Search results for ""author diane glancy""

Like poets of legend, Diane Glancy has spent much of her life on the road. For years she supported her family by driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools. Claiming Breath is an account of one of those years, what Glancy calls “a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters . . . and a final acceptance of the broken past. . . . It’s a year that covers more than a year.”

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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 nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy’s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners’ predicament.

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The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet’s vision and a storyteller’s voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre’s outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today. Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures—English and German on her mother’s side, Cherokee on her father’s—Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.

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In Psalm to Whom(e), the restless and astonishing Diane Glancy continues to break new ground with a hybrid collection of personal writings that considers the relationship between place and faith; the need for movement, stability, and inner exploration; and the search for home. Psalm to Whom(e) centers on Kansas and rural Texas, places that usually see the underside of planes. Glancy focuses on geography. History. Origins. Memory. Faith. Once in a while, in desperation, she offers a prayer to whom(e)ver is there. Glancy stretches and pulls the language to see behind the words: old Native thought patterns, for instance, or echoes of Gertrude Stein. She takes us with her into museums, churches, and national parks, shuttling freely between personal, cultural, and spiritual history, narration and poetic exploration. Psalm to Whom(e) defines the world as a place on which to mark, as evidenced in the earliest pictographs. Embedded in the markings on cave walls and rock facings are circles and spirals in which the impulses to move, to travel, to migrate, to explore one’s own inner wilderness and solitude are homed. The “whom(e)” is in an essay, “Among My Friends Are Letters of the Alphabet.” “As a loner I write a lot because I have to have something to do and the letters of the alphabet always are there.” The isolation of Covid may have driven her farther back into history, she says. Into the beginning of faith on the prairie. Into her own believing on her grandfather’s farm and her own father’s work in the stockyards. “Sometimes I add letters to words. As an ‘e’ as in ‘whome’ because then I see home, for which I always am looking.”

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