In this Book
- The Dream of a Broken Field
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: University of Nebraska Press
summary
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 at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre’s outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today.
Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures—English and German on her mother’s side, Cherokee on her father’s—Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. i-vi
- Table of Contents
- pp. vii-x
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xiv
- Book One: The Old Geography Lessons of Language A Personal History w/ Paper Dolls, the Beginning of Travel, et al.
- More Than Anything
- pp. 3-4
- Black House
- p. 8
- Discourses on Paper Dolls
- pp. 11-16
- A Book of Roads
- pp. 35-44
- Book Two: Geographies of a Realigned Language Native American Literature, Issues, Ou’Wash, and Creative Theory
- Soldiers as Paper Dolls
- pp. 50-53
- Terrorists
- pp. 55-57
- The Return from Carlisle
- pp. 62-64
- Boarding School Physics
- pp. 65-66
- Geographies of a Realigned Language
- pp. 69-75
- The Eskimo Wars
- pp. 76-78
- Book Three: The Dream of a Broken FieldAcademia and a Sudden Retirement. A House, a Cabin, and a Summer Trip
- I Am Wearing the Dialogue of Another
- pp. 86-88
- A Dress of Rain
- p. 94
- I Pick Them Up in Travel
- pp. 106-107
- Engraved on a Rock
- pp. 108-110
- The Dream of a Broken Field
- pp. 113-114
- Ascension Convention
- pp. 115-124
- Book Four: Geographies of Language The Act and Question of Creative Nonfiction
- A Rocky Shelf
- pp. 127-133
- Geographies of Language
- pp. 134-135
- Buffalo Nickel
- p. 136
- Is not telling the truth the same as lying?
- pp. 146-148
- Off the Road
- pp. 153-156
- Book Five: One Who Wears MothsFaith and Writing. A Continuance of Research Trips and Travel for Teaching
- Another Journey
- pp. 159-160
- The Coldest Night in Texas
- pp. 171-174
- The Mound Builders
- pp. 178-184
- The Shape of Privacy
- pp. 185-186
- One Who Wears Moths
- pp. 187-206
Additional Information
ISBN
9780803236073
Related ISBN(s)
9780803234819
MARC Record
OCLC
742517460
Pages
220
Launched on MUSE
2012-08-22
Language
English
Open Access
No