the prose. And the editing and the construction. So, it was periods of wild impulsivity…followed by calm editing. [Laughs.]
You’ve said that the relationships with the women in your life, and the feminine in general, changed profoundly because of the memoir. Can you talk a bit about that?
The big thing is I’d never really written about my mom. Not in fictional form, not in poems—she’s a very distant character in my previous work because I didn’t want to incur her wrath. I didn’t want to stir up the hornet’s nest of her heart. After she died, I was freed from that fear—I thought—but I guess I was able to write honestly about her. And in writing the book, I think my feelings about her because more complicated. I think when she was alive, my fear and doubt and pain and trauma involved in my relationship with her was everything. I was seeing very narrowly. In writing the memoir, I started to see more about her and started to empathize more with her. I think my growing empathy made me more feminist when looking at my mother.
But you also gave your sisters and your wife, these other women in the book, such an amazing rounded-out presence, not to mention a lot of the best lines. I’m not sure that’s always such a common thing with male writers.
Well, I am surrounded by very smart women! All I had to do was write down these amazing things they said. [Laughs.] I’m reminded of this screenwriting book that had advice for how to write a female character, or how to cast an actress: give them the lead role of the man. All the same lines, all the same complications. So putting women in the roles of every great male role of the past—like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. We men have it in us [laughs]. For you dipshit men who can’t do it on your own, write the lead character as a man, and then from the second draft on, make that lead character a woman. That series on Netflix, Glow, I don’t know if you’ve watched it, it starts out that way, with the lead character auditioning. She’s reading the role of the man, purposely, rather than the role of the woman. She’s being this dynamic, rowdy person in this audition. And you’re thinking, wow! That’s cool. And then you find out she’s actually in there to audition for the role of the secretary, who has two lines. It’s very much about gender. So it was no great, magical trick on my part. I just wrote down what the women in my life said to me. And they’re smart, dynamic, complicated people.
I’ve been seeing your poem, “Hymn,” a lot on Facebook over the past few weeks, after Charlottesville. This current political moment is not just weird, but it seems as precarious and scary and complicated as it’s ever been. How do you engage with that as an artist and a citizen?
For those of us opposed to Trump, from the moderate Republicans to the far left, this swath of Americans who are opposed to Trump, we’re all going to have our different strategies. And some of them will be more effective than others. Some of them are more complicated than others. But we all have to keep resisting in our way.
Like the folks down in the Bay Area that took their dogs down to the plaza where the white supremacists were going to be marching…
And filled up the park with poop? That was brilliant! That’s installation art. That was artistic. So, you do it with marching, you do it with lawyers, you do it with protests, you do it with art, you do it with comedy, you do it with drama, you do it with mockery, you do it with emotional pleas…every possible permutation of resistance is how we do it. A universal approach to it. And things are not worse than they’ve ever been—part of the energy in this, you start talking about folks 30 and under, all they’ve ever known is social progress. The country has steadily advanced over the past few decades. Trust me, I’m 50—I know this! [Laughs.] And now, the country has run into a brick wall the shape of Trump. For me, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world, for me, it feels like an even dumber version of Reagan when he was in office. And it’s awful. And it is a gigantic setback, and hugely damaging, and will take us decades to recover. All these protests, all this resistance in all of its forms, means nothing unless we register people to vote. And we vote in large numbers. The most important thing to do next year is to vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. Drive up voting participation for anti-Trumpers.
Can you talk about the next generation of Native American writers? You’ve talked about how you started your career in a sort of golden age of Native writing, but there has been, in the past several years, sort of a fallow period.
The distinction is there’s been a long, quiet period for fiction. I just looked at a site that was listing Native authors who had written novels and short fiction over the last 15 years, published by university presses, commercial houses, and small presses. I’m sure they might be missing some people, but it appears, based on their numbers, that Louise Erdrich, Stephen Graham Jones and I have published about 75 percent of the fiction in the last 15 years. Our books account for that much of the published fiction. There are a lot more poets. Perhaps there are a more Natives publishing poetry because there’s less commercial pressure. You print 1,000 books of a poetry book, there’s far less commercial pressure to sell that. So I think maybe it’s been harder for Natives to publish fiction because of the perceived commercial value. I have two students coming out with books. One is Terese Marie Mailhot, who has a memoir coming out in February, called Heart Berries, from CounterPoint Press. Another student, Tommy Orange, is coming out in the fall of 2018 with a novel called There, There. I really think these books are going to burst open the field and publishers are going to come looking for other Native nonfiction and fiction writers. I think both of these books have that great combination of literary art and commercial interest. They’re great art, and they’re very accessible. Because of the Trump presidency, and because of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, there’s an energy in the air, and a desire to listen to Natives. I think we have to be ready to speak. I’ve been pushing and encouraging and going after all my Native writer friends and colleagues to finish their books! Publishers will be coming for you next year—be ready.
You’ve said that you feel like there need to be more novels that reflect the experiences of Native Americans who don’t live on reservations, who are lawyers and doctors. Am I assuming some of these books are telling those stories?
Yes, Tommy’s novel is urban. Both books are not necessarily focused on the reservation. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of Natives live off-reservation, but you wouldn’t know that based on the stuff we’re writing. I would love for Native authors to diversify their subject matter. Let the white people portray us as being visionary, Edenic nature people. [Laughs.] We’re a lot more complicated than that.
That idea, which pops up a lot in your work, about walking between worlds is part of that?
Yes, and to stop thinking of that as a negative. I walk in 100 worlds. And I think when Native writers only think of themselves as walking in two worlds, when they get to binary, it hurts their art. It’s OK to tell a Native to be a Native, and tell a Native story, and have a couple of non-Native people respond to it. [Laughs.] Certainly I have fans who are primarily interested in my Native heritage, who might romanticize me or stereotype me, but I get people from across the demographic who read my work and learn something new about Natives, but also at the same time learn something about themselves. So it’s that combination of reading about the other, but also learning about yourself.
They’ve scientifically proven that reading fiction makes us more empathetic. So I guess that’s where the empathy comes from.
Yes, but also self-empathy. On this book tour, people didn’t talk to me afterward about oh, how sad for Indian! How sad for the Indian! They told me about their moms. Primarily, people who had moms like mine. And that was a multicultural, multiracial group of people telling me about their very diverse set of moms, from rich to poor. You write specifically about who you are, with your vision in place, and then people are going to come, and you’re going to be surprised by who’s interested. I think one of the things that harm Native expression is when we assume who our audience is, and who they are going to be. Any writer! We have no clue who our work is going to appeal to, or why. That’s the great mystery.
Some of those folks are people who are in recovery from alcoholism, too, right?
Yes, people in recovery, bipolar people, poor people, small town people…I’m a complicated human being. So the reasons why people respond to my work is complicated.
To end, I have a totally crazy, out-of-left field question. I saw you mention raising a pig for the FFA in another interview. I was just at the Illinois State Fair a few weeks ago and was standing around in the shed with all the FFA kids, with their lambs and ducks, and it was such a strange experience. So I was really curious about your experiences with the pig.
I called him Herman.
A boy pig, or a girl pig with a boy name?
A boy. I was young—gender identity was still pretty fixed in my head. [Laughs.] Now, who knows what I’d name him. I think I certainly had affection for him. And I was very sad when I knew he was going off to his fate as food. But I also learned the whole process of how food comes to be. We kept him around for a couple of years, so I was 16, 17—and I respected the sacrifice. I honored his sacrifice. I also know that he certainly didn’t want to die. It’s a huge moral dilemma, a moral question. I certainly shouldn’t be a meat eater if I’m not willing to know how meat is made. I know how meat is made. I grew up in a farm town. I ate many meals where the meat had a name. It makes me wonder, how many former FFA kids became writers?
Probably more than a few? I know in lots of places it’s a pretty standard part of growing up, but it just seems like such a weird, profound experience.
I’ve never met one. In my 25-year career, another writer has never come up to me and said they were also in the FFA. I’ve met 4H-ers. But I’ve never met another writer who was in the FFA. So it’s a topic that is unexplored [laughs]. But for me, what the FFA did, they had all these speech competitions. Parliamentary procedure contests, speech, debate…so the most valuable part of the FFA for me was all that. I learned how to do public speaking because of the FFA. It was less about the pigs...and more about the puns.
