Writing Indian, Native Conversations

4. The New Millennium and Its Origins

Since the 1970s critical studies about Native fiction abound. Most notably to date, Louis Owens’s Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel does a fine job of exploring and discovering the major issues in the fiction written by Natives, and its coverage extends into the 1990s. As mentioned previously, concurrent with the growth of criticism as a field of study and application, in the United States there were heated debates about “authenticity” (cultural and/or ethnic verisimilitude), “authority” (who is authorized to speak from a specific cultural or ethnic perspective), intellectual property rights, and the appropriateness of applying Western theory to non-Western texts, all of which enlivened the latter decades of the century and continue to shape the ways we think and talk about texts and the meanings they may provoke. I had the opportunity to talk about these issues with Owens in his home in the mountains near Albuquerque, with its clear view of the Sandia Mountains. It was the comfortable setting for this, the last installment of four days of wide-ranging conversations about fly-fishing and politics, espionage and University of New Mexico basketball, contemporary higher education and the environment. John Purdy (JP): So, where to begin? Let’s start by talking about your novels. How did you start writing fiction? Louis Owens (LO): The first novel I wrote was Wolfsong. I began it in my attic room in the Forest Service bunkhouse in Darrington, Washington, one fall after the snows came and almost everyone else had left for the year. I wanted really to write a novel about the wilderness area itself, the Glacier Peak Wilderness, making the place the real protagonist of the novel and the characters 4 |The New Millennium and Its Origins 190 | the new millennium and its origins ways of giving the trees and mountains and streams and glaciers a voice. JP: Did I tell you the story about the first time I used that novel, at Western [Washington University near the locale it describes]? I had a student in the back who, when we first began discussing it, furrowed her brow and said: “Where is this town, Forks? These characters seem familiar.” I asked her where she was from, and she replied, “Darrington” [the community that is the model for that in the novel]. LO: Well, actually, I named it Forks because I wanted to disguise the town. Also because the rivers [the Skagit, Sauk, and Stillaguamish near Darrington] come together [ultimately], and that is symbolic. But I had somebody who actually made a pilgrimage to Forks and came back to tell me how great it was to find the town where the novel is set. [Forks is on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.] I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it wasn’t Forks. JP: Well, Forks is a lot like Darrington. They’re both small logging communities. LO: Darrington may be meaner, at least way back when I lived there in the ’70s. The first words spoken to me there were by these three loggers who wanted to know if I preferred to have my hair cut off with a chainsaw or burned off with kerosene. Anyway, that’s how I started writing the book, and then I put it down and went back to school, where I picked it up again to work on while I was writing my dissertation. Bill Kittredge was a writer in residence at UC Davis at the time, and Bill read a draft of it, liked it, and did me the great favor of sending it off to his agent. It was read by Gary Fisketjohn, who I think was at either Random House or Knopf at the time, and he said he liked it and that he was sure they’d publish it. I thought, Who says being a writer is so hard? But the novel was turned down, nominated by Fisketjohn for the Pushcart Press Book Editor’s Award, which it didn’t receive, and then reconsidered and rejected a second time. That’s when I put it on the shelf for about a decade. Basically, I was young and had my heart broken as a writer. I was pretty naive. the new millennium and its origins | 191 Wolfsong was finally published because I happened to be talking with John Crawford of West End Press one day, and he asked if I had...