Interview with IAIA Alumna, Ramona Emerson, author of "Exposure" by Rey M. Rodríguez and Tanya Tyler

Storyteller’s Blog of the Chapter House Journal was thrilled when Ramona Emerson agreed to an interview. Not only is she an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, but she is also an extraordinary writer who cares deeply about her community and the craft of writing.

As further background, Ms. Emerson is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She has a bachelor’s in Media Arts from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. As a police department photographer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she spent 16 years documenting crime scenes before becoming a novelist. She is an Emmy nominee, a Sundance Native Lab Fellow, a Time-Warner Storyteller Fellow, a Tribeca All-Access Grantee, and a WGBH Producer Fellow. She is the author of two massively successful books, Shutter and Exposure. 

Storyteller’s Blog did something differently in this interview and we invited Tanya Tyler, an IAIA MFA student to help with the interview. Tanya is Diné and a massive fan of Ms. Emerson, so her contribution only added to the conversation. During the interview, we discussed a wide range of topics from Ms. Emerson’s writing journey, ravens, buffaloes, farm instruments, to how to decolonize Gallup, N.M. We hope you enjoy what follows. As a bonus check out the author’s playlist at the end of the interview.

RR: Ramona Emerson, welcome to the Chapter House Storyteller’s Blog. We're very grateful for your time and everything you do for IAIA. We like to highlight IAIA alumna on this blog and we like to know as much as we can about your writing journey.  So how did you get into writing novels?

I did not set out to become a writer. I never thought I would write a book ever. It was an accident. I had been making films for almost 30 years. I had only written screenplays but not even a feature screenplay, just shorts and a lot of documentary film, applications, treatments, and log lines. That's the extent of my writing. I had that work going on for many years, I had taken a poetry class in college in the nineties. But I hadn't done anything as far as being a writer. 

I had just finished a short film called Opal. I was despondent about how that was working out. I was also doing another documentary and was frustrated with that project, too, so I decided to go to a writing workshop in northern New Mexico. They had a workshop at Los Luceros.

I went there for probably about 6 months, off and on, and Joan Tewskesbury was our mentor there. I started doing writing prompts and writing short little fiction like flash fiction stuff I hadn't done before.

And while I was there, IAIA announced their new MFA Program. I thought this would be perfect for me. I could get my MFA and continue to work and do my documentaries and things. It was a perfect program for me as a mom and as somebody who works a lot. And so, I applied, and I was going to apply as a screenwriter. That was my intent to go in for the screenwriting program. I asked Joan if she'd write me a letter of recommendation. And she said, no unless I went into fiction. She knew I was in the dumps about the film that I just finished, and I was having a hard time. 

She was like Ramona I think this is an opportunity for you to change course and to think about storytelling differently, and just try it out, maybe, and see if you like it. And so, I went into fiction at the behest of Joan Tewskesbury, and I got in with some of those flash fiction and shorts I had been writing in the workshop.

Before you know it, I was in Eden Robinson's fiction workshop, feeling like I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I didn't know if I should be writing short stories or what. I didn't know what to do. I was a filmmaker, so I threw in about 4 or 5 chapters of this book I was starting or short stories I was thinking about putting together.

It just happened to be about Rita and about some of that stuff that was going on, and a lot of it was about my grandma and it turned into what Shutter turned into when I graduated from the MFA program. I had a complete manuscript of my first draft of Shutter. 

So, it was a lot of everybody, all the workshops, and all of our mentorships that I had there pushed me to keep writing that story, and Eden was the first one - it looked daunting with all the red that she gave me on my first draft. 

I mean it was red. I am not joking, but I didn't know what I was doing, right? I was starting from scratch, and she said, it was okay. It's there. You just got to tidy it up, and you'll see when you start working on it. It'll work out. And you know. I just kept working on it, working on it, and working on it just like everybody kept telling me to do and that's what happened. Boom and I got a book that I would never, ever have expected from myself. I think it was like 360 pages of that first draft that I turned in for my thesis.

RR: Wow!

Yeah, I would have never expected that I could have written that much by any stretch of the imagination. So, I was just as shocked as everyone else. 

RR: Was that book already inside of you, in a sense, and it just had to reveal itself?

Yeah, I knew that story had been building in my head, and I thought it would be an intriguing and interesting story, something I would like to read. The fact that I made my main character, a Diné woman just added more dimension. When I started to talk about the paranormal side of the story, and how I could work that into this story I could see in my head it for the 3rd book. It's in my head. I know how it's going to come out. I just have to be given enough time to sit and write it. I have a lot of things on my plate. So, I write when I can. But you're right.

It's something that's up here. As I write it's like a puzzle, and as I write it. It slowly unfolds. It tells me what direction to go in, and sometimes I go crazy, and I repeat too much, or I go off on these tangents, and I create more things that don't need to be there, and that's just part of the process.

Eventually, I whittle it down to what it becomes, and I have editors that help me do that. But it is just this story that's in my head and a puzzle that I have to put together. I use a lot of tools to get me there but eventually, it does.

RR: Can you talk about the tools a little bit? Do you use an outline? Or do you just write it?

I'm finding that outlines are very good for me. I'm good with deadlines, and I'm good with structure. I didn't have an outline for Shutter, but I had the basic bones or spine of the story in my head. I knew where she would start and where the book would end. I knew that, and I just had to get there. With Exposure, I had no idea what I was going to do. I knew that I was going to write a serial killer, and I wanted to do that. But I had no idea what to do with Rita, and I had already talked about her childhood and a lot of personal issues, cultural issues. And I didn't want to rehash that. But I knew that Rita needed to move forward, and there was a lot of healing that she needed to be done, and that's where it started. I didn't have an outline or anything, and it was hard. It was hard for my editors because I just unleashed this 380-page treatise on them. 

It was 8 months of writing everywhere during my Shutter tour, in the airports, in the hotels, wherever I was staying, in the cabs, in the Lyft rides everywhere I was riding. I plop this thing on them and we spent the next 7 months sorting through this monstrosity that was Exposure. It was a lot of sorting, and I had a lot of extra crime and gore and blood, and whatever else that was in there, we had to cut way back. We had to cut way back on a lot of the serial killer stuff and a lot of the things I had going on in my mind. It was hard, and I don't recommend ever doing that again, not for me or for another writer like, give yourself some structure. Give yourself a map, because when you don't, and then you end up like me, torturing your editors for 7 months. 

But now I know what works for me. I give myself the bones, and I write out the bones, and then it works into an outline. So I gave my editor a 10-page outline of Book 3 before I even started, because I knew it was in my brain, and it helped me to just put it down and say, Okay, now, there's a map. So, while I'm writing the book, I can refer back to my map and say, Okay, now, I'm on Chapter 14. Where was I thinking I was going to be on Chapter 14? It helps me move through the process much easier than it did for the second book. So, outlining has worked out for me. 

RR: That's wonderful advice because a novel is so daunting. There are so many different ways of doing it. It’s helpful to appreciate the frustration and joy of putting that puzzle together.

Absolutely. It is a puzzle. And I do a lot of research, too, before I even start writing. And so I think that helps. That's why I say it's in my brain because I've been doing all this research about certain elements of the story. So when I get to that point, I access those files. It's like, Oh, remember what you read about this, or maybe you should talk about ravens, or you should talk about belief systems here.

RR: Ravens!

Yes, I have studied a lot about raven behavior, I learned everything I could write about them. I also studied the Penitentes, and the Catholic Church, and about boarding schools in South Dakota in the 1970s. So when it came time to write the book. I had all of these notes. I had all these photographs that I had pulled off when I was doing the research and found compelling in some way. My mom sent me police blotter articles from the Gallup newspaper. So, all of these things I used to put back into Exposure were super helpful. But like they say, they're pieces of the puzzle. And then I have a playlist. I stand by that playlist. 

RR: Yes, we want to add that playlist to this interview.

That is what takes to make the book. And then somehow, I'm able to write it because I give myself all these tools ahead of time.

RR: What do you call research?

Everything is research. I like to sit and listen to people's conversations at restaurants. I go to locations, and I listen. And I listen to the people, the music, and the other sounds that are coming through. What can I see from there? When I was writing Exposure, I was sent to South Dakota to work for the Nature Conservancy. I was photographing and filming the rematriation of these buffalo herds that were moving from Oklahoma into South Dakota. 

During that time, when I was doing this work, I was absorbing everything, the landscape, the smells, the beauty of what I was filming, and the fact that I was by myself in acres and acres of land. It was me, my camera, and the buffalo, and they didn't bother me, and I didn't bother them. I sat there and filmed them. I absorbed those moments. I listened to what the wind sounded like, and the silence of that place. 

And then I went to South Dakota, and I saw these white A-frame houses, abandoned farms on acres and acres of land with all these abandoned equipment barns, and it was just spooky out there, real foggy, and lots of darkness, emptiness, and abandonment. I went to that place, and I absorbed it. I listened to it. I watched the people who drove by and looked at me. I went to the towns and went in the store and saw what kind of people lived in that town. What were they selling in the grocery store? What kind of cars were they driving? I observe everything. And I think it's because I make documentaries. And so for many years, I've told stories visually. So when I go to a place. I absorb things visually. I just do that, and I take things in as an experience. Everywhere I go. Even if I'm in a place I don't like like in the waiting room at IHS.

RR: Yes.

All of that, because even when you're uncomfortable, and you don't like that place, look around at the people who are suffering there with you. Where did they come from? What do they look like like? What does it smell like in there? It always smells like alcohol pads at IHS, or somebody's burnt popcorn from another floor. And I remember that kind of stuff because I'm aware of it. So as a writer, I always tell people that part of the research of being alive is absorbing everything, even the bad experiences, even the people that come in contact with you that you don't necessarily like.

There's nothing better than literary revenge and writing those people and letting go of that memory and that kind of uncomfortableness that you felt putting it on the page and giving it someplace to live is invaluable. To me everything is research. 

There is also the standard research. I went to CSI School for Shutter for 16 weeks, because I wanted to learn everything about it, not just what I knew as a photographer, but everything. And I did. I learned all about blood splatter and all kinds of things - ballistics.

And I read newspaper articles about the towns. I especially read the crime blotters because some of the wicked, nasty things come from the crime blog, or people doing hateful things to each other daily, in cities around the country. I take that information and personalize it. I give it over to a different set of characters or a different place and time and relive it. And I've done that a lot, especially with crime. I take real crimes that have happened and turn them into somebody else. But the details are there. So, when you do the research and you have those details you are ready to go. You're writing rattles off because you've been studying it, and you know where it took place, and you know all the details because you've been reading about it.

RR: How do you write about Gallup in a way that is important to you? 

Gallup has been around for a long time, and it's got a pretty wicked history. It is colonization personified. That's what Gallup is. I mean even the name Gallup. It was named after the paymaster for the train, right? Everything about that place is dark to me. And I'm also doing this documentary about it and Larry Casuse. 

And I have this kind of other connection to that town, about the dangers of that town and the relationship that Diné people have with Gallup is a different relationship than everyone else does. That town needs us. It wouldn't live if it weren’t for Diné people putting money in its mouth, and the thing is that even though it couldn't survive without us, it hates us. It's a racist place, and it's a place where the alcohol industry rules, the mining and gas industry rules, and the jewelry and tourism industry rules. 

I wanted to talk about all the things that strangle us there in that town, and that's what Exposure is about. It's this place that's a huge part of most of our childhoods. We had to go there to go to the doctor, go to the dentist, go to the grocery store or the mall. Anything you wanted to do, you had to go to Gallup. So it's embedded in our lives and childhoods, and a lot of us have had that same experience. But there's also a lot of darkness. We've known people who have died in that place. We've known people who have been killed and who have lived violent lives. We know people who have died there, and it's a daily thing, and people don't talk about it. So I wanted to talk about it, and I wanted to bring Rita home. I also wanted to call Gallup what I feel it is - which is a serial killer - and personify that town with a man. I won't give away the details, but once you read it, you'll know what I mean. I think it's a larger metaphorical statement about that town via this man who's a serial killer.

RR: Interesting.

Yes, for me, that's what it was. Gallup is that place we all grew up in, but it's also this other place that has this history that we can't forget.

RR: It is very complex. Jake Skeets mentioned in a Storyteller’s interview his love of the Gallup Flea Market.

Oh, yeah. The flea market.

RR: It’s the place to go.

It is that, and that's the place we have. For our first book event, we took Exposure to the Gallup Flea market.

RR: And why was that important? 

Because of that book, I wrote it for everybody out there. I wrote it for everyone from Gallup and Tohatchi. It is for us. So, they get it first.

RR: Nice.

They get to experience and get their hands on it first. That's how it was with Shutter. That's how it will be with the third book. You have to be there for your peeps, man, and you got to give it to them first, plus I needed a mutton fix. 

RR: Love it. Take it away, Tanya.

TT: One of the standouts for me was the mortuary scene when they were talking about the wounds and what they looked like. I had never heard of a billhook sickle, too. I had to Google it and see the images. And oh, it gave me chills.  

 Thank you for doing your research, Tanya. I also looked for the ugliest hooks. I had to find the good stuff and the older stuff that was made in the seventies and sixties. That stuff looks right out of a horror film. The farming tools of that time are pretty wicked because they don't look like the new ones. The new ones look pretty tame. They have safety handles and rounded edges. Not those from the sixties. Holy cow! Those things look like something you would find in a Texas chainsaw massacre. So, another reason for good product placement. 

TT: Can you share a little bit about the Easter eggs that you put into Shutter and Exposure, like with the chapter titles? 

 Shutter had juicer Easter eggs for me than Exposure, but when you look at the chapter headings for Shutter, each one has a different camera model. You can Google those camera models and it'll tell you what year it was made. I did that as a device because people were questioning what year each chapter referenced. It seemed clear to me that the story was going backward and forward in time, from past to present in a repeated fashion. I didn't deviate from that pattern. But people were still questioning so I put the cameras in the chapter headings. 

The first camera models are from the seventies, and you can see that it goes into the eighties. And then the last one is the iPhone. The very first iPhone came out in 2005. So that you can see that's the trajectory of the camera and the character, Rita, over those chapters. There are references to cell phones in other chapters but they are not iPhones. The reader can figure this out because the phones weren’t able to take quality pictures until 2005. 

 It's also a statement about the death of analog and the birth of digital when you look at the camera models. The reader can see the death of analog slowly play out throughout the book. We have no backstory anymore. It's aperture settings. So, the camera aperture slowly opens up into the last chapter that says wide open. The aperture is wide open on the lens, so those are the Easter eggs for Shutter.  

We had different Easter eggs in Exposure. Those camera exposure settings on the Rita chapters are meant to elicit meaning about light and mood. Some have long exposures when she talks about people's ghosts moving in the frame. When you do longer exposures, you'll get these trails of people or images. People can stand in an image and then leave, and their ghost will be there. There's something strange about long exposure. You'll see in those chapter headings Rita's mood is moving in and out of the ghost world or reality. And, what is the light like for her? Is she in darkness? You'll see the exposure setting set for those different settings. 

 And the serial killer chapters, we have temperature settings that are headings, so you'll see it says thirteen degrees, minus six degrees, and that is meant to talk about the death of exposure. The coldness of the time he's working in. He's working in the winter, and he's disguising these deaths as deaths from exposure to the cold. He kills when it's the coldest. That's when we see these temperature headings so we know that it's so cold that no one could survive outside at night in that weather. 

Also, we've got some quotes from the Bible. This is him trying to figure out how to explain what he's doing, why he's doing it, talking about his devotion to God, and his religion. But the degrees were added specifically to show how cold it is when he's doing these things. The story takes place during 2006 and 2007. They were some of the coldest, most brutal winters in Gallup history, and a lot of people died of exposure that year. It just so happens to be when this particular story is set for a reason. It recounts how the exposure deaths in Gallup are something that are not investigated by the police. It's more chalked up to the weather and people don't do the investigations to find out if these people were indeed murdered or killed by the weather. They don't care to investigate, and they just get put into that pile of exposure deaths for that year. It's troublesome, and I wanted to address it with my novel.  

TT: Thank you for explaining some of the Easter eggs. It's been really fun to look through the book to try to find them. Another question, in both Shutter and Exposure, what was your most difficult chapter to write? 

For Exposure, the hardest chapter for me was letting go of one of the characters. I knew that I didn't want to let go of her. But I also knew that Rita, as a character, had kind of been staying there because of this character. Rita would not have been able to leave without her. I hate to say it. I don't want to give out all the details, but when she loses this character, there's no reason for her to stay there anymore. 

She didn't have a boyfriend or anybody else to keep her there. I knew that chapter was coming, and it took a week to write it. I didn't want to do it, and I kept questioning. Should I do it?  Maybe she moves away? Or maybe something happened?  I was no, you have to do it. It took a long time to get the guts and figure out how she would go. Anyway, it was hard for me. That was the hardest thing in Exposure to write about. 

 In Shutter, I had a hard time with the last seven or eight chapters. They had to be rewritten maybe 10 different times in different iterations. In draft number seven, Rita died at the end of Shutter, and I had no intention of having a sequel or bringing her back in any way. 

I thought the natural path of this story would be that she would die, and it took a long time and a lot of editors to convince me not to let her die, and to give some sense of closure to her at the end of the book. Those last few chapters of Shutter were tough. 

I had never written a book, much less a thriller or anything else. I was learning how to keep the suspense going. My editors were teaching me how to move the story forward. And I started to figure out that I had to write it just like a script. I would leave these little tidbits at the end of every chapter so that people will be invested enough to read through to the next chapter.

TT: Hmm! On the other side of that, what was your favorite chapter to write? 

 I love writing the chapters with Rita and her grandma. Those are so easy to write. Those chapters are written in an hour or two, and a lot of those chapters that ended up in Shutter didn't get edited. They were close to the first drafts because I knew those stories backward and forward. I had done all the piñon picking and all the tea gathering with grandma, and I could hear her voice. I could hear her getting on to me. I could smell the post office at home like there was just everything about that place I knew, so it was easy to write. It's always awesome to write about my grandma. I love writing about her, and it was easy to do. It was easy to trap all those childhood fears about my grandma into writing. When I wrote Exposure, it was hard not to write about grandma, because she's not in there. She's not in there as much as she was in Shutter. I noticed in the third book that I brought her back quite a bit more than I did in the second book. I feel like the second book was just a bridge to get her home. And now we're going to get into the real meat of it. 

 TT: What would you like people to take away from your books? 

 I would hope that other readers and maybe other young writers, would see that it's okay to write about stuff that even you're afraid to write about. That was my biggest fear writing this book was how people would react to it, especially Diné people—-how my people, would read into what I was writing. I was concerned about that. And so that was probably my biggest fear is talking about death and talking about things we're not supposed to talk about but at the same time, I was talking about stuff that's pretty much reality. I'm not glorifying anything. I don't talk about witchcraft. I think you can write about anything if you think about it and have reverence for it. It's letting go of a lot of trauma. It is letting go of memories that haunt you. People that have come across your life in one form or another, and you remember them, or they're there for a reason. It's like the page is there for you to put them down.  

I want people to take away from this book that it's important to write these stories. It's important to talk about things. It's important to get it all out through your stories, whether you're using a camera, or you know you're writing on your laptop or on a piece of paper. It's all about encapsulating and memorializing our time in history, the people that we knew, and the things that happened to us, because it's never going to be like that again. 

A lot of the people that I knew when I was a little kid who were important to me and who were a big part of my life are now gone. I'm glad that I have some of them on camera, and I've taken photographs of them, or I've filmed them in some way or another. And for me, that's what art is about. It's memory. It's remembering those things and those people and the things they said and the things that they taught us over the years.  

 That's what is so important about it. It's never about how famous you're going to be. It's about how important it is for you to tell those stories and to get those realities and that story out into the world because people don't know your experience, and they'll never know unless you're there to tell them about it. Or show them or film them. That's what's important about storytelling. We're the weird, true historians. We're the artists. We're the ones who are recording humankind and history and art as it moves through the world. We have an important place here as writers, as creators, as artists. 

So that's what I hope people pull from the book. I am talking about a very specific place and time and my place in it, and other people's place in our lives, our traditional and tribal cultural belief systems in a very contemporary world. And how we're dealing with that and continuing to thrive and survive. That's what I'm hoping that people take away. 

 TT: Thank you. There are a lot of students coming through IAIA and getting their MFAs and are up-and-coming writers. I wanted to know what was your publishing journey. 

 Man, that was tough. It was a tough journey at first when I got through the program, I had a manuscript done, and I was hopeful. I was excited. I came out and went straight to Writing by Writers with Pam Houston. 

A year after I got out, she gave me a scholarship to go up and do her program. I also had a publicist and agent right out of school. Eden Robinson told me to send my manuscript to her agent in Canada because we wrote dark stuff. I did, and she took me on quickly. So I had an agent quickly out of the program. At that point, I was doing a rewrite of the book and doing a second or third draft and Writing by Writers. While I was there, one of my workshop students, or one of my co-students, actually took some of the work that I had turned in for the workshop and sent it to her editor. I didn't know this. She didn't tell me, but I found out later that she sent it to Soho Press. Her editor sent it to my now editor, Juliet, and said “Hey, you might want to check this out.” She read it, and called me on the phone. She was super excited about it. We talked for two hours. It was exciting.  

 I thought something was going to happen so when I got back from Writing by Writers I had a second or third draft. I sent it to my agent, and she sent it out immediately everywhere and we immediately got about 28 to 30 rejection letters. Nobody wanted to publish the book, at least none of the big publishers did. Everybody told me that it was too complicated. They didn't like the timeline. They needed to decide whether it was a crime, fiction, or paranormal coming-of-age book. They needed me to figure that out, and every single publishing house said no. 

We did some more edits over the next couple of years, and this documentary that we were working on called “The Mayors of Shiprock” came out. We reordered the book. We edited the book. We sent it back out and got another flood of rejection letters. Then my editor and I went back and forth for many months. And eventually, I got this email telling me, “I'm really sorry, Ramona. It's a really hard letter to write, but I got to let you go because I can't sell the book, and I'm hoping the best for you moving forward.” So, this is about four or five years out from graduating. And here I was with no agent. A manuscript I couldn't sell had been already rejected by every big publishing house. I didn't know what to do.  

 So, I finished the documentary and went on tour. I was at IAIA actually. And I remember filming Brandon Hobson. He was there as a visiting professor, and he was talking about how he was with Soho. So I just asked him if should I submit to them. And he was like, “Oh, yeah, you should. You should definitely do that.” 

I went home and sent Juliet this book again and told her I lost my agent, and if she was still interested Within a few couple of weeks of that phone call with Juliet, she said, absolutely let me look at it again, and I sent it to her. She read it over the weekend and called me back and was like,” Oh, yeah, we're gonna definitely have to move forward with this. If you're okay.” Within a month it was in the works and I published Shutter with Soho, I didn't have an agent.  

 It was probably about seven years after I started writing it. Eight years. Maybe so. It had definitely been a good five or six years since I had graduated from the MFA program, and I was watching everyone else get their books published, and I was, oh, geez! It's never going to happen. So, when Soho picked it up, I was excited and scared and everything. Within a year it was coming out. That's how quickly it happened. But it took like 8 years to get to that point, right? So, it's not always an easy road. And Juliet says that it's okay that it happened that way. There was a reason. The book waited for the pandemic to move over. It waited for a lot of things to happen for it to come out when it did, and it was the perfect time. 

So, I know all those graduates at the MFA program. I know it's hard and it's not going to be easy. It wasn't easy for me. I didn't get some deal like overnight, and some six-figure deal overnight. It was totally not like that. And we, my husband and I were working like crazy right up until that book came out. I mean every day filming and doing work and hustling, and that's what we've been doing for 30 years, and it didn't stop. It never stops. You must hustle. Even when your book comes out.. You still have to keep that storyline running. You still have to do the work and go on tour and do all the talks and do everything you can do to get your work out. It's not easy, even when you're published. 

It's not going to get any easier for you. It's just going to get to be more stuff to do so. Enjoy your time being a young writer and enjoy the journey of it, because it's a journey, and all of it teaches you something. It's hard not to get down on yourself. It's going to happen you just have to keep working on it and believing in it and putting it out there, and you're going to have moments where you're like I give up, writing sucks. It's for the birds, and I'm number one on that too. I hate writing, writing sucks. But it's what we do. You just have to believe in it. I know it's hard, but it'll work out. That's what I keep telling people. It'll work out. 

TT: Wow, thank you so much. That was insightful to hear about your journey. I will hand it over to you, Rey.

RR: Thank you, Tanya. I have one final question. What's the role of literature in decolonizing a place like Gallup?

Whoa! I tell you the the ultimate thing to do is to get a bookstore in Gallup. Why do we have 28 liquor stores, and not one bookstore?

RR: Fantastic.

Right. It would create a community that we don’t have around books. Jake [Skeets] and I were saying. We can open our bookstore, and it would be a native-run bookstore where kids could come for story hour, and there could be language workshops, and you could have art stuff going on and you could have native authors coming in from all over the place like straight off the train, right across the street to the cool bookstore, and it would be like a hub of literature. That would be the way to decolonize Gallup, by educating Gallup, those are the things that they need. If you give them hope and education, then they won't need booze. They won't need drugs. They won't need these things that that town pushes on you. So that's what I say. We got to open up a bookstore. Yeah.

RR: That feels like a poem right there. I hope that dream comes true. Tanya and I appreciate you. We're so blessed to have you. Thank you so much for your generosity of your time and wisdom.

Below please enjoy Ramona’s playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3M7lUqkhjtqDgoJIVP1vRh?si=FnY97RLfSB-kwk_3rBUS9w

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall his poetry will be published in Huizache. His other book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, IAIA's journal, and Los Angeles Review.

Tanya Tyler (she/her) is Diné from Tséʼałnáoztʼiʼí, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. She graduated with honors from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelor of Arts and double majored in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been published in Conceptions Southwest and Yellow Medicine Review. She is a first-year student in the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.