The Future of Print Narratives and Comic Holotropes: A Conversation with Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Vizenor visited Bellingham, Washington, on May 25, 2004. His new book, Hiroshima Bugi, drove much of his visit. In the afternoon, Vizenor sat in on one of John Purdy's classes at Western Washington University, responding to student questions about his writing process and the new book. In the evening, he read passages from the book to a general university audience, many of whom had come to hear new ideas from the archetypal trickster teacher.

Between these two performances, we found time to sit down over cups of coffee and reflect on the future of Native American stories within the current and emerging trends of the publishing industry. Naturally, any such discussion implies imaginative fusion of sight, sound, and text, so it seemed altogether appropriate that our conversation occurred on the birthday of Miles Davis, one of American culture's most innovative and imaginative geniuses. Prior to the start of this conversation, which was recorded on two microcassette machines and then transcribed, our thoughts converged on the paradox of musical "literacy" in the creation of jazz.

JOHN PURDY: Here we go, in stereo.

BLAKE HAUSMAN: In stereo, on Miles Davis's birthday.

JP: This is the genesis of this idea: When you were up last time, you and I walked around and we went to Elliott Bay Bookstore.

GERALD VIZENOR: Yes.

JP: And when we were looking around for works by Native American authors, you were questioning what the future was going to be like in publishing.

GV: Oh.

JP: At the time, it didn't seem like you were very hopeful that a lot of works, by American Indian authors particularly, or publishing in general, had a very bright future. And oddly enough, when I saw LaVonne Ruoff Brown just the other day, she told a story about [. . . how] at one point a person of prominence in the publication industry said, quite frankly, "The book is dead."

GV: The book of any kind?

JP: Yeah. So those two things together kind of make me wonder. I thought about the past in "American Indian studies" and the publications, the numbers of books that have come out. You're the editor of two series, who better to know and talk about it? But I'm wondering, given what we know of the past, what the future holds. What it looks like, if that makes any sense.

GV: I didn't expect to be called upon for prophetic views, first question. [Laughter]

JP: ok, well let's go to the past.

GV: No, I like the future. It's safer. [Laughter] I just hope to be published in the future.

JP: Yeah.

GV: That's a part of an answer, isn't it? Well, we're still riding a great time in publications, and the most impressive thing to me is that we can now clearly make distinctions—;for any reason, cultural or commercial—;clear distinctions between commercial writers who are Native and literary artists who are Native. And I'm not trying to draw a hierarchy, but to just be comparative, that people write, for good reason, for commercial publication, and find a good audience. We know who those authors are. And a lot of Native writers write for the art as they want to experiment and explore it, and they can get published, too. And that's the purpose of that second series that I edit with Diane Glancy: to find original, experimental, literary artists who tell a story in a different way, and also who try to make use of Native oral experience, or any other Native experience, in an original literary way.

JP: Interestingly enough, I've just finished Field of Honor, Don Birchfield's new novel, and that's something unlike anything I have come across before . . . [confusion over the book's publication date]. . . . I also told you that Birgit Hans has done that manuscript of McNickle's The Surrounded—;"The Hungry Generations"—;so here's a manuscript from the late '20s and early '30s that was kind of groundbreaking as well.

GV...