Interview by Désirée Zamorano
On stage at Flor de Nopal’s literary festival in Austin, Texas, Erika Wurth knocked my socks off with her audacity. As I grew to know her body of work, I realized that energy, rage, and passion pretty much describe her formidable productivity. Dynamic and well-published, her writing includes a collection of poetry, Indian Trains (West End Press); a debut novel about the gritty young life of Margaritte in Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend (Curbside Splendor); a presentation entitled Spaceships and Detectives of Native Fiction at AWP; as well as a forthcoming short story collection, Buckskin Cocaine (Astrophil Press). Erika brings an intense intellect and hunger for engaging narrative and poetry. She is a Professor at Western Illinois University in the Department of English, where she supports and nurtures young writers. We chatted by phone and email.
ORIGINS
You straddle many worlds. Talk about the tension between your academic life, with its particular language and structures, and your creative life.
WURTH
On a pragmatic level, sometimes it’s hard to make time and have energy for your writing when you’re teaching, touring, and taking care of your family. But what I do is “steal time.” In other words, sometimes you’re not going to have a lovely, perfect afternoon to write. Sometimes you’re going to have to steal fifteen minutes in-between a flight and two hours of grading. I have learned to be spectacularly unromantic about writing, and I think it’s how I end up finishing manuscripts.
But for me, on a more abstract level, though I'm engaged intellectually—and I've written a couple of essays on native poetics and narratology, the second one being published in The Writer's Chronicle—I often feel disconnected with the ways in which native academics talk about Native Americans and native literature. Sometimes I feel like native academics (and often native writers, to be fair) are performing being Indian for a non-native audience. They seem to present natives not only as if we are (only) natural and spiritual, but also in this deeply ambiguous way, a way that’s not particularly realistic or reflective of our lives. That’s an unfair and shitty thing to say, but I like to think that I leave room for more than a simple Pan-Indian reflection of native life in my creative work, and I would like for that same room to be allowed in our lives and in our literature, and in the academic or critical perception of our work.
ORIGINS
What do you mean by “Pan-Indian”?
WURTH
I would see a lot of younger native writers say, “You know I’m tired of Native American literature displaying this Pan-Indian stuff—I’m Dinè (Navajo), I’m not just ‘an Indian’.” That really used to offend me because there are lots of Indians like me who are three tribes or who grew up with people who were of other tribes and so had their own pocket of culture that’s specific and distinct. Some of us practice Native American church and go to Powwow, or speak a mix of Lakota and Navajo, and I felt like “Pan-Indian” was a good description of people in my situation because not everyone is from a Rez or one tribe. And even if someone is, you still can’t boil their experiences down to one conglomerative, generalized thing.
But what young native writers were talking about, I realized, was that by “Pan-Indian” they meant every stereotypical Native American concept in popular culture that has nothing to do with any of our cultures.
ORIGINS
When you talk about your heritage you say:
WURTH
So much has been taken. So, when we talk about our tradition, our language, our literature, and the shame we were made to feel for our very bodies, our way of being, there is a struggle in connecting what we were to what we are. But there are so many of us still here, still speaking our languages, learning them, doing things that are a contemporary version of what our ancestors did even when America tried to kill off those things. We are not a thing to be preserved; we are human beings whose culture has been damaged—but we have survived that damage, and we are beginning to thrive.
ORIGINS
How in the hell do you navigate that, first as a person, then as a writer?
WURTH
I started to get very concrete about that question a number of years ago. I think that land is important, and spirituality and culture, but I have begun to understand that language is fundamental. How I'm going to negotiate it, in a way that I think is actually beautiful and a force for deep good, is to learn an indigenous language. I would love to learn one of mine, but my boyfriend is Lakota. I grew up hearing some of it, and if we have a child it would be a member of his nation, but his is a thriving language. Studies have shown that when native people grow up speaking their languages, they are healthier in every single way. So I took a language-intensive course and plan to attend the twice-monthly courses they have at the Indian Center in Denver.
ORIGINS
Do you feel like you are performing in a sense, on the page, and if so, for whom?
WURTH
A postmodernist might say all identity is performance. I can see that, but I think the problem is every culture ends up with a very broad performance that is either unhealthy or healthy only due to being indigenous in some way, shape, or form. I think that it’s unhealthy to perform stereotypes (and I think a lot of this can be unconscious) that aren’t human. Meaning, specifically for native people, these ideas that we are just sort of an ambiguously, ecologically, and spiritually natural people versus people who are trying to continue really wonderful, specific, healthy, lovely traditions in a modern way—that we are people who are STILL fighting to keep what land we have, fighting for our languages and lives. For example, I am Chiricahua. The Chiricahua were shoved in part onto the Mescalero Reservation and in part (Geronimo’s band) onto Oklahoma. The Chiricahua have now garnered their own reservation but, again, after so many years. That’s not just an abstract, nice idea about how we’re connected to nature in some ambiguous way, that’s a concrete relationship to a very specific place.
I remember in a native lit class I took when I was doing my PhD, we were reading so much literature by native writers that reinforced these stereotypes. And I was always diplomatically objecting, but I was the only native, so suffice it to say the students and the professor really, REALLY did not like me because I was disrupting a pretty little idea (which ended once in her screaming at me that I could not attend class next session). The teacher created a classroom environment (through texts and discussion) where people felt invited to say that natives could literally speak to the earth, talk to trees. And this idea that we’re magical and not human, well, for me, that puts our status closer to a unicorn than a human, and I’m just not comfortable with that. These stereotypes are really dangerous.
And the final irony? She was Mexican-American, and the last day of class the students were complaining TO HER about how Leslie Silko had said there was plenty of room in America for Mexican folks. And I was like, yeah, you wouldn’t be complaining if those immigrants were from England. And the prof looked at me and I swear I could hear something just BREAKING in there, because she realized I was defending Mexican folks—her folks—in the same way I had my own. I think she realized how deeply she had put us in a fantasy category, how badly she had removed Indians from any important material reality.
ORIGINS
You are pushing against those stereotypes.
WURTH
I would have to agree with the post-modernists in saying that all identity is some kind of performance. However, I would like to have a healthier performance. What I want to do with art, even though it is always a performance, is to create an imaginative landscape of course, but one that is in touch with important material human realities.
For example, a visual artist and I were asked to do a presentation on Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel. It was kind of a strange request, as he’s a post-modern artist and I’m neither a YA or Alexie scholar. The only tie was that we’re Indian. And I was having a rough time thinking about what I was going to do, but the visual artist, Gregg Deal, thought that what we could do is start with art by non-natives and move to art by natives, and show how this non-native art has influenced ours in an unhealthy way, thus contextualizing Alexie’s book in that mix. I think it came off well.
But what’s frustrating is that this is an act of resistance—and that’s great—but what about just doing our art?
ORIGINS
When I recommend sharing this at AWP… (Erika gives a heavy sigh.)
WURTH
For every Indian panel at AWP we have to devote our energy to resistance. Which is why I don’t want to devote any more. I want to devote time to our art and the interesting questions that can revolve around our imaginative landscape.
ORIGINS
Speaking of which, I love this quote of yours:
I deeply believe in my right to make my art out of the stuff that I, as one native person, have experienced—and read, and dreamed. I want us to allow ourselves to dream—and dream widely—of other worlds, other realities, I want us to make a thousand portals that somehow lead us back to who we were, and are, and are becoming.
How do you do this? How do you push back against publishing realities?
WURTH
I think it's very hard and you have to ask yourself what you want. Of course we all want attention and an advance, one that would allow us time to write and to pay the rent and to get a pretty thing, but if I really just wanted those things more than anything, I would've taken my intellectual life and put it into business or law.
And so I figure if I've done this thing because I seem to be unable to help it, despite what I said in my last sentence, I might as well do it the way that I want. And I write what I want for the audience I do believe is out there, which is an audience who can be sad or joyful or amused, but most of all who want a great story. I’m just going to show who we are in an organic way. My novels, my poetry are my attempt to show who we are in an organic way. And then when I'm interviewed, I try to fill in the blanks.
That's what I was trying to do with the novel and with my short stories and poems. Although it's important to me to own my identity in my work as a native person in the same way a person from the south might own their's: with the images and people and location they grew up with as part of the natural landscape of their work. I also didn't want to assume a white audience in an inorganic and not particularly artful way, and just say Indian Indian Indian and this is what Indians do over and over. I just don't think that makes for good art. It's for an audience that just wants a lesson but isn't going to learn one.
ORIGINS
Who are your literary influences?
WURTH
I'll pick two who made a difference for me during a fundamental time, which was in my early 20s: Cisneros and Alexie. Both of them taught me the lesson that I described above, that you could do art about the thing you knew, but that you could also do it in a way that was poetic and imaginative. Their communities in some ways are so different—and so is their work—but the language they used made me realize how in love with the world they are, and how one could describe where one was from, and where one wanted to be, in a way that was loving and artful.
Désirée Zamorano is an award-winning short story writer and the author of the critically acclaimed The Amado Women. Her work has appeared online and in print from PANK and The Toast to PW and The Los Angeles Times.