It’s deep summer, and I’m home now, immersed in the luxury of sunshine on grass, wind in cottonwood trees on Puget Island, aware that areas relatively close by, east in the Columbia River Gorge, in Oregon, and in Northern California wildfires are burning. Here, farmers leave round bales in golden pastures like a board game. Peaches, not so common on the island, ripen at a local farm. Wild plums ripen along the slough bank.
This month, I was invited to study poetry at Tin House Summer Conference, a respected workshop offered by a prominent literary publisher from Portland, which has developed a focus on Native, Palestinian and underrepresented writers.
Literary conferences offer people a change to improve their writing, to network, find more readers, to experience different teachers, to sell their latest books, to promote new ones. Summer is a busy time, with some students traveling from one workshop to another, building friendships, meeting literary agents and editors. I’m diving into detail here for all of the talented Osage and Native writers who are looking to deepen their work and enhance their audience.
The conference is held annually on the Reed College campus in Portland. Tudor-Gothic style buildings are set in park-like grounds scattered with huge redwoods and oaks, a small lake, and a forested canyon nature preserve. The un-air-conditioned dorms keep your feet on the ground, but the community that builds over the week is rich.
I studied with poetry rock star Natalie Diaz, who was born in Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, Calif. She’s Mojave and enrolled with the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham), who played professional basketball in Europe and Asia, and is now an English professor at Arizona State University’s Creative Writing MFA program with dozens of honors. Her Postcolonial Love Poem (2020) won the Pulitzer Prize, and I’ve wanted to study with her since she taught poetry at IAIA when I studied fiction.
It’s heartening to be with someone who introduces herself in her languages, Mojave and Spanish, making space for and normalizing the use of our languages in everyday life, our full selves, here in this country that wants to forget Natives are still here with our cultures intact, our languages.
Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), brings us inside the love and challenge of living with a brother addicted to meth. From the title poem, “Neighbors were amazed my parents’ hearts kept growing back— It said a lot about my parents, or parents’ hearts.” These are poems that stay with you, for their rhythm and form as well as the compassion and consternation we have felt. In “My Brother at 3 AM,” “he sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps/when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.” The poem, a particular form with repeated lines, circles lovingly around this Mom and her son, his hallucinatory visions. “He wants to kill me, Mom… What’s going on? she asked. Who wants to kill you?… O God, I can see the tail, he said.”
During record-breaking heat in Portland, we sat in the shade and talked about poetry, about our Native languages, our concerns. Workshops at Tin House are small, which give students time and intimacy. This year, my workshop held Natives from Oklahoma tribes, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Osage, as well as two Diné, among a much larger group of Natives at the conference.
Osage author and Osage News reporter, Chelsea T. Hicks (A Calm and Normal Heart, 2022) taught a fiction workshop, sang karaoke, and gave a craft talk about her latest zine/art project, 𐓏𐒰𐒿𐒷𐓒𐒷 (Markings). She gave a reading primarily in Osage with an English translation.
Tin House curates a special culture in just 10 days. By bringing Black, Indigenous and people of color with varied histories and experiences in this country together, along with Palestinian, and Arab-American writers like author, journalist and professor Zaina Arafat, You Exist Too Much (2020), an Oprah Book Club Pick, the community offers a multi-faceted look at America, its history and present.
CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this article, it was incorrectly stated that Natalie Diaz is a professor at the University of Arizona. She is a professor at Arizona State University. The Osage News regrets the error. This article was corrected on Aug. 9, 2024.
