Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

by Elissa Washuta (Editor), Theresa Warburton (Editor)

Overview

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295745756
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	06/28/2019
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	457,987
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz) is assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. Theresa Warburton is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American studies and English at Brown University and assistant professor of English at Western Washington University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Exquisite Vessels Elissa Washuta Theresa Warburton 3

Technique

Contemporary Creative Writing and Ancient Oral Tradition Ernestine Hayes 23

Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer-and Maybe to Myself Stephen Graham Jones 31

Funny, You Don't Look Like (My Preconceived Ideas of) an Essay Chip Livingston 39

Nizhoní dóó 'a'ani' dóó até'él'í dóó ayoo'o'oni (Beauty & Memory St Abuse St Love) Bojan Louis 53

Fairy Tales, Trauma, Writing Into Dissociation Sasha Lapointe 62

Coiling

Tuolumne Deborah A. Miranda 73

I Know I'll Go Terese Marie Mailhot 80

Little Mountain Woman Terese Marie Mailhot 84

Fear to Forget & Fear to Forgive: Or an Attempt at Writing a Travel Essay Bojan Louis 89

Fertility Rites Tiffany Midge 100

And So I Anal Douche While Kesha's "Praying" Plays from My Iphone on Repeat Billy-Ray Belcourt 103

The Great Elk Ruby Hansen Murray 106

Plaiting

Real Romantic Eden Robinson 115

The Trickster Surfs the Floods Natanya Ann Pulley 119

The Way of Wounds Natanya Ann Pulley 126

To the Man Who Gave Me Cancer Adrienne Keene 139

Self-Portrait with Parts Missing and/or Smeared Michael Wasson 149

Critical Poly 100s Kim Tallbear 154

Twining

Pain Scale Treaties Laura Da' 169

Caribou People Siku Allooloo 173

Part One: Redeeming The English Language (Acquisition) Series Tiffany Midge 183

Apocalypse Logic Elissa Washuta 191

Women in the Fracklands: On Water, Land, Bodies, and Standing Rock Toni Jensen 204

Goodbye Once Upon a Time Byron F. Aspaas 214

I Am Chopping Ivory or Bone Joan Naviyuk Kane 237

Blood Running Sasha Lapointe 242

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Alicia Elliott 246

Acknowledgments 257

List of Contributors 261

What People are Saying About This

Tommy Pico

"Shapes of Native Nonfiction is exciting, fresh, and profound. It provides the space for native nonfiction to be indigenous, without the pressure to "perform" indigeneity. The writing gets to be weird, joyful, wounded, flip, deep, unflinching, terrified, and secure. Expression over cultural expectation. I turn to it and return to it, delighted each time."

Editorial Reviews

"The medium is the message in this formally daring anthology of essays from Native writers, organized into basket-weaving themes such as ‘coiling’ and ‘plaiting.’ In these 27 essays by writers hailing from multiple tribal nations, some established and some newcomers, the Native experience is interrogated, elucidated, and celebrated."

Esquire

"The volume seems to be the work of a master weaver expertly managing the warp and weft of the threads—everything in its place, everything serving its purpose. These vibrant essays and writings acknowledge the wounds of the past but are not confined or defined by them. Rather, the contributors, who include Siku Allooloo, Natanya Ann Pulley, Ernestine Hayes, Chip Livingston, and Michael Wasson, narrate a living, dynamic future."

Choice

"In gathering contemporary Native nonfiction, this book elucidates the roots of the form-conscious essay and brings together the exciting current work of Native writers. In a sweeping decolonizing gesture, this anthology challenges the nonfiction canon as it’s been taught and creates a porous new space in its place."

Essay Daily

★ 06/01/2019

Editors Washuta (creative writing, Ohio State; My Body Is a Book of Rules) and Warburton (English, Western Washington Univ.) have pulled together a groundbreaking collection of 27 mostly previously published critical essays and creative nonfiction meant to challenge non-Native scholarly and academic assumptions about how and what Native authors write. The selections eschew straightforward autobiography and fiction in favor of dazzling experiments in nonlinear narrative and content that contests "a voyeuristic obsession with tragedy as the ultimate possible contribution of Native literatures to the broader field." Contributors include Ernestine Hayes, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, Terese Marie Mailhot, and Deborah Miranda, with the most memorable pieces being Stephen Graham Jones's "Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer—and Maybe to Myself"); Tiffany Midge's "Part One: Redeeming the English Language (Acquisition) Series," a clever, funny, political meditation on etymology; Bojan Louis's unconventional travelog, in which he admits "we're proud of the things we don't know"; and Adrienne Keene's powerful and pointed "To the Man Who Gave Me Cancer." VERDICT It's not hard to imagine this work as a staple of creative writing course syllabi for years to come. A must for any library.—Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

"In this anthology, shape matters. It turns the essay into a resistant form, pushing against the myth of the ‘disappearing Native’ and asserting a new narrative, one that isn’t subject to colonizing. . . . Shapes of Native Nonfiction is full of cognitive and emotional work. It turns the essay into something alive and breathing."

Cincinnati Review

"A veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered."

World Literature Today (WLT)

"This new collection of essays from established and emerging contemporary Indigenous writers is stunning both in depth and scope. . . . The collection, expertly curated and structured by writer and Cowlitz Indian Tribe member Elissa Washuta (whose incredible essay Apocalypse Logic also appears here) and literary scholar Theresa Warburton, shines in every piece and in its existence as a whole. . . . In these pages, storytelling is a way of developing new Native nonfiction literary possibility."

Literary Hub

"In this far-ranging collection of essays, Indigenous writers explore family, home, landscape, identity, trauma, history, and memory. Some of the essays are about writing itself. Others tell stories about particular experiences or moments. Still others are more outwardly focused, exploring art, culture, and politics. Part of what makes this book so unique is the various innovative forms the essays take."

Book Riot