Flutie lives on the edge of an enormous quiet that she wants to transcend. Her family's life on a dirt road in Western Oklahoma, her father's job repairing old cars and tractors belonging to impoverished hay farmers, her brother’s betrayal, and her mother's indifference are all parts of a story Flutie wants to tell if she can find the words.In a library book, Flutie reads the myth of Philomela, whose tongue was cut out by her sister’s husband so she cannot tell that he raped her. A...

"[Glancy's] long-distance drives take on the monastic qualities of a spiritual pilgrimage rather than serving merely as a means to a destination." --The New York Times Book ReviewThe land carries voices. The land remembers what happened upon it. In traveling the land, I become familiar with more than myself. Give me the journey of the road; it is my journey home.From the award-winning Native American literary writer Diane Glancy co...

1990 Winner of the Mildren P. Nilon Award for Minority FictionIn Trigger Dance, her first collection of stories, Diane Glancy takes us to uneasy places where both the environment and the characters are at risk, where even the animals grieve. Sometimes the author's voice, sometimes the voices of the characters, tell us about their migrations, symbolic or literal. Diane Glancy's characters walk in two worlds and try to build a middle ground between ...

From the award-winning Native American literary writer Diane Glancy comes a book about travel, belonging, and home. Travel is not merely a means to bring us from one location to another. "My sense of place is in the moving," Glancy writes. For her the road is home—its own satisfying destination. But the road also makes demands on us: asking us to be willing to explore the incomprehensible parts of the landscapes we inhabit and pass through—as well as to, ultimately, let them blur as they g...

Diane Glancy was working on two manuscripts. The prose poems of The Lost Notebooks of the Painter's Wife and the variants of The Cubist. Notebooks was narrative; the other, in the Cubist style, looked at subjects from several perspectives. The manuscripts began calling to one other, though they seemed to have nothing in common. One day, she had the thought they could be the same manuscript. She combined them--alternating poems from each, one after another--until she found they came out eve...

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as “trouble causers,” arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative non...

A professor hears the voices of Biblical women. She begins writing. What was it like for Dorcas to die and be brought back to life? What was it like for Philip's daughters to live with the threat of persecution after Christ was crucified? What did Miriam feel when she sat in the leprosy tent? What did they all say as the professor wove her own story between their voices? It was Michal, David's first wife, who made a bolster of goat's hair for David's bed when Saul, her father, was trying t...

4 x 4 The first words were footprints of the wind in our ears. Sometimes we cried with earache. We wrapped our heads in animal-skins. Our cries were feral in the dark. We packed dried berries and pieces of meat and camped for the night. We followed hoof-prints in the snow. We saw a tuft of animal-hair on a thorny branch jittering as we passed We dreamed of it at night. We followed the course of streams and rivers. It was an old knowing of the world. Our journeys were written on the lines o...

Many towns have their murderers, but are they also members of a church, a Boy Scout leader, or president of the congregation? Could they be trusted to bring a covered dish faithfully to church suppers? This novel takes the BTK murders in Wichita, Kansas, as inspiration to question issues of evil. How could a man commit murder and yet sit in church all those years until he was caught? What is a Christian? What is Christianity? Can a Christian murderer go to heaven? Mark Cabot and Ralph Ghea...

Constructed as a series of reports to the Department of the Interior, these poems of grief, anger, defiance, and resistance focus on the oppressive educational system adopted by Indian boarding schools and the struggle Native Americans experienced to retain and honor traditional ways of life and culture.

In 1838, thirteen thousand Cherokee were forced to leave their homeland in the Southeast and walk 900 miles to present-day Oklahoma. Hunger, cold, fatigue, and disease threatened their very survival. Their grueling relocation trek-the Trail of Tears-takes on new immediacy and meaning with this stunning work of fiction. Maritole loses not only her home and her settled life in North Carolina, but also many of the people closest to her. A chorus of voices joins hers to vividly recreate the tr...

"My father, Wood Hume, worked for the railroad. We followed him from town to town, through Texas and Louisiana in the tomato-red sun that sank into the plains. I learned to read on highway signs." So begins the beautifully told story of Rachel and her itinerant Southern family. In The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, Diane Glancy captures the language of the rural south in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.Sometimes the Humes lived in the Cajun town of Po...