Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosNational Book Award-
winning author Sherman Alexie, whose most recent story collection, “War Dances,” was published in October, will appear at The Nature of Words on Thursday and Friday.
Submitted photos
Alexie unplugged
Seattle author — now back on the bookshelves in Crook County — to read latest at Nature of Words on Thursday
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Published: November 03. 2009 4:00AM PST“Sorry, I fell asleep,” says author Sherman Alexie, calling a few minutes later than expected. He explains that he fell asleep among the books, magazines and newspapers scattered on his hotel room bed.
“I think I fell asleep on the Entertainment Weekly,” he adds. “It looks mangled.”
Book tours leave plenty of down time for reading. “I’ve lost track of the cities,” he says, but touring is part of the job. “I don’t have any problem with doing this. I get to tell stories for crowds. That’s fun. The travel is exhausting, but I like performing.”
Alexie, 43, is the Seattle-based author of poetry and short story collections and novels including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which won him a 2007 National Book Award for Young Adult Literature.
For the record, he’s calling from a hotel in Philadelphia a few weeks into touring for his latest short story collection, “War Dances,” published in October by Grove Press.
In a matter of days, he’ll join the other writers — Valzhyna Mort, Seth Kantner, Kim Stafford, Charles Goodrich, Matthew Dickman, Karen Karbo and Jane Kirkpatrick — at The Nature of Words in Bend (see “If you go”).
He looks forward to attending, he says. “It’s always fun to hang out with book dorks. I’m a book dork, so we all get to be book dorks together.”
Thursday night at the Tower Theatre, he’ll read with Karbo and Dickman. On Friday morning, he’s scheduled to appear in a lecture and Q&A session titled “Sherman Alexie Unplugged.”
Even he’s not sure what topics he’ll cover.
“I have no idea,” he says. “That’s always improvisational. I promise, though, there will be no singing. Whatever I do, I’m sure there’ll be an eager audience. I’m curious whether there will be four or five protesters outside. I doubt it.”
Alexie is referring to the January decision by the Crook County School Board to suspend “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” from the classroom after a parent complained about its discussion of masturbation.
“It always accomplishes the exact opposite of what the people seeking to ban it want,” he says, and you can hear the amusement in his voice. “It’s a strange fight, especially with this book. I was invited to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library to read from this book for 1,000 Texas high school students. So, apparently, good enough for the ex-president, not good enough for Prineville.”
Alexie is not bashful. He’s gone head to head in interviews with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who plays an impish ultraconservative on TV, and he’s won poetry competitions and done stand-up comedy.
So when you challenge or ban one of his books, you risk stirring a funny critic who doesn’t pull punches.
Crook County was among just five or six places around the country that banned or sought to ban the book, Alexie says. As The Bulletin recently reported, the school board has voted to allow it back in the curriculum, but to Alexie, a father himself, taking offense to the topic in the first place “reveals there are obviously conversations they’re not having with their kids. If there’s a person out there who believes their sons and/or daughters are not masturbating, they’re better at denial than I am. It’s a very natural, very human, very healthy activity.”
The book in question was inspired by some of Alexie’s own life experiences. According to the biography at www.sherman alexie.com, he was born with water on the brain. While he did not wind up with severe mental retardation, as doctors had predicted, he did endure seizures throughout his childhood.
Nonetheless, he learned to read by the age of 3 and read Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” by the ripe old age of 5, according to the site.
Searching for a better education as a teenager growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, he opted to attend an off-reservation school, excelling academically and becoming a star basketball player.
Later, at Washington State University, he took a poetry class.
“Women dig poems,” he explains. Wooing them through his poetry was his first impulse. “That’s pretty much every poet’s original impulse: to woo the subject of your affections.”
The subject matter of reservation Indian life was “really new for a lot of people,” he adds. “Certainly there were other Native poets doing their thing, but inside the context of Washington State University, I was brand new.”
Life still inspires his art. In “Breaking and Entering,” the first story in “War Dances,” the narrator is mistaken for a white male.
“I look ambiguously ethnic,” Alexie says. “I’m in Philadelphia; I look like 150 things here. In Eastern Washington or Eastern Oregon, I am definitely an Indian. Once I go to a cosmopolitan area, I become ambiguously ethnic.”
He’s been mistaken for “every Spanish speaker there is. Italian. Pretty much every Asian person there is, Jewish, Middle-Eastern occasionally, North African occasionally, Moroccan once, Slavic. On and on and on.”
Living in Seattle, does he strive to keep Native American culture alive for his kids?
“That’s not an interesting question,” he says, sighing.
“When I give readings and people ask that question, I ask the crowd, which is usually 80, 90 percent white, I ask the crowd to raise their hands if they speak one of their ancestors’ languages, other than English. And then I ask if they participate daily in a ceremony that their ancestors did. And then I ask if they live in the same place, the same city, their grandparents did.
“Generally, about two or three white folks still have their hands up. When I ask those questions of Indians, about 80 percent of the hands are up.
“You guys are in trouble, culturally,” Alexie says. “You guys have lost your European roots. The rumors of demise of Indian culture are nothing compared to the loss of European culture.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.
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