Kiowa/Cherokee
Often we spend so much time looking down at our phones we forget to look up. I catch myself looking at the stars at night and the moving clouds in the day, realizing I’m watching them like I had when I was kid. Those were days before Reasor’s Grocery Store in Tahlequah moved from Choctaw…
One of the beautiful behaviors of people is our need to protect. We don’t like bullies. This becomes more the case the older we get. There is something about seeing someone being treated terrible that we can’t stand. Maybe it’s a new comer who is unjustly getting targeted, or it could be someone vulnerable who…
The sought after and mysterious “voice” of writing. You watch editors salivate like Derridean defeatists about how magical voice can be when it “makes your foot tap to the rhythm.” Aww, how romantic. We are lovely romantic beings who need magic in our lives. Well, I’m about to take the magic out of the what, where,…
I’ve been promoting my writing on my Twitter account for a few months now. Slowly but surely I’m getting more and more engagement and I’m nearing the cusp of 9K followers, and hoping to hit the 10K plus realm within a week or so. One of my followers, and now a tried a true fan,…
I like to think I’m too smart to be manipulated. I have a Master’s Degree. I’m an avid reader and writer. Critical and creative thinking is my business. Then I attend one of those Hollywood productions (of the better variety, like Life of Pi), and despite my knowledge of all those structural techniques I still…
“There’s not much culture in this writing,” I’ve heard students say when critiquing student work or reading the novel of a Native author. Or they’ll say, “It looks like the main character is having an identity crisis,” and it can sound dismissive, but there’s something we have to understand about most Natives: We move deep…
One of my favorite lines in The Crow is when Eric (Brandon Lee) has T-Bird (David Patrick Kelly) duct taped to the drivers seat of his car, as its filled with explosives and aimed at a pier leading toward a harbor. T-Bird can’t believe Eric has come back to life as The Crow and as…
Revision is a little punk b#?ch! There I am toiling away on the second draft, almost to the end of the novel and starting to think about characters in the novel (mentally preparing for the “sweeps” portion of my revision process), and then I come to realize my main character is an asshole. ArtBook ReviewsBooksFamilyFictionlifePoetryPoliticsReligionWriting
I said it before. The last grade I completed was the sixth grade. Then later in life I went on to obtain a Master’s Degree. I think a lot of it had to do with riding waves. Not in the ocean. I’ve never been daring enough to take on those types of challenges. But riding waves…
