In this bonus listen, we're sharing a recording of a live event. Enjoy this conversation with Terese Marie Mailhot, author of Heart Berries. Terese was joined by Sara Marie Ortiz, Manager of Native Education at Highline Schools.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of the show notes.
Watch
You can also watch a video recording with captions on YouTube.
Recommended Reading
Browse the books, writers, and essays recommended by Terese Mailhot and Sara Ortiz at their event.
Contact
If you'd like to get in touch, send an email to deskset@kcls.org.
Credit
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to the Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins.
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
And in this feed drop, we're sharing a conversation that we recorded from a live event with author Terese Marie Mailhot, who wrote Heart Berries: a <emoir, which was one KCLS' best books of 2018. In this conversation, she's chatting with Sara Ortiz, who's the manager of Native Education at Highline Schools and a writer herself. So enjoy.
Emily Calkins:
The King County Library System is delighted to present Terese Marie Mailhot and in conversation with Sara Ortiz. Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Elle, in Mother Jones, Medium, Al Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times and Best American Essays. She's The New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries. Her book was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. It was selected by Emma Watson as Our Shared Shelf book club pick. It was also the January 2020 Book Club pick for Now Read This, which is The New York Times and PBS Newshour Book Club. It was chosen as a Best Book of the year by NPR, by Library Journal, the New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library and Harper's Bazaar. And it was on our Best Books of the Year list at the King County Library System as well.
Emily Calkins:
She is the recipient of the 2019 Whitting Award and she's also a recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University. And Sara Marie Ortiz is Pueblo of Acoma. She's a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts and Antioch University Los Angeles's Master's of Fine Arts program, with a concentration in creative nonfiction. She's formaly studied law, indigenous education, global self-determination in indigenous communities, journalism, radio, theater, critical theory and film. Ms. Ortiz research has worked in Native Arts, in education and in culture advocacy for over 16 years. From her first days as a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts to today. She's published widely and has been featured in the Kenyon Review and Plowshares, The Florida Review, The American Indian Graduate and Indian Country Today Media Network.
Emily Calkins:
She's presented at tribal schools and colleges at conferences, universities, cultural centers and community hubs from New Mexico to Johannesburg, South Africa. Sara lives in Burien, Washington, so she's local to us here at the King County Library System. She's the Urban West representative for the Washington State Native American Education Advisory Committee. She's the lead coordinator for the Northwest Native Writers Circle, and she's currently the Native Student Success Program Manager for the Highline Public Schools. So in short, we have two very incredible, interesting and accomplished women with us tonight. And I'm very glad that they're both here. So thank you to both of you for being with us. And I will turn it over to Terese for her reading.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
All right. Hi, everyone. Thanks for - It's late where I am, so I'm not even sleepy, I feel good. So thank you for staying up. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy to share my work and really happy to connect tonight. And I'm hiding in my room away from the kids so everyone can hear me okay, I hope. And I hope if there's some technical issues, you give me a little grace. You never know. And I think I'm going to read from Heart Berries. I have the paper back. And I'm also going to read a piece that I wrote for my dear friend, Candace, who passed away during the pandemic. She passed away from breast cancer. And she was a wonderful woman. And I wrote this kind of, I hope you can hear me. I know somebody said speak louder. And I'm trying to use my reading voice without a microphone. So this is okay, right? You can hear me? I hope so.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
All right. So this piece is called Wolf Clan Woman, and it's currently in the L.A. Review of Books, I think. It was just published there. All right, let me start. And it's a short essay which I've never written before, but I guess maybe all my essays are short and I'm just realizing that now.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Wolf Clan Woman. They didn't capitalize your name in the obituary. They didn't say you were Wolf Clan or that you died sober. They didn't say when you called your grandmother to catch up, she put your abuser on the phone. And that's why you don't trust some people. They didn't say your father was a survivor. He was taken from his people, given to the nuns and priests and then reunited with his mother. It was a time of joy and reclamation. Then lightning struck his house. He was reading comics with his sister. He said the whole house lit up like a million candles. There wasn't a shadow in that house. His leg caught fire. The doctors told him he wouldn't survive. He said, "Get the fuck out of here." They didn't say you wore Sketchers, mom shoes, purposely. For the fun of the mention, for the comfort to say there was some cuteness and resignation in what we do now as mothers. You wore shirts that said, "Blessed" and "hype." And you watched reality TV like you knew the people, affected when most would laugh.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Grief is oversight and the things we forget to honor, like being your closest loved one and forgetting to capitalize your name, forgetting text lives forever beyond us. When you were in the middle of chemotherapy, I cleaned your house. I held each wig you owned and examined it from all dimensions. The red one was my favorite. My brother said it made you look too rez but that's exactly why I liked it. I looked at your journals where you listed plans, organized treatments and wrote down different subsidies you could apply for. I felt honored to see your life as vulnerable as it was. The notes were what compelled me to keep cleaning, to get on my hands and knees and wipe the corners.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I wanted you to have one thing. You were a survivor, you know? Even if you didn't survive everything. We can only contain so much. They will say, "Wolf clan woman was so tough." So much gossip. So much criticism and cackle, so much nurturing and home cooked meals, so much fight, so much yellow in the medicine wheel, that after our last hug you placed Yukon sweetgrass in my hand. You were tough medicine and absoluteness. No forgiveness, no second chances, all forwardness and motion. They didn't say what filters you liked or that when you went to hospice, the man who threatened to kill you, came to abduct his child. They didn't say how you had to pull restraining orders up on your phone from a hospital bed. They didn't say you never had a chance to rest. Nobody wants to talk about the threats on your life. Nobody wants to make myth of you yet. I'd like to think if I wrote your obituary that I wouldn't let you down. But words fail to execute the sharp edge of young death.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
And that's that's Wolf clan woman. Somebody said to adjust my screen. This feels so weird. It's like you guys are directing me. I don't know, this new reading online. And I almost feel like it's more intimate because you get to be in the comfort of your space. And also, you don't have to wear pants. And I think that's one of the other things. So I have Heart Berries. Let's see. I'm going to read. All right. I'm going to read part of, I know I'll go. And here we go. I have to get close to this microphone. So if my chin cuts off, just pretend you see it. All right?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I know I'll go. And this is about my dad. My father died at the Thunderbird Hotel on Flood Hope Road. According to documents, he was beaten over a sex worker or a cigarette. I prefer the cigarette. I considered an Indian death myself while walking along the country roads of my reserve before I really considered life. His death intruded as I could not fathom being a good person when I came from such misery. I found newspaper clips about my father. Ken and four men abducted a girl. There aren't any details. There are documents about his murder and the transitional housing program he was in when he died. He was homeless and social welfare gave him a hotel room next to younger, more violent men. There's nothing easy about his memory or what he left behind. He was an anomaly, a drunk savant.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
He took his brushes, colors and stool when he left my mother. It was harvest and the corn stalks were gold and waiting. I was waiting outside on the porch and ate blueberries. I spit out anything too ripe, a purple liquid. His hair was black and course. He was wearing a baseball T-shirt and jeans covered in rust acrylic. As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on a page to impart the story of my drunken father. It was dangerous to be alone with him, as it was dangerous to forgive, as it was dangerous to say he was a monster. If he were a monster, that would make me part monster, part Indian. It's my politicked right, the humanity in my character. And subvert the stereotypes. Isn't that my duty as an Indian writer? But what part of him was subversion? Our basement smelled like river water and cedar bough. He carved and painted endlessly in the corners of the room. While I sat in his lap, he taught me our icons. Eagle was mother, bolts with thunder being, and his circles were the universe.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
It meant so much to draw a circle well. He practiced and let me watch. I remember when he left, my mother started to paint again. I remember that while my father tried to draw a circle with his own eyes and hands, my mother used coffee cans. I resist the iconography and find myself more interested in why Salish work isn't true to life. My therapist asked me to speak to my father and my mother in a session. I told my father, a bird is just a bird. A mother is a tangible thing. Making Indian women inhuman is a problem for me. We become too symbolic and never real enough. My therapist said, "Talk to your mother." And I couldn't. My father was soft looking sometimes. I liked to sleep in the crook of his neck. He smelled like Old Spice and bergamot. His hands shook when he was not drinking at his worst. And when I held his hands, he seemed thankful. He delighted in my imagination.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
The grass was always high in our lawn, and he often let me use the hose to fill buckets or wash tires. and I pretended it was a snake. My mother wanted to heal him. I remember several trips to visit him in rehab. She sent him to islands and I remember wearing a life jacket crossing water to somewhere in Tofina. I remember each hope given to me by my mother that our father would be okay and that things would be different. In the past, I wanted to tell her that some things can't be loved away. But she knew that. We left my father a few times. We stayed in my uncle's home. Mom took all four of us along with my grandmother, and we slept in one room. I had chicken pox. I slept in a green upholstered chair and had an accident. My brother Ovie was awake. He told me to undress and took off his shirt for me to wear. I went back to sleep with a sour stomach and woke up as my father was fork lifting me from the chair to his van. He always found us.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Once I packed my bags, mimicking my mother. With a bag of dolls and wooden cars, I told him I was leaving. I told him I wouldn't come back until he stopped drinking. "Come here," he said. "No." He promised me he would quit and then he left. My brothers told me that he didn't really leave. I misremembered. My grandmother saved money and asked our cousin to kill him. The man beat him well. And when my father came home, we were gone. He ruined every artwork we possessed. He tossed every can of salmon and beets that my grandmother prepared for winter. He took jewelry, he took money. When we got home, everyone told me to wait on the porch. They went inside and cleaned while I stared at my spit. For years, they were happy to let me imagine he left on his own regard.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
After my mother died, I went to find him. He lived in a town called Hope. He had a new family and our van sat in his front lawn on bricks. When he answered the door, he told me he knew who I was. He had a thin, dirty white shirt on. He looked ill and his face was gone. His hair was still black in some parts. His wife was my older sister's childhood friend. My father had met her when she was a girl visiting my sister. After years with Ken, you could see the hard life she lived. She smiled at me and said my father had old videotapes of theater work I did in the community. I had five new brothers so young they looked like the archetypes my own family had formed in the presence of my father. I found myself in the youngest child who formed bonds too quickly and needed holding.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
My father and I sat across from each other in lawn chairs in his basement. I resisted the urge to sit like him. Instead, I held bad posture and slumped in my chair. "You have my nose," he said. I said I missed him, feeling awful it was true. "The best thing I could do was leave." "I know," I said. "Your mother was a good woman. I told her I was an asshole and she took me in like a wounded bear." "I know," I said. A month after this, he showed up at my house with a white documentary filmmaker. I answered the door but could not let him in the house. My brother Ovie was still scared and angry and confused. "They're doing a documentary about me," he said, "about my art." I was anxious standing there with him at my door. "I know," he said, "I'll go." I hugged him in my driveway and I knew the whole res was watching and I knew I had betrayed my family a little bit.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
To now skip ahead just to the next passage. The National Film Board of Canada debuted the documentary as a piece with immediacy and no external narrative. I'm a woman wielding narrative now. Weaving the parts of my father's life with my own. I consider his work a testimony to his being. I have one of his paintings. Man emerging. The artwork is traditional and simplistic. Salish work calls for simplicity because an animal or man should not be convoluted. My father was not a monster, although it was in his monstrous nature to leave my brother and I alone in his van while he drank at the can. Our breaths became visible in the cold. Then he came back to bring us fried mushrooms and we took to the bar fare like puppies to slop. His smell was not monstrous, nor the crux of his body. The invasive thought that he died alone in a hotel is too much.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
It's dangerous to think about him as it was dangerous to have him as my father as it is dangerous to mourn someone I fear becoming. I don't write this to put him to rest, but to resurrect him as a man. When public record portrays him as a drunk, a monster, a transient, I wish I could have known him as a child in his newness. I want to see him with the sheen of perfection. With skin unscathed by his mistakes or his father's. It's in my nature to love him. I can't love who he was, but I can see him as a child. Before my mother died, I asked her if he had ever hurt me. "I put you in double diapers," she said. "There's no way he'd hurt you. Did he hurt you?" "No," I said.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
If rock is permeable in water, I wonder what that makes me in all of this. There's a picture of my brother, Ovie and me next to Dad's van. My chin's turned up and at the bottom of my irises there's a brightness. My brother has his hands on his hip and he looks protective standing over me. I know without remembering clearly that my father took this picture and that we loved each other. I don't think I can forgive myself for my compassion. And that's I know I'll go, about my dad.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I don't know. How long have I been reading? I'm wondering if I should read something else or if that's enough of me? I don't know. Sara, do you have a opinion? Where's Sara?
Sara Ortiz:
I think that there's still probably a few more minutes. If you wanted to read another piece, Terese. Maybe a short one, then we can [inaudible 00:22:52] our convo.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
All right. I'll read a short thing. Let's see. I know: From a Cedar Bough. It's something that's healing. And it's from the perspective of a cedar tree. So I love it because I was raised just surrounded by cedar. And must do it. All right. I published in Al Jazeera during the pandemic, too. I've been busy during the pandemic. I think that's the only way I've been able to just deal with all of this. All right, from a cedar tree.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I'm one of the medicines of the Nlaka’pamux people. Of the people living on Seabird Island Band. Some old heads put a little bit of me in their shoes or make a little tea with me once a day when there's a virus afoot for protection. And cynics say it's superstition, not science. I have no human form though once we walked like people do. These are stories we hear less now. When the people harvest bark in the spring, they will do it six feet from one another, smiling to close the distance. They will make bracelets and weave crowns and headbands and capes to celebrate name-giving and graduations and potlatch and all the good things coming to the First People. The people who offer before they take, who never forget the medicines, whose practices are called superstitions, sometimes by their own. Trees still walk, just slower. Please tell them. There's a science to it, I promise.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
There was a little girl this time last year learning with her auntie how to pick a bough. You have to put down tobacco and say thank you and pray before you take something from a tree. The girl smiled. She was embarrassed to be stumbling as she prayed, as she said thank you to me. And I wanted to say thank you for carrying on this tradition of wellbeing, of collecting medicine for your auntie, who will put the bough above her door to keep spirits away. The auntie does not know if this tradition is Nlaka’pamux or Christian, given what white people did to her, to her culture, to her soul. She does not care because it is what her grandmother taught her to do. And it is Nlaka’pamux now.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
These are matriarch hands on me. Generations of power, of offering, of celebration, of pain, of burial. A burial is called a planting where we are. This auntief, her mother was planted in a cedar box carved by one of the men on Seabird, who would not take any money. My fear when I saw the beauty of the box, was that it would someday be uncovered by an anthropologist who would find the mother's bones remarkable, the box remarkable, and then nobody would rest. They would all be in some exhibit in Chicago or New York. But today she rests. I am asleep now, too. I cannot say, in my waking hours, I am more lively than I am now. There is spirit in quietude, in receiving and watching. Stillness and observation can inspire. The Diamondback rattler, the moment she was still before she turned a corner inspired a girl in her weaving to make the first diamond pattern in a basket.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
We regale each other and fit together in simple ways. This interconnectedness has worked for a long time now. Forgive me if I'm too relational to the people I've known for thousands of years. I could tell you about cherry bark or canary grass, how we mingle in baskets to bring water. Or I could describe my being verdant and rested in the dull reaches of myself. How you cannot run your fingers against the grain of my outer bark or bough. It hurts too much. Elders say some things are worth hurting for, others are not. Common sense is taught doing practical things like harvesting my roots for different kinds of baskets. Different kinds of legacies I hope will one day not be a museum exhibit but home decor where kids ask, "What's that, auntie?" And someone says, "Your lifeblood, your whole culture is above the fireplace. Do you want to go outside and say thank you?" That's From A Cedar Bough. All right. I'm done.
Sara Ortiz:
I wish I could clap louder. I love, love, love you, Terese and your writing is... There's so much that strikes me about about your writing, about your work. And there already are lots of questions coming in the question box. And I think that I already plan to speak to a number of those questions and Emily is going to be managing some of that. Yeah, lots of people [crosstalk 00:29:17] oh, it's a love fest. Terese and I, we laugh a lot because we're like minus six degrees of separation in Indian country and particularly in our writer circle.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
You can't help but know everybody. I feel like every Native, you talk for ten minutes and you know somebody.
Sara Ortiz:
Absolutely. And you find out about all of the mutual connections and we have a lot.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
That's why you gotta act right.
Sara Ortiz:
Exactly. It keeps you honest. Holds you accountable. Terese and I both share that we're alums of the beautiful and magnanimous, ever complicated Institute of American Indian Arts. Terese graduated from the MFA program and I graduated before the MFA program had actually been established. And we don't rest on our laurels too much. We know that our BFA, our cohort that graduated because there was so much success in that era that we went on to like Cornell and Brown and some of the best MFA programs in the country. And so it's just so special to be part of that legacy. Shout out to any other alums if there are any. Any other IA alums. Put it in the chat box. And I just wanted to do a couple of shout outs before I get into the questions. Tomorrow, we're actually doing a youth writing workshop. And I do, as Emily mentioned, manage the Native Education Program for Highline Public School. Shout out Highline. If anybody is on from the district or surrounding districts, we have so many amazing Native students in our program. And so we actually are opening it up.
Sara Ortiz:
I gotta close the chat box. I'm going to get all distracted. But we are doing a workshop at 4:30 tomorrow, via Zoom. So if you'd like to join us, please just shoot me an email. I'm going to go ahead and pop my email into the chat box at the end, but it's open to high school and college age and families also. So Terese has some really, really special prompts and activities planned for that workshop. So please join us if you are able and encourage youth in your midst to participate with us. And then the Northwest Native Writers Circle, you can find us on Facebook, we're a ragtag grassroots collective of Native writers, Natives who just like to write, like to talk about writing, like to support others in creating new work and getting publishing opportunities. We host learning opportunities like this. We're really grateful to Hugo House for supporting a lot of our work when we just first got established. And we like to support Native youth to see themselves as writers and to really just lift voices.
Sara Ortiz:
Our native people are so, so beautiful and so dynamic and creating all the time. And the more platforms we have, the more points of access, the more resources we have, that's how we grow stronger. So support our work, Northwest Native Writers Circle and find us on Facebook. And I am going to go ahead and just get into it. Your work is equal parts excavation and resurrection. There's so much going on in your work, it's a tome of sorts and so much prayer song. So much of your voice really does feel like it's being lifted up by the ancestors. And like you're conduit in many ways for so many other voices, but not being wholly representative. I like that you brought that forward on Trevor Noah. That we often get sort of painted into a corner sometimes. I've heard it referred to as a Sherman Alexie effect. It's like when you read one Native author, you read them all. And so then people end up not doing work and doing the cultivations to actually discover all sorts of new Native writers and other Native writers.
Sara Ortiz:
But I'm just wondering, especially in this time, it's so insane, in a pandemic. You're a mom, you're a writer, you're a professor. You're doing all the things and you do so much in the book that I think speaks to this time also, which is strangely cathartic and feels like preparation. I remember sitting with your book a couple of years ago and it felt very much in time. And like it was exactly what I needed to read and experience at the time. And I think it's going to stand the test of time and help people a lot, to get through these wild times. But what are your thoughts on the writer's moral obligation to speak to the chaos, to speak to racism and the fear that's kind of in our souls at this point? And do we have an obligation as writers to speak to those things or not?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I don't know, because I think it's definitely, I think for me, when I was writing my book, it was a lot about survival, right? I was writing the things that wouldn't let me go. But I think moving through the things that wouldn't let me go felt like a moral obligation, like the things that wouldn't let me go were my relationship to stigma and stereotype and the fact that I felt like a living one. I felt like as a young mother, as a person who had a lot of dysfunction in her family, I felt like those things were haunting me. And if I couldn't make sense of them, then I would have died unnamed, like my experience would be unnamed. So I felt an obligation to that and to my spirit as a human being.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
But now that I have, I don't know if overcome is the right word. But now that I have moved past that personal journey, I feel an obligation to be good to people, not only in my work and be honest, because sometimes being good doesn't mean being nice and to be honest. And I think through that, I've found a good calling. But really, what I do morally is through mentorship. So, I know that because of my lineage, because of the good women in my life, I have to do right and create more opportunities and not fall into the trap of ego and not try to take up too much space as a First Nations woman. Not to take up too much space and to also make sure people know about other writers who... Like Arielle Twist, who's an indigenous transwoman, but she's also a kick ass poet.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Always thinking of how I also can help others and how else I can share, because it's really lonely when you just want things for yourself and you're out there doing the writing life unless you bring other people in. So I think that's my moral obligation. Learning as a teacher because language changes all the time. So, last year for me, learning about ableism and trying to be decent in that sense was a first. I never knew about any of that stuff. But as a professor, I think we have an obligation to reshape our language almost every year, you know what I mean?
Sara Ortiz:
Absolutely. That opportunity it causes anxiety and also excitement. But I'm glad you mentioned that about accessibility, because we have Zoom, the Zoomification of the world. Everybody is doing all the teaching online, but closed captions and things like that to support everybody it's needed, it's necessary. I wanted to ask you, there's so much that you put forward in the book. You're so vulnerable. You're so raw and honest with so much of it. There's both a starkness and a richness. And the lyricism of your work is next level. I'm sure it's something to think about what's next. But what are you still working on in terms of what you may not be ready to write. Is there anything that you're still, that you're afraid to write or that you're just not ready?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Well, I'm on contract to finish a book by January 15th, and I don't know if I'm going to do it. It's a book about a young bookish, weird indigenous girl growing up on from where I'm from, so from Seabird Island. And it's really closely based to my life. But I had to write all of that autobiographical stuff so that this character could really actually live apart from me. So, I'm writing that and for me it feels like really touchy because it's dealing with the fact that growing up on Seabird, you're right by that highway in British Columbia. And you're also seeing all of these systemic issues at play that are statistic, but they're real life for you and your people. So writing about those issues almost feels like it scares me to write about those issues in a responsible way. But I know I have to do it and I can't sensationalize those issues, but I have to make them real.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
And I think that's so hard to do. It's so hard to make our reality, it's hard to digest and complicated in an art. It's hard to do that on the page, even though... It's like hearing the music in your head but you can't play it yet. So I'm trying to figure it out. I think it's so important to hold up the truth of the story but also don't let myself be exploited. And it's really easy to get exploited by accident in this business. Because you might be having a great conversation with a non-native person and then they just kind of swing in to a question that's just over a boundary. And it's like your auntie's not there to tell you to tell them to stop it. They're not there to guide you. And it's all up to you. And sometimes it's hard.
Sara Ortiz:
Yeah. To always show up with your big girl pants on and advocate for yourself in all the spaces, the literary world is cutthroat and not straight forward.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Not just for you, because the next person benefits from you speaking up. That's why I think we all, if you feel like you need to be a necessary disruptor in this life, do it and know that someone like me will have your back.
Sara Ortiz:
Yeah, I love that. Thank you for saying that because we need those aunties even literally in this space, but also just knowing that we have people in the circle who have our back and are going to be relentless with it. I wanted to ask you and it's sort of touching on a question that I saw come up. How do you balance the public and the private aspects in your work? How do you save some for you also? That was one thing that came to mind was like, how do you do the excavation, do the work of really pulling from the deepest part and really going there with your stories, but also not go insane and maintain some balance?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Well, I think that's the only thing. It's like protecting your emotional sensibilities. So if you feel like you've given somebody too much, you probably have. But I think on that so many times in the past that I felt conditioned for public life. Because when you talk to a social worker or something, when I was a teen, they want you to be contrite. They want you to be pitiful. They want you to beg for services. They don't really see you as a human being. So, honestly, all that work I did being interviewed by youth outreach workers and social workers prepared me for...
Sara Ortiz:
[inaudible 00:42:43]
Terese Marie Mailhot:
a book tour? Because they ask probing questions like a social worker. They're like, "So how are you doing now?" You feel like you're being evaluated. I've just come to realize, I just want to be real. And if I feel like there are overstepping a boundary, mostly I smile and deviate. But for me, I always think about the person in the audience that, like, if I'm feeling like I need to talk about med management, I need to say, "Hey, my success is owed to my people, my family and my children. But it's also to therapy and med management." Saying that, if I feel like the space needs to hear that, I'll say it. And I think I'm in also in a position where if that makes me vulnerable, I can defend myself. You know what I mean?
Sara Ortiz:
Absolutely. Thank you for lifting that up, too. Because as a people, not just in America, Canada, but all across the globe, we're in a mental health crisis. We talk about the public health crisis that is the pandemic. But pre-pandemic, our people have been hurting and not being able to be honest about mental health challenges. And at this point, it's in our children, it's in our youth, it's in our elders. It's in all of us to be so brutally honest and vulnerable in that journey that you've been on. I think it's power. I think it's medicine in a lot of ways to the people. I wanted to ask you and this is touching a little bit on that other question. We talked a little bit about this writing truth and sharing stories, "secrets" or private traumas.
Sara Ortiz:
But some of those things that are at the heart of the matter that aren't yours. The collective, you spoke about your brothers figuring in the work and of course, your dad and your mom and Casey and your children. A lot of writers want to know how do you navigate that and not share too much. What's the process and protocol around, "Hey, is this okay to share?"
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I always thought if I'm harder on myself, I'll get into less trouble. So, if I'm writing about a relationship where I'm with somebody who might be gas lighting me or not treating me right, if I'm honest about my own dysfunctions and self-effacing and I also, thanks to this advice from Toni Jensen, if I give the character, the person I'm writing about one trait they want to see in themselves, whether that's like, "Oh, he's so tall, he's so large, he's so beautiful as a man." If I write that they're less likely to have a problem with them in the book. It's about doing that too. You have to be self-effacing first. And if you do that, usually they like how you render down the truth of the relationship or the truth of motherhood. And also, I reveal more about myself than I do about any of my subjects. Because I think that's just like paying a toll to enter that space and be honest about a relationship is you have to withhold things that you know they don't want out there and talk to them.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
If you want a relationship after the book, talk to them about, "Hey, could you read this text and could you talk to me about it?" Because when I do that with my brothers, when I do that with my husband, there were tough conversations, but ultimately they supported me and that's why I move forward. My father, I don't owe him anything. So, writing about how he hurt me, that was just the truth that needed to be told. And it was my experience. So even if he was alive, I would have done it anyway.
Sara Ortiz:
Yeah, I feel that. That's a very personal experience to share the relationship between fathers and daughters, particularly Native fathers and daughters, and especially when there's trauma.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
You're writing and then it changes the relationships. Sometimes your voice is necessary to move into the next phase of that life. And sometimes it doesn't need to be polished, it just needs to be read by that other person.
Sara Ortiz:
Well, I think we have just a couple of minutes left and then we're going to shift over to the questions from the audience. But definitely wanted to ask you and this is a two part question, and they are connected and aren't connected. But in Terese Mailhot's view, what is the future? What's the next level of native literature, native writing and writers? How do we get there? What are some pro-tips and what are you hopeful about? And then also, what are you reading?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Okay, I'm reading Kelli Jo Ford's Crooked Hallelujah. I'm reading that right now. There's other things on my list, but the future I want it to be like we have the right to write romance novels. We have the right to make some really average art and still make a lot of money and have success. And we have the right to make a cheesy rom com, you know what I mean? We have the right to. And we have the right to be experimental. In the future, I see just more, more of it. I want more. I want if somebody, especially young Native women, when they come to my readings and they're like, "Do you think I could do this?" The answer's always yes. "I can see you. I can see you on TV. I can see you. If you want a best seller, I can see it." And it's like, I want people to feel that because it's like we're discouraged so much in our life. And I just I don't have time for that
Terese Marie Mailhot:
And I mean, just see more. And whatever you want to do, don't feel burdened by what's come before, you're starting your own pathway and that's real. Think grand thoughts about yourself.
Sara Ortiz:
Absolutely. I love that. Just the abundance I want to see all the wild little things, all the experimentation, lots of experimentation has to go on to get to a wider array. I really, really love that. And I'm just so grateful to you for your work and anything that I can do to support you, I'm just so glad to be in the same circle as you. And everybody out there, if you haven't read Heart Berries, definitely buy it. I saw that the link that's at the bottom of the screen isn't working. Shout out to Third Place Books. You can definitely find your way to purchase the book, Heart Berries. It's a transformational work. It really, really is. There's a reason that audiences have responded to it in the way that it is. It changes you and it lives on you once you experience it and you're open to it. So, thank you.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I live in you.
Sara Ortiz:
You live in us now. Thank you, Terese.
Emily Calkins:
Well, thanks to both of you. That was a lovely conversation. I did just put the link to Third Place to get the book again. If you want to buy it. Sorry about the broken link there. We have lots of questions. So I'm just going to get right to them, this one's from Lauren. Your writing is so poetic. Does that come naturally to you or have you studied lots of poetry?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I do read a lot of poetry. I'm reading Emily Dickinson now. Her nature poems like Mayflower and things like that. And I think Mayflower, it starts like soft, pink and punctual or something like that. That's the first description of a Mayflower. And I'm like there's so much in those just three little lines. And it's like, when I'm writing, I think, "How do I hold back and give the reader the words they need not the words I want to purge or not like flexing and showing that I'm a good writer. I want them to trust me." You know what I mean? So I think about poetry as it's expedient and it's true and it's image-driven. And I feel like those are really good methodologies. Those are really good practices for writing. That's it. I think I'm not a poet, so I should not write poetry. But essay is good.
Emily Calkins:
So speaking of essays, Lisa said, what makes a really good essay and whose writing do you enjoy reading?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I really enjoy reading, let's see, I really enjoy reading James Baldwin. Enjoyment in terms of knowing that, that's quality work and that it's like resonant and emotional, but it's also succinct and intellectually stimulating. So, it gives me all types of enjoyment. I like Alice Walker. I think she has that blue essay about a horse. And I think it's like a thousand words or something and it just really examines what it's like to live close to a horse who has no partner. And you see the inhumanity of people to how they sometimes own horses and don't think about horses' emotional intelligence or spirit.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
And it really sticks with me. And Woven by Lidia Yuknavitch is like one of my all-time favorite essays because it's a weave. And she does great to this degree of excellence where you see the structure and it's also messy. So it's not a perfect braid but it's natural and fresh. I can name a lot of writers. Stephen Graham Jones's Letter to a Young Native Writer, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I can do something. I can name a bunch. But those are just like things that, off the top of my head, I'm thinking about. Toni Jenson's Carry. I just, I blurb that. So, it was really good. If you want to see my thoughts on it, look in the back of her book.
Emily Calkins:
I'm taking notes. So we'll send out a list. We have the email addresses for everybody registered. We'll get a list and send it out to everybody so people can track these down too. Let's see. And this is a question from Terese Lamb, she says, I love the book from beginning to end. It made me think of my own experiences growing up and all the nooks and crannies of good shit and the bad shit. And how it blended to become the fabric of life. That's what I loved about your storytelling. Question, in what ways has Heart Berries changed you now that you finished the book. Did the end of the book reveal anything to yourself that wasn't there before?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Yeah. The book, so I started it as a letter to my partner because he had all of these ideas about mental health and women. He would say that I was crazy. I always felt like that's unfair. There's a back story and there's also the dynamism of how I've come to be complicated and faulty, but human. And so, I thought about that because it was a commentary that a lot of men say to women sometimes. Like, "She's crazy." And I was like, well, I want to humanize myself. And so for me, that's like an objective and it's a pure one that I kind of roped into. And it did change me because writing about that made me feel like I was trying to redeem myself. And then when I just let go and I was like, "Don't try to redeem yourself. Just try to tell the truth of your life and see what humanity render or what person comes out. And whoever loves you after that is a good person." Maybe, I don't know.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
So I did that. And then I realized I wasn't writing to appeal to a man to love me. I was writing to make sense of my life. And I thought, if I can make it sense of my life to the external world, it would make sense to me. So by the end of it, I realized it's not even about a man. It's about overcoming my shit and growing and being proud of who I am. And you get that sensibility by the end of the book that it's like, my life has a lot of drama, but it's like, I'm proud of who I am. I'm proud of where I come from. And I and I love my mother. Those sentiments are just really strong at the end. And I didn't know it was going to end up that way, for real, I didn't.
Emily Calkins:
This is a question from Alicia. She says, I remember being struck by something I heard Toni Morrison say, "Most books are written, even by BIPOC writers, are written for a white audience." And Toni Morrison had decided to opt out of that. There's merit to writing to a white audience but also to your own community audience. Who do you feel is the audience you need to write to?
Terese Marie Mailhot:
I don't know, because the thing is I am writing for my people, but I know I made them mad with some of the things. So my bad. But that needed to be said. In writing about my friend, writing about my own life, I'm not just outing myself, but everybody related to my father, you know what I mean? So those truths might not have been ready to be out for a dozen or more people, but for me, it was time. So handling the fact that I might have done that, it does weigh on me, but it felt like a necessity. And I do feel like it has liberated other people to feel like they can speak out against people who hurt them. So, I kind of do picture my people, but I also picture them shaking their fist, I mean, too while I'm writing. And I'm like, good as I'm just typing. But I don't always do it right. And I think accountability is really important as a writer. So, knowing what you want to upset in a person.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
And I don't write for a white audience. But that said, it's like I don't really think about them actively. I don't think, "Oh, I'm writing about sweat lodge. Do I need to explain what the hell that is to a white person?" I think if they really care about reading Native writers, they can use Google and they'll be okay because we use Google when we read English literature. And when I learned what a chaise lounge was I had to Google it. That's some white stuff.
Emily Calkins:
Okay, well, so we have hit time. I just want to say thanks so much to both of you for being with us tonight. As a reminder, you can purchase Heart Berries from Third Place Books and I will drop that link in the chat one more time here.
Sara Ortiz:
And thank you to you, Emily and everybody at King County Library System. We love our librarians. I popped my email into the chat box. So if anybody has any questions about the way we're approaching exposing our students to more Native writers in Highline Public Schools, I love those questions that we actually have a book list that's been vetted. We work with American Indian Children's Literature to make sure that we get good materials into the hands of our students. So I love you librarians and love you, KCLS.
Emily Calkins:
Well, thanks again to both of you.
Terese Marie Mailhot:
Thank you.
Emily Calkins:
[inaudible 01:00:43] Have a good night.
