Interview with Kimberly Blaeser, author of “Ancient Light,” and Rey M. Rodríguez and Tanya Tyler

Kimberly Blaeser is a true treasure in many ways, and we hope the reader gets a sense of her gentle and fierce beauty in this new interview, where we discuss her writer’s journey, poetry, Indigenous history, Indigenous Nations Poets, writing something everyday, her latest book of poetry, Ancient Light, decolonizing publishing and the academay, and many other topics. 

Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019). Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition on the work of fellow White Earth writer, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Her writing is included in over 100 anthologies and translated into multiple languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hungarian. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” 

An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. Blaeser’s honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is a Professor Emerita at UW-Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Recent projects include the curation of a “Water Portfolio” for Prairie Schooner and an “Indigenous #LanguageBack through Poetry” project.

Tanya Tyler and I were so touched by her openness and willingness to share her story. The Institute of American Indian Arts is so blessed to have her as a teacher and a vocal supporter of the program. We hope that you feel the joy that we experienced interviewing her.

RR: Kimberly Blaeser, thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed by Storyteller’s Corner of Chapter House, the literary journal of the Institute of American Indian Arts. We're so grateful to have you, and we could not be more excited.

I'm really grateful to have a chance to talk to you, too. It's wonderful to connect.

RR: Thank you. So we usually like to start with getting a little bit of background and hearing what your writer's journey has been like. How did you get into writing?

My writing journey has been long! I grew up on White Earth Reservation and lived some of my first few years off the grid. The house was always filled—with people and stories. We lived 26 miles from the village store, and the village store was really one large room. Those were my earliest years when we lived part-time with my grandparents.

That immersion, being among people who are wonderful storytellers, was a gift. It is something of an inheritance that you carry with you. Growing up, I was a terribly shy child. So I spent a lot of my youth on the fringe, just taking everything in. I was a little sponge, and because I was so shy, an internal storytelling developed in me. Then later, writing was a source for me to manage everything I was feeling and seeing.

Once we were of school age, we lived in Mahnomen, Minnesota, which is a small town whose population when I was growing up was 1,313 people—and that was the county seat! It was a white town, and we went to a white school. I dealt with any tensions through my beginning scribbles. I've always been writing, and I've always been writing in different forms.

My first job out of college was as a freelance reporter and photographer. I have a real fondness for that time. What I loved was hearing people's stories. I did a lot of feature reporting and could be in the company of people telling about their lives. I enjoyed and still enjoy being on the listening end of life stories. Looking back, I realize another part of what I loved about journalism was when you filed your story—bam! you’re done. But, as you know, I became an academic. When you're teaching, you're never done. There's always something to read or grade or whatever. So I always have a little bit of nostalgia for the schedule you have as someone working in journalism. And also, you have this kind of illusion of being right in the midst of where everything's happening. And sometimes you are. But most of the time, it's an illusion.

As a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, I became a part of a writers' group for the first time. It was called the Writers and Other Troubadours, and I started to walk out some of my work. It was well received, and it was during my time there also that the inaugural Returning the Gift festival was held. It was a huge Native writers' festival held in Norman, Oklahoma.

The very first thing I published was largely because of Winona LaDuke, who created the White Earth Land Recovery Project and was a vice-presidential candidate with Ralph Nader. She is enrolled at White Earth, too, and invited me to be a part of a mini fund-raising tour. Because so much of White Earth Land had been stolen or was tied up in the court systems, rather than wait for generations to try to get these cases litigated, Winona was going to do an end run around the court system, raise money, and buy back land. So we went around basically raising money for the White Earth Land Recovery Project in the State of Minnesota, doing readings and talks, visiting schools, and that kind of thing.

At one of the readings, someone in the audience was a publisher of a journal, and they complimented my work and asked if they might publish some poems. Apparently, Joseph Bruchac, at Greenfield Review Press, saw it, and I ended up being invited to the inaugural Returning the Gift Festival. That event was a watershed moment for a lot of Native writers.

Two hundred and some writers came together in Norman, Oklahoma, for 5 or more days. It was fantastic. This was pre-Internet, so this was the first time many of us met. We then started communicating and formed the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas to serve as a mentoring organization—another huge step in that era. The organizers kept having festivals every year. There I met Leslie Silko, Simon Ortiz, Jeannette Armstrong—and all these amazing people that I had read about who were there in person. In the second year, I submitted a manuscript to their poetry competition and won. So that was my first book. I tend not to bring that book out because first books have some really bad poems in them!

Later, after graduating from Notre Dame, I began teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. So then my writing also included scholarship. I wrote an academic book about Gerald Vizenor, who is an internationally known writer from White Earth. I continue to write about him. He's had 30-some, maybe 40 books. And he's this significant figure. From that time, I continued to publish in scholarship and poetry. I have also published short fiction and creative nonfiction. There are supposedly lines between genres, but they are not as clear for Indigenous writers. I don't think we conceive of those distinctions as hard and fast. So, even in my scholarship, I'll have poems. 

I've also always been interested in photography, and there was a moment in time when the writing and the photography started to come together. I would do either ekphrastic work that was engaging with my own photos or something more like what I have in Ancient Light, where there are these layers of text and image like a palimpsest, where something's spilling into something else, and that's a different kind of form. I call those works picto-poems. They are inspired by Anishinaabe pictographs and Native American ledger art.

My writing career has its own mind, and it goes where it goes, and I just kind of try to hang on.

Just now, I'm working on a lot of fiction. 

RR: Yes, what's helpful about this blog is that we're learning a lot about what it is to be a writer. And we're finding that it's a lot of things. We had an interview with Layli Long Soldier where she talked about poetry and how the language of poetry could be grasses instead of language.

Yes, of course! I actually have a poem that is the language of water.

RR: Exactly. 

That's one of the things I'm interested in right now is the way that we're literate in other languages, like the language of place, and what means what. Who says poems have to be alphabetical? They don't. There are other languages we know, and I'm just very interested in giving them more preference.

RR: Yes. That's helpful for us, too, because we're trying to use the blog to give a sense to emerging writers as to what's a path is. What's a way of doing this? So it's important that we hear your story. How did you decide to go and get a graduate degree?

Oh, my gosh, it's almost embarrassing. When I was an undergraduate, my professors kept saying, “Oh, you should go to graduate school.” I did not know what that was. And if I asked them, then they'd know I shouldn't go. You know it's that whole impostor syndrome, right? And so, I was working for this newspaper, and people kept saying, “Oh, you should be in graduate school.” The librarian, ultimately, in the small town, gave me a book, and it evaluated graduate programs. The two programs that had four stars that looked interesting to me were the University of Minnesota and the University of Notre Dame.

So I just thought, what the heck. I took the GRE, and that was all you needed for Minnesota. But for Notre Dame, you needed the advanced lit part of the GRE. I had signed up for it, and then we had a flood. I was supposed to go to Grand Forks, North Dakota. That was the closest to where I was living, and we had a flood, so of course it wasn't held, and, at that time, I was not the kind of person who would investigate alternatives. I didn't have such a big stake in going to graduate school, right? So I didn't find out the substitute date to take that exam. But I got accepted to Minnesota, and I had tribal funding to go.

However, I didn't like being in a big city. The next fall, I'm already in the Minnesota program, and Notre Dame calls and says we have an incomplete application. I said, Oh, I probably missed the date for that test again this year. And then a day or two later, they called back, and they said, Well, we're going to admit you without those scores. And then I said. I don't know if I could afford Notre Dame. Another day or two passed, and they called. They gave me a fellowship. And they invited me to come out. So it was wild—a sort of bumbling my way into the Notre Dame program.

When I was there, I thought I had signed up to get a Master's, and they had put me in the Ph.D. program, so I made an appointment with the department chair, and he turned out to be this amazing human being named Walter Davis. He ended up being one of my best mentors there. He, very nonchalantly said, “Well, you know what? Why don't we just leave that? If you don't want to do it? You don't have to do it, but if it turns out you do, you don't have to apply again.” Of course, I ended up finding that I did love the study of literature, and loved being among writers. 

There is another part to that story that I have been thinking about recently. I didn't have a lot of teachers in high school that I felt comfortable with. One of them, Al Colligan, just passed away a week ago. When I came home one summer, I was studying for the master's exam. We were catching up in the quick way you do when you run into someone. He asked, “Are you getting your Ph.D?” I said, “Well, I don’t know.” He slowed everything down and became serious. He said, “Really, I think you should.” Sometimes, all you need is a little affirmation from someone you respect, right? Direction is hard to come by if you have no mentors and nobody in your family who's ever done this before.

His comment was a big part of what made me think. Oh, maybe I could do this, and maybe I should do it. I should look closely at this. Later, I ended up having this impactful fellowship at the Darcy McNickle Center for the history of the American Indian in Chicago at the Newberry Library. And that also was one of those things that someone had to encourage (push?) to apply for. 

Sadly, perhaps, I never really felt like I deserved something or qualified for something. But this is part of the reason that I'm doing Indigenous Nations Poets—because I want to be the person who says you deserve to do it, and you should do this. I feel like affirmation and mentors are the biggest things that we need to continue.

RR: Wow! I'm so glad I asked the question because we all need to hear that story.

We have all the talent we need in Native communities, right? Confidence, we may be a little shy on.

RR: And I'm so grateful for that story. We need each other even more to affirm each other, given what's happening in the country. Thank you so much for that story.

Let me tell you just one other thing. I've been very nostalgic about this memory. We are five years into Indigenous Nations Poets, and our very first retreat was in D.C. when Joy Harjo was the U.S. Poet Laureate, and we were at the Library of Congress for a week with Joy. The Library of Congress is the largest in the world, and we had 16 fellows from Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and everywhere in between. Many of them were like me back then--they were very green in that way.

And I remember one day just saying, because it's a little nerve-wracking when you're in a big city or this library, and everything's going on. But I remember one morning saying to them, make sure you look around. Make sure you take this in. This is the largest library in the world, and how many times do you pass the Gutenberg Bible on the way to the bathroom? We had ten faculty or visiting writers there—Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Edgar Silex, Esther Belin, Deborah Miranda, and many other mentors were there, and I think all of us, at different times, said to them, “You belong here.”

RR: Beautiful.

It was also moving when many of them went and got their Library of Congress research cards. I know we're in a scary time right now. But I also feel we have community. We have one another.

RR: Thank you for the reminder.. Along those lines, and then I'll turn it over to Tanya, we ask every poet, and so we have to ask you, what do you consider poetry?

I think poetry is an act of attention. Poetry is looking and then looking beyond the surface of things because the surface is just an illusion. And poetry is a gesture—because language can't contain everything.

RR: So it's also making an opening for all that can't be said?

Right, and poetry is an invitation because poems are made between the writer and the reader/ listener. They don't just exist. They have to be created within that sort of engagement. And so they're an invitation for someone to enter the poem and make meaning with you, right?

A lot of times, you send your poem out into the world, and then it's on its own. It goes off, and it does its thing. And I have so many stories about what poems have done in the world. But I feel like that is what it is in many ways, too; it is an invitation.

And to connect things: When I say poetry is an act of attention. I also feel that photography is also an act of attention. You are paying attention and making a photo, not taking a photo. You're engaging with a source, not collecting something. You're creating, making art.

Dorothea Lange said that you use a camera so that you can learn to see without the camera.

RR: Hmm, yes.

If poetry is an act of attention, it's teaching us how to pay attention. It is a process. It is not just a product. It's a process that we're engaged in.

RR: Wow! Thank you so much. Okay, Tanya, take it away.

Hey, Tanya.

TT: Well, thank you again, Kimberly, for your time here today, and it's exciting to be a part of this interview. I agree with Rey that what I like about these Chapter House interviews is people's backgrounds. They're all so different. And it's so amazing how we all ended up here. The timing. Is it the universe that brought us all together? And that's my big hope with these interviews is that it just takes somebody to read them and be like, “That can be me.”

One of my mentors was also Jerry Vizenor, and he had this whole discussion about chance. The role that chance plays in our lives, and that we have to be open to it. So I really appreciate what you just said.

TT: Thank you. The other thing I want to share is that I don't consider myself a poet, but this was such a great challenge from Rey to review your book, and I learned a lot from it as well. I liked what you said about being a quiet person. It's like you're recording these events because you're so observant when you're like that.

Yes.

TT: It is present in Ancient Light as well. How did you choose your words and the imagery to convey that intended meaning for “Ancient Light” in particular?

This book, in my mind, has a trajectory that starts by looking at colonization and everything colonization has wrought. And it's not looking only at what it's done to Indigenous people. It's looking at what it's done to our environment. That mentality of ownership and collection. That's part of that colonial mentality. I wanted to say, look at this crazy way of being in the world. And the damage that it's done. A few of the early poems describe that colonized world. 

But this book was also partly written during the pandemic. So there's that other loss, which was the loss of life, and maybe the loss of feeling safe. The loss of connection happened for many people during that time. And I wanted to acknowledge it. 

But then I wanted us to realize and tap into what it is that has made us resilient. How have we survived to this point? How are we thriving as Indigenous people? How did we heal from some of the things that we or our ancestors endured?  My grandma, my older aunts and uncles, were boarding school era. So for me it’s not ancient history. And the impact of that in Indigenous communities is still immense. I wanted to know what do we hold on to? What can help us? And so for me, part of that healing is to use “ancient light." As a term that covers a lot of things, but it can be anything from traditional Indigenous knowledge, ceremony, or the healing that comes from being in nature. The art itself. I'm trying to look at what feeds us, what defines for us a different way of being in the world, and that different way of being in the world is under the light that's cast by our traditions. It's that ancient way that helps show us our way now. 

So that's the trajectory. Then, within that, for example, there's the whole group of poems titled “The Way We Love Something Small.” At first, I thought it was a series. But it's not a series. It's an aesthetic. It's a way of engaging with the world. And it goes back to what I said. Poetry is an act of attention. It's looking closely, but looking closely in a very vulnerable way, so that it's the reciprocity we always talk about in Indigenous communities. It's not just us casting our eyes, but the being seen, being open, too. If something is given back to us, we acknowledge it, in whatever way we do that. If we pay attention, something returns to us. And so I wanted to also note and attend to those transformations that can take place when we go beyond the edge of seeing. 

When we open ourselves in a different way, we become vulnerable, we fall deeper into the world. We let go more of the ego, and we become a part of the larger world, something bigger than our human selves. There are all kinds of ways in those poems that that happens. But they're all thinking about transformation, and I feel that, in that way, they come out of the Anishinaabe dream song tradition, and they also come out of the Zen haiku tradition. I could say so much about either of those. I mean, we could have a whole interview about those because I'm fascinated by what I think of as inheritance along those lines. But I do feel that what's happening is not declarative as much as it is a journey.

TT: Thank you.

The other thing that happens in Ancient Light is that I'm working with the visual poetry more than I have in other collections, and for the first time, I was allowed to put in some picto-poems. 

TT: I love that one. It is one of my favorites.

Oh, Is that your favorite one?

TT: Yes, it was so powerful.

Nobody saw that poem until I put it in this book because I didn't want to be dissuaded. I didn't want someone to critique it in a way that I would withdraw it because it is one of those times when you just take a chance on yourself, right? 

The book had been accepted, but I was putting it in its last form, which was a lot about rearranging the order. And when I was doing that, I realized that I needed to take some poems out and that maybe some poems were missing, right? And so I put this poem in, and when I shot off that last manuscript to Elizabeth, my editor at Arizona, she wrote back and said, “That is an amazing poem.” I was like, “Oh, my gosh! I'm so glad that somebody saw it and liked.” Sometimes, we're not the best judges of our work. Sometimes, we need distance to say whether or not this is working.

One of the things that has always been helpful for me, especially early on, was to be a part of a writers' group where I could try things out. But now, people who are like you are at IAIA. You have your whole cohort that you could share work with, and hopefully forever. You know that continues, right? 

So tell me what else you want to know about this book, because I could talk sort of endlessly about it.

TT: Sure. What was the easiest poem to write for Ancient Light? Which one just came right out?

Oh, wow! I'm not sure about this, but there have been some poems that have come easily in my life. I'm not 100% sure that anything came too quickly here, although maybe a couple of those, the way we love something small poems, were unfolding from the experience of the experience. They might have existed, and all I was doing was translating them, if that makes any sense. So those came more quickly in that way, perhaps.

Hmm, I see some of the different sorts of things in here, including narrative poems. This reminds me of one of the other things in the book. I'm interrogating certain things. Like the ways of evaluating, the ways of counting, and the ways of measuring. Some of the systems we have in place. Who's to say what makes something good or worthwhile? 

Or let me see if I can think of a poem that illustrates that. Oh, there's the one about “Alaskan poems you didn't write” where it says, “live like drumbeats under your skin . . . We watch days bump suns in Alaskan skies/our pockets empty of words for measure:/ how eloquent is lapping—-/against singularity.”

So the idea is that words, in some ways, can't hold experience. That we can't measure everything. Things are ephemeral, and there's no capturing them. In the poem, I seem to want to say that out loud so that whoever is in the poem with me feels free to leave the poem for the experience. Because you don't want it to be about experience. You want that, too, but you want the poem to invite experience.

So there's the one poem that was about winter, and alludes to making the snowflakes, but towards the end it says even then our tenderness too big for accuracy. That is again suggesting that things can't be contained. It was important to me to interrogate what is thought to be the systems of evaluation. I want to undermine them a little bit. Or maybe a whole bunch.

TT: Yes, I agonize over what I'm doing sometimes, maybe more than I should.

Yes.

TT: What was the hardest one for you to write?

I think it was hard for me to write poems that inch closer to trauma. I haven't revealed a great deal about certain experiences.

I don't believe that I should sit in judgment of other people who, I know, have had their own challenges. So other people's less than perfect behavior, even when it impacts me—I've not wanted to tell those stories in some big, flamboyant way, like: This horrible thing! Or present myself as a victim. That's not what I wanted to do. So I have just a few poems in here that I think don't go right to the dark heart of an experience, but rather allude to it.

And so I was perhaps reluctant to share those details, and yet at the same time, I think, why are we doing this work, anyway? Linda Hogan says we write for those who come after us, for those who might find in our story something that helps them along their journey. So if I know that other people have had this experience, the kindest thing I can do is to say you're not alone.

I also don't want to be graphic. I want to, as kindly as I can, and with as much forgiveness as I can muster, acknowledge that this hurt me, this damaged me. This is part of my past. So, for example, there's this poem called “This Small Curtained Space.” It's a long poem, and it is not direct in a graphic way, but if you read it, you will understand some of the things alluded to. 

There's a moment when the speaker asks the question at the very beginning, “Why write the bar scenes,/ the waiting in Minnesota winter car scenes,/ If you have survived them?” Then later, the answer comes: “Why? Because a chair falls to the floor. / Because a voice rises and breaks, / rises and breaks like a glass shattering / a door slamming, skin opening again. . .”  It goes on, then closes: “Because survival is finally just survival: / a child's hand holding the curtain closed / longer, better, letting no light out—or in.”

It's that idea of needing to let light in to heal. I think it also says “stitch on the jagged underside of hurt.” If we have broken spaces in us, we have to be able to acknowledge them. I'm not saying we have to write about them.  But if we write about them—even I just for myself or others for themselves—we let the littlest bit of light shine on those pasts. We essentially say: I acknowledge this. This is what happened. This is how I'm healing. I think those poems were hard for me, and in fact. I did not send this off until I shared it with my brother because he lived through it. He knows the same stories. I said, I want you to read this new collection of poems. He read it, and he cried, and then he said, “It's beautiful.” I felt like he understood, not just the writing, but the why.  

We need to tell sometimes a little bit about what has harmed us. I do that dance carefully. A lot of what happens is off stage. I don't want to traumatize or re-traumatize somebody else by telling about my trauma. I don't want to do that, but instead I want to say, Hey, I've been there. You got this. You can get through this. We're gonna make it. We can. Those are the things that I'm trying to communicate by that subtlety. And that's just my decision, you know. Everyone makes their own choices on how they tell their story. But I have certain decisions I've made about how I care for people who may have harmed me, because I understand the history that caused them to be a person who harms other people. It came from somewhere. I actually have this new poem titled, “What if we are not broken by our histories?” Yes, what if we are not broken by our histories? 

TT: That was incredible to listen to, and that was a question I wasn't even going to ask. But you answered it for me. When we are writing about trauma, how much should we even include? Because I've been reading so many memoirs lately. I read Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan. The one I'm reading right now is Danielle Geller's Dog Flowers, and it is so difficult to get through. I had to take breaks from it.  

Of course. Yes, I guess the big question is, do we (write about trauma)? And then how do we? What I often say to my students is, nobody says you have to go to the most hurtful place. That's not the only story you have to tell. You don't have to go there. You don't have to ever go there, but you surely shouldn't go there if you're not ready. There's a time when you can face your demons. No one should force you to do that. I say people should care for themselves and their stories in the way that's healthiest for them. Yes. And sometimes it means to speak it. And sometimes, it means to wait. So that's just me. Other people have different opinions. I respect what people's choices have been, the reasons they choose to do something, and how they choose to write about things. We all have our interior court that we have to answer to. 

TT: And I liked what you said about sharing it with your brother first, before you're able to release it. I think that it was powerful to include community and family in it. Thank you. 

Yes. That idea of community makes me realize there's one other thing that I'd want to talk about in this book that I didn't talk about. And that is the Anishinaabemowin. At Indigenous Nations Poets, we started a #LanguageBack initiative a little more than a year ago.  During the wonderful Land Back movement, I've always been applauding the actions. But my head was always also saying #LanguageBack, #Language Back, because that's another arm of sovereignty. And I finally said it out loud in a board meeting, and everyone was like, “Whoa, yeah, let's do it.” And so we've been doing that work.  

This is another whole weird thing. It's hard for us as Indigenous people not to be ashamed if we're not fluent in our languages. Yeah, there's a whole lot of shame that comes with that. But it's not our fault. So that's one of the huge things I always try to say because it's linguicide. It was done on purpose. 

I feel lucky because my grandparents and older aunts and uncles did speak Anishinaabemowin. I absorbed some elements and spoke some as a child. Then education hit—American education. Now I'm recovering what I knew and building onto it. But I still feel like that's a luckier situation than many people who weren't even exposed to their language. 

And there's everything the language carries involved, too. Everything that's embedded in the language, and some things that cannot be spoken in English. There is a way of being in the world that's reflected in the language. I think it is an act of sovereignty, and it is an act of love to reclaim our languages. Love for those people who kept are languages and culture alive. 

Maybe it's just because I'm older. But I often say, we have to be kind to ourselves as we go through all of this recovery.  For example, I make jokes in my writing. I have this one poem that asks, How do you conjugate after 40?  I speak baby Ojibwe mostly. I'm now learning conjugation, but it's important to recognize that this is a process. And to allow yourself to be engaged in that process in your writing. If you look at my earliest books, the double vowel system had not yet been developed for Anishinaabemowin. So everybody was just spelling like things sounded. Which means across my books, words are spelled differently. (Since later, I, like most people, adopted the double-vowel system for spelling.) I also might spell words differently from someone in Canada. Even now, there are different dialects and so forth. So, it's not necessarily wrong or a mistake to use what you know. This is how you know the language, and who else is making this poem? So, yeah, use it—and keep learning.  

We recently had two big, exhausting, but “perfect” workshops in Wisconsin. We met in two different tribal locations and worked in two different languages at each location. This means we had language “gurus” and poets, and whoever signed up. And we had Menominee, Oneida, Mahican, and Anishinaabemowin. We are doing “#LanguageBack through Poetry.” Because any language you learn, your writing is part of how you continue to build that into your actual memory, your system, until it comes naturally. If you play with language, as we all do as writers, then you're looking really closely at words and their relationships. Oh, and this morpheme is also in this word. And you see how they go together. You play with similarities, or maybe you work in metaphor. But whatever you do, it reinforces the learning. Then, when we either publish or perform it for our communities, we're giving it back. So, there's a reciprocity in that as well. If language is a gift from either our human communities or the land, or the water. If it's a gift from the spirits, then we also have a responsibility to give it back because that's part of reciprocity. 

Believe me, I'm not saying I'm fearless. I'm not. I get very nervous sometimes. because I'm imperfect as I learn. But I'd like to meet the first perfect person before I die! 

TT: Going back to Ancient Light, I do have a question. There are a lot of your photographs in it. But the most striking one to me was of the Indian baby. In front of the . . . 

“Indian Baby in Front of an Indian Bldg., Albuquerque, NM.”  

TT: Yes, I just want to ask, how did you come across that image? And what was your reason for including it? 

Yes, that's an interesting story. One of my UWM students, Paul Finger, used to send me Indian kitsch. He went all over the country. He was a filmmaker. He did all these interesting things. But I would come into Curtin Hall at UWM, and they'd say, “Dr. B., You have a box.” So, it's from Paul Finger. He sent annuals from some school, postcards—a lot of unique things.  That particular image he found in an antique shop. You know how you go into those stores, and there are just boxes of people's photos. These are part of somebody's family, and they're just sitting in this place. Well, he had found that photo and thought I'd be interested in it, and sent it to me. And I was moved by it. In the poem, I suggest a connection on two levels. One is I have pictures of me sitting in a laundry basket like this baby sitting in the soapbox. And I'm all surrounded by my Indian grandmas like this baby is, too.  

Then, just that labeling on the image. Like the person who owns the photo is collecting Indianness. I wanted to critique it, so I put those two things together. Partly, I'm trying to rise above the power of that commodification. So I go into Anishinaabemowin, and I speak of “tended embers of ancient light.” It reads: “But, boozhoo, survival. / Boozhoo tended embers of ancient light— / fire in the flint of a child's eye.“ Where is our survival if not in our children, you know? Because we're imagining a story. From this, I imagine a child who became very powerful and would have written back to the person who collected him as a child.  

TT: Wow! That was such a powerful image for me. And there's just the universe at work again, bringing that photo to you and to the student for finding it. 

Exactly. Yes, you just never know. The thing is, too, sometimes something comes to us and we're afraid of it. I have stories. But let's just say it takes a while for us to accept the gifts we've been given or the requests that are made of us by the universe. People think you have to have a big ego to do certain things. I think you have to have no ego to do certain things that you have to dive in and say, “Okay, I'm just going to give it a try.” What if I fail? What if? There's a way in which it's not about you. It's about the thing the universe has asked you to do, right? 

RR: A lot of your work around decolonizing, and I'm very curious about how you would decolonize the present. What would a decolonized publishing world look like, or an academic setting look like? 

Okay, I'm gonna go with the first because I taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee for oh, my gosh! 35, maybe more, years, some very long amount of time. I taught at the University of Notre Dame. I taught at Beloit College. I teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts. I think there might be one other place. Anyway. I always had in my mind that I'm in the educational system partly to undermine the educational system. For me, that meant the authoritarian kind of structure and the hierarchical structure. It's interesting that not everybody can accept when you give them some power back. I found that my graduate students were much more amenable to working as a community, and that undergraduates had to be convinced that they knew something that they could share or that we could work together to discover something.  

So I'll just give you an example. Once, early on in my career, I was teaching an Intro to Native Lit, and I can't remember what work I was teaching, but in the intro classes, you have people from across the disciplines. I had people from engineering and math, besides English. There was something about the color blue in the work. Oh, it might have been Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. I'm not sure. Anyway, it was a book, and it had blue in it. They were like, so what does blue mean? Of course, I turned it back: what do you think blue means? I think ambiguity was not allowed in their frame of mind. Not possible that it wasn't one plus one equals two. I wanted them to see that one plus one equals possibility. What if something is not a mathematical formula? What if there is some ambiguity, some allusion, some chance for you to enter the story and make meaning? That was entirely beyond what they could do at that time. 

Let's just say the K through 12 education system, where you're being taught to a test. And it has a right answer. And you memorize. And you answer, that's what you're taught to do. It's a big leap when someone says, “Let's just figure this out together. Let's talk about it. We could debate it.” That discomforts them. But isn't there a right answer? No, there's not a right answer. It's purposefully ambiguous. That is a big leap from the method they were used to. To theorize and collaborate was new. There were moments in time when people took to it, especially graduate students, but sometimes undergrads, too. But there were always people who resisted.

Mary Catherine Nagel had a play, and it had to do with the Cherokee Removal. I can't remember the name of it right now. Oh, it’s Sovereignty, I think. If you remember, there were two sides to that whole Cherokee removal. And there are two names we associate with the process, the two families that were in opposition, the Rosses and Ridges, in that history. The play kind of upsets the way that history has been told and makes you say, “Oh, wait a minute. I always thought that these people were in the right. And now, someone's telling this story about the other side of it.” Anyway, it's a cool play. So we came to class, and I said, do you all know the movie—argh,  now, I'm probably not going to remember it. But what is that series of movies where there were the guy turns into a wolf and the guy that is a vampire? Do you remember this? 

RR: Is that Twilight? 

Yes, the Twilight series! Okay, so there were the people who were the Jacob people and the people who were the Edward people. There were two characters. People picked sides. They were for one or the other. In this Mary Catherine Nagel play, I said, “Okay, you have to pick a side.” Who did they want to support in this? And then, because the story had to do with a court hearing.  I made someone the judge, and everybody else picked a side, and then they had to work together to prepare their points and come back and argue their case. And whoa! They were, first of all, they were amazing, and second of all, they loved it. They loved it because they were telling us/me what they learned and telling us what the play meant, and I was letting them figure it out. At the end of that semester, everyone said that was their favorite class of the semester, and some of them said that was their favorite class ever. Which was affirming. 

With my Intro to Creative Writing, I always start with: What do you know about that’s unique? What is your special talent? What is your secret knowledge? Because we all have that, and we should tap into it. In an educational system, taking down that hierarchy. That's what I think is important, and there are lots of ways to do it. But I think just having the students have the realization that they, too, have knowledge is key, and shaking up the power structure a little helps. 

So that's that was that was the first half of your question, and the other was, how do you decolonize? What was the other half of it? 

RR: Well, I was thinking about the publishing industry. 

The publishing industry. Well, I think we're doing that, too. That has been the concern for me and some of my cohort who have been part of the beginning of Indigenous Nations Poets.  There is always an “Indian du jour.” People are like, there's the writer and all the lesser writers. You know what I mean? Part of what we wanted to do with In-Na-Po is to have people who supported one another and who wanted to share the glory, and wanted to share the publications, and wanted to read in groups. Let's remember where we came from. Let's make this our space. This is how we work in community. We don't have to do what they do. In lots of small ways, we're trying to undermine that.  

In Indigenous Nations Poets, we make these poem cards—mini broadsides. Usually, these highlight one poet—someone singular and great. Instead, we have two poets, one on each side. And maybe we have a faculty, and then we have a fellow, and we're putting them together. And it's not about one person. It's about our communal voice and what we can build together. 

It seems like little tiny things, but add up all of our little tiny choices. What’s important is what stands behind them. Another example: For Indigenous Nations Poets, we plan readings at our retreats, and we have our fellows and our faculty read together—an In-Na-Po community reading. Just in every way we can, we're trying to break down those weird hierarchies that I don't think are really good for us. Why should we imitate this structure that you know has created this horror that we're living in? Why should we do that? I think there are other ways that we can build. That's how we decolonize—when we make small choices about what is the best way to honor community. That means in publishing as well as anything else. Yes. 

RR: And for those that may not know what Indigenous Nations Poets is, what is it? 

Sure. It's an organization that is just five years old. I'm excited—it's five years old! Its original impetus or mission statement is to mentor emerging writers. Because I felt like that is what was missing: mentoring for writers and support for Indigenous poetics and Indigenous poets, past, present, and future, and to recognize that poetry also supports the sovereignty of tribes and supports Indigenous languages. It recognizes all of those things. We have an annual mentoring retreat where we have fully funded 16 writers to come, and we have cool faculty. Last year, Layli was one of our faculty members. We have well-known Indigenous writers come in and work in these community spaces with writers, and for many of those writers, they have never been in an all-Indigenous space.  

Maybe they've been in an MFA program where every bloody time they read something, someone would say something like, I don't know what relocation means. Then they have to waste their time teaching history instead of talking about what their poem is, or their story is. Or they have people who don't get the aesthetic out of which we write. There's a lot of explaining and defending that goes on. If you're in a group where everybody else gets it, all you have to do is write and talk about your writing, and you don't have to do all that other stuff.  

At these retreats, we work with the community we are in. Last year in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. We had someone from the Dakota Nation come and talk about Bdóte, which is an important historical and spiritual site there. We always do an interart activity because, as Indigenous people, we don’t separate the arts one from another. There are all these overlaps, and many people work across the arts. Last year, we worked with the Minnesota Center for the Book and did some mono-prints featuring Indigenous languages. The year before, we made a film. After the fellows are selected, we work with them for three years. 

We have online workshops, AWP readings, share publication opportunities, etc. We also have professionalization opportunities at the retreats, including panels of publishers or editors. In-Na-Po is a part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poetry Coalition, and every year, we do a project. This year, the theme is Poetry and Shelter, so we invite our fellows to help with our project. Overall, the goal is mentoring, building the community, and making space for all of us as Indigenous writers.  

RR: That's phenomenal. Well, we've taken up a lot of your time. 

A lot of yours. 

RR: The last one we'd like to ask is there any advice you would give to emerging writers and poets? 

I have this one piece of advice I always give, which is to read. You have to read all the good stuff—as much of it as you can. Because if you are only reading other emerging writers in your workshops, that's not going to feed you as well as reading the amazing writers from all over who, through the centuries, have done gorgeous work. Don't be afraid to read older writers, and don't be afraid to be influenced. People are like, “Oh, I can't read stuff that might influence me.” Well, you know you are you, and they are them, and you write from an experience and in a voice no one else has. Besides, personally, I want to be influenced by Rumi. I want to be influenced by some of the great writers. So reading is really important. 

And the other thing, which is going to sound silly. But you know how you are at a cocktail party or  a dinner, or when you meet at a conference, and someone says, “Oh, I'm a writer.” You say, “What are you working on?” And they can't tell you because they're thinking about being a writer and talking about being a writer, but that’s it. They forget to do that central part of the writing life-- the writing itself. 

So one of the things that I say. . .Wait, I'm gonna show you first. These are journals. 

RR: Wow! 

Stacks and stacks of journals over here. I suggest that you write every day. That doesn't mean you have to write something great every day, but if you prime your pump, you're going to have a better opportunity to get the writing done that you want to do. 

So this is my journal right now, and I'll just show you in here. It says WSED—Write Something Every Day. Okay, so let’s say you’ve had four hours of sleep, and you're tired, and you're kind of cranky, and you hurt your leg, and you have no inspiration, right? Guess what? That little note excuses you.  

I put that down, WSED, and that means:  This might be crap, but I'm writing something. It's basically saying, this is not the best thing I've ever done. So I put the acronym for Write Something Every Day, and then I write something, and that little label permits me to write something bad. Write something that's not stellar or sparkling. But it is also surprising how many times you start putting that pen or pencil to the paper, and oh, I just had this idea, or oh, this word is interesting, whatever spark sparks.  

I'm big on all the things you can do in a journal. I cannot tell you the number of culled poems that I have created. Let’s say, I have an assignment—something someone asked me to write about. I don't know. Birch trees. Well, guess what? I probably have 10 different things. I've already written these little tiny scraps that I wrote about a birch tree. I go and cull stuff from my journal, or I do what I call wordscapes. So, you know, landscape, right? If there's something I'm going to write about, while writing, I don’t want to go look at a dictionary or try to find a word for something. So I think about birch trees, or I think about thunderstorms, or whatever it is that you're writing about, and I put done every detail, fact, idea, tangent, I think of.  

Just scratch down things, words and phrases, and connections. I also do some research, poke around online, or in my books. I had to do a poem recently about curiosity cabinets. Before I started the poem, I had six pages in my journal about curiosity cabinets—their history, other words for them, famous curiosity cabinets or their keepers, items found there through the centuries, etc. I have a lot of curiosities in my library and around the house. So I start looking at and listing all the things I have. Voila, you have your wordscape, your word bank. Then you're writing, and you're looking for a word, and all you have to do is skip over to that page like, oh, there it is! Because sometimes it's hard, you break the movement or the flow of your writing if you go off searching for something.  

I believe it’s also important to do some handwriting, because it's brain to hand, and that engages different neurons. It is different than type type type. And you're not writing to the shape of the computer page. There are all kinds of reasons. But also because not everything can be typed. Sometimes you may draw pictures or charts in your journal, draw arrows, sketch layout, etc…  

I have a perfect story to illustrate why you should always have with you at least a scrap of paper and a pen or pencil. My friend, Amy DeJarlais, used to “babysit a resort up in Northern Wisconsin. One time, while she was there, she got up early, before she was going to take her shift, and she rented a rowboat and went out on the lake/. Then, poetry happened! (You never know when poetry is going to happen.) She had a pen, but she did not have any paper, so she wrote on the rowboat. For real. Then the next day she came back, and she said to the guy, “I need to rent the rowboat I had yesterday.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, we got lots of rowboats.” She's like. “No, no! I need to rent the rowboat I had yesterday.” Because when there is a poem, you always have to have the tools, right? 

I know a lot of people take notes on their phones. I don't. I have to have a pen and paper or something. Regardless, you have to write it down when you think of it, when you overhear that thing on the bus, when you see something that’s so cool or, wow, shocking! You have to write it down, then, because you think I will never forget this. You will forget it because you're making supper, and you got caught in traffic, and your child needs art supplies, and you have to run back out. By the time you get to your journal or your computer. What was that again? Or, you have a dream. And you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm gonna write about this tomorrow. Uh uh! Not unless you scribble something down. 

RR: Thank you so much. You are such a treasure to us.

Miigwech!

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 poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School. 

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.

Photo credit to John Fisher