Böcker av Diane Glancy

Unpapered brings together personal narratives of Indigenous writers to explore the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins.

A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter's shed, where she makes different forms of ziggurats that she places in her kiln, a little symbol of hell. Though Eugena rejects Frank's insistence that there is a heaven and hell, she finds that she has worked with the shape of both and never knew it. In the end, she realizes that heaven and hell are in the shape of ziggurats, one rising and the other sinking. Her beloved ziggurats become the ironic witness of what her husband preached. Meanwhile, Frank and Eugena struggle to make sense of their lives after the death of their addict son, Daniel. When he is killed in a car accident, Frank and Eugena argue over whether Daniel's death was truly an accident, or whether his car may have been pushed off the road. The novel begins, ""Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it."" When Eugena dies, she travels through hell to find her son, Daniel. Frank sends the last chapter from heaven. The novel was influenced by Dante's The Divine Comedy and begins with an epigraph from The Inferno, ""What I was living, that I am dead.""

A professor hears the voices of Biblical women. She begins writing. What was it like for Dorcas to die and be brought back to life? What was it like for Philip''s daughters to live with the threat of persecution after Christ was crucified? What did Miriam feel when she sat in the leprosy tent? What did they all say as the professor wove her own story between their voices? It was Michal, David''s first wife, who made a bolster of goat''s hair for David''s bed when Saul, her father, was trying to kill him. The bolster made it look as if David were there. Likewise, these women''s voices are not their actual voices, because they were not recorded in Scripture, but a similitude of what such women might have said. The narrator struggles with their stories beneath Scripture. Michal is maligned because she scorned David when he danced before the ark, but after the death of her sister, she raised her sister''s sons. David hanged them all when the Gibeonites told him that Saul had broken a covenant with them. They asked that Saul''s male descendants be killed. What was it like for Michal to see her nephews hanged? What did she have to say?""Diane Glancy is the kind of visionary whose poetic spirit sees beyond, twisting the ordinary with astonishing verbal leaps of imagination, turning things inside out so that we see what they are made of. In these stories, she interweaves a personal narrative with visions and voices from another time, another sphere. The result is quite extraordinary.""--Luci Shaw, author of Scape""Uprising of Goats is an impeccably researched, intricately rendered, hauntingly beautiful journey through what has traditionally been a realm of silent mystery. It''s clear that Diane Glancy does not simply imagine the world of biblical women, but inhabits the same quietly electrifying space.""--Paula Huston, author of A Land Without SinDiane Glancy is emeritus professor at Macalester College. Her books and films are listed online at www.dianglancy.org and www.dianeglancy.com..

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as "trouble causers," arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy''s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners'' predicament.Diane Glancy is an emerita professor of English at Macalester College and is currently a professor at Azusa Pacific University in California. She is the author of numerous novels, including Claiming Breath (Nebraska, 1992), Designs of the Night Sky (Nebraska, 2002), and The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha.

Speaking out of the known world, this powerful selection of Glancy's poems transforms experience through new narratives, mytholigising history and social crisis. Tackling themes of disruption, loss and heritage, these poems invoke a wide range of familial and animal personae and environments: we find ourselves guided to a land filled with hope.

Constructed as a series of reports to the Department of the Interior, these poems of grief, anger, defiance, and resistance focus on the oppressive educational system adopted by Indian boarding schools and the struggle Native Americans experienced to retain and honour traditional ways of life and culture.

"There is a map you decide to call a book. A book of the territories you've traveled. A map is a meaning you hold against the unknowing. The places you speak in many directions." For Diane Glancy, there are books that you open like map. In-between Places is such a book: a collection of eleven essays unified by a common concern with landscape and its relation both to our spiritual life and to the craft of writing. Taking readers on a trip to New Mexico, a voyage across the sea of middle America, even a journey to China, Glancy has crafted a sustained meditation on the nature and workings of language, stories, and poems; on travel and motion as metaphors for life and literature; and on the relationships between Native American and Judeo-Christian ways of thinking and being in the world. Reflecting on strip mines in Missouri ("as long as there is anything left to take, human industry will take it") and hog barns in Iowa (writing about them from the hogs' perspective), Glancy speaks in the margins of cross-cultural issues and from the places in-between as she explores the middle ground between places that we handle with the potholder of language. She leaves in her wake a dance of words and the structures left after the collision of cultures. A writer who has often examined her native heritage, Glancy also asks here what it means to be part white. "What does whiteness look like viewed from the other, especially when that other is also within oneself?" And in considering the legacy of Christianity, she ponders "how it is when the Holy Ghost enters your life like a brother-in-law you know is going to be there a while." Insightful and provocative, In-between Places is a book for anyoneinterested in a sense of place and in the relationship between religion and our stance toward nature. It is also a book for anyone who loves thoughtful writing and wishes to learn from a modern master of language.

There is a saying in Native American tradition that "wholeness is when the shadow of the rider and his horse are one." Although we usually focus our attention on what seems most real, Diane Glancy shows us that the shadow of our past has substance as well. "The Shadow's Horse" is a new collection of poems in which Glancy walks the margin between her white and Indian heritage. In poems that conjure the persistence of fallen leaves or juxtapose images of Christ and the stockyards, she powerfully evokes place and spirit to address with intelligence and beauty issues of family, work, and faith. In some of these poems Glancy recalls growing up with her Cherokee father, who worked in a stockyard, radically applying Christian theology to the slaughter of non-human creatures: "The cattle go up the rampdragging their crosses.Their voices are Gregorian chantsrising to the blue sky, the cold clouds." In others she examines the walk of history through the ordinary details of life-history seen from two points of view, early Euro-American and contemporary Native American. She sees her Native heritage as shortlived and fragile, yet as enduring as leaves, and she asks, "If you line up all the leaves that fall / how many times will they go around the earth?" Writing in a cross-boundaried, fragmented voice-a voice based on the memory of the way language sounded when it was stretched across the cultures or walked in both worlds-Glancy has fashioned a book about speaking oneself into existence. "The Shadow's Horse" is the story of one culture made to sing the song of another until the Native voice is so erased it is nearly an illusion. Yet as readers of these poems willdiscover, the shadow of the past is as real as the horse it rides.

In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world.

The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet's vision and a storyteller's voice, the result is a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction.

A depiction of contemporary life in Native America. This book presents an Indian worldview in its holistic complexity and integrity, and is an addition to the literature of white-Indian cultural interrelationships. It presents an account of the author's life on the road, driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools.