Recent Radio Interview On First Person Radio

RECENT Radio Interview

On First Person Radio

with Laura Waterman Wittstock

Hear Interview:
Joy’s Interview is at 7:40 in the recording.
http://migizi.org/media/FPR_2012-09-12.mp3

More Information: http://tinyurl.com/6tna7hm

Joy at National Book Festival in DC

Reading and Book Signing

Saturday, September 22

2012 Library of Congress National Book Festival

http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/

At the DC National Mall

10:55-11:40 am Joy Harjo/Book signing at noon.

More Information: http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/author/joy_harjo

Joy Harjo RADIO Interview September 12

First Person Radio
Wed. September 12, 2012

KFAI   9 - 10 am Central Time

Local Stations: 90.3 Minneapolis & 106.7 St. Paul

Listen on kfai.org/firstpersonradio 

or MIGIZI at http://tinyurl.com/6tna7hm

Laura Waterman Wittstock interviews Joy Harjo. about her new book - Crazy Brave. Its a memoir about family and the breaking apart necessary in finding a voice. Harjo’s tale of a hardscrabble youth, young adulthood, and transformation into an award-winning poet and musician is haunting, unique, and visionary.

September 8th Joy Harjo Performance

September 8th

Joy Harjo Performance 

and she will MC the Indian Summer Music Festival

7 pm

Indian Summer Music Festival, Milwaukee Lakefront

Henry Maier Festival Park, 200 North Harbor Drive, Milwaukee, WI

http://www.indiansummer.org/

September 6th Poetry and Music Performance w/ Larry Mitchell

September 6th 

Poetry and Music Performance w/ Larry Mitchell followed by book signing

Returning The Gift Writers and Storytellers Conference 2012

7 pm

Weasler Auditorium at Marquette University 

1506 W. Wisconsin Avenue

Milwaukee, WI

http://yukhika-latuhse.org/Agenda.html

http://yukhika-latuhse.org/yukhika-latuhse.html

Campus map: http://www.marquette.edu/campus-map/marquette-map.pdf

My last Muscogee Nations News Column: July 2012

Itʻs summer and Indian stories are in the making everywhere. The days are long and languid and the nights are warm and full of singing, full of story potential. Everybody’s singing stomp dance, powwow, church, and humming popular songs with ear buds in their ears. And it’s not just two-legged humans but all the other humans: birds, frogs, insects and too many mosquitoes.

One of these days Iʻd like to start collecting some of those contemporary “old” Indian stories. Many of them have their beginnings in the summer, but are usually told on long winter nights. One category of these stories that youʻll never find in the publishing world is painting stories. Like many of you, (some of you behaved, like my sister Margaret) I lived through those wild Indian parties and 49ʻs as a high school student at the Institute of American Indian Arts and a student at the University of New Mexico. I see them now as part of a test, a kind of coming of age. Some of us made it through, barely, some of our friends…didnʻt…and others are still stuck there trying to catch the thrill of the first high. Some good stories came out of the journey because we needed them to make it.  Laughter is the grease that slides us through difficulty, even tragedy.

Painting was a tradition at those parties. The first person to pass out was the canvas. We young women would dig through our purses and backpacks and pull out fingernail polish, tape, glue, cotton balls and any other items that might be decorative. (I hear superglue later made an appearance.) Oh, and scissors if the painting posse was being especially devious. And then the victim was…decorated on the face, arms, and sometimes…other…places. Imagine waking up and looking in the mirror. One of the best painting stories was told to me by an Umatilla man who has many, many contemporary “old” stories. He told of waking up to the sun on his face, naked on a roof without a ladder, his body painted…everywhere.

And then thereʻs the classic kind, like the story my cousin George Coser, Jr. told us the other day as we drove downtown Tulsa on the way to the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. “There used to be a church over there. They used to serve food for the homeless,” he said as he pointed to a parking lot. Then he told of a friend of his driving over to pick him and a buddy up to take them out to lunch. They were excited and as they headed to Tulsa imagining all their favorite eating places there. His friend pulled up to the church and next thing he knew they were standing in line for their free lunch! Now thatʻs a real Indian story!

Then there are the other kinds of stories that feed the soul of our tribal culture in a different way. Those are the stories we heard at the Thlopthloccco Tribal Town meeting out near Okemah, attended by ceremonial grounds and other cultural leaders a few weeks ago. These were the deep philosophical stories of the roots of meaning for our people, with the overhanging question of how are we going to continue as a Mvskoke people, when many of the children do not know their clans or arenʻt brought into the function of the clans?  There is never one answer but many answers, many stories. Another important story we heard was by the Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Initiative, about the restoration of and reculturing of plants that have traveled with us and nurtured us through our human stories. 

Mvto, mvto to all the culture bearers, those who choose to remember in a time of forgetting. Mvto to the spirits of all the stories that carry us to laughter, to deeper understanding of our predicament, our place here on this Earth.

This Song is a Pathway

There is a small bird that is not flashy and loud like the blue jay who lives here. Blue jay likes everyone to know he’s here and is especially good looking. That little bird is not the color of passion, and is not known to carry good luck to humans like the redbird. Nor does it blush with orange on its chest which marks it as a keeper of knowledge of the history of a place like the robin whose family has lived her for generations. You would miss this small bird if you scanned the horizon. It is small and brown. Yet, it has a tone so pure your heart opens so it can know the movement of love that is within the architecture of all life. That tone is a doorway. I need that bird’s song this morning. I use it as my path to enter this new day. When I step out into this song I trust my heart. I can hear it singing

CRAZY BRAVE is officially born!

Today, Talk of the Nation on NPR at 2PM CDT, and tomorrow GOODREADS live conversation at 3PM PDT. Please join in. Tomorrow night The Central Public Library with Keren Taylor moderating. Then, to Seattle, KPFA event in Oakland, Bookworks in Albuquerque. The tour resumes a week later with the Collected Works in Santa Fe, Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Tattered Cover in Denver, the Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, then ends on the 27th at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, Alaska!! See you Soon.

CRAZY BRAVE

There's a post that comes up when you Google CRAZY BRAVE that is title an "Excerpt from Crazy Brave."
For the record, it isn't an excerpt.
It's one of the over a hundred pages I deleted from the manuscript.
And I've rewritten the vignette that now appears as an "excerpt".
Tonight--on a new song from an older poem....
and need to finish packing, and get ready to be on Talk of the Nation tomorrow
with CRAZY BRAVE.

CRAZY BRAVE

My memoir CRAZY BRAVE is here. It's official birthdate is July 9th. It took me fourteen years to birth it, fourteen years in which I pulled out stacks of journals, made timelines, decided to make it a memoir in short stories. My life didn't make neat short stories. David Sedaris can do it, make tight, crafted vignettes with a biting and perceptive humor. And as much as I love humor (I've watched most of the comedy acts on Netflix) my writing voice veers toward the earthy mystical. In the past I tried to lure the spirit of my voice (writing, saxophone, speaking, singing) to a more pop style. It refuses. It has a dignity all its own, and it is constructed of a web of time and memory beyond this right now human mind.

A memoir teaches you to write it.

Then I made a collage of poetry, vignettes, short stories....it was....almost...working...I could have slid it through in that manner. But it wasn't right. Not yet. 

So I started over. I let the story start where it wanted and go where it wanted. I had wanted to corral it in safe places. It wanted to explore all that had silenced me. I gave in to the story. And then I rewrote, revised, many, many times. The last revision was in my mother's sewing room in Oklahoma, where I was living as she was dying last summer. I returned to help her. 

At night I would revise. I cut a hundred pages to make it tight. I read the next to the last revision to my friend Pam Kingsbury who lives in the northwest corner of Alabama, near Muscle Shoals, for three nights in a row, around ten o'clock at night. I have to hear it read aloud, to feel the spirit of it, how it wants to go...

And now it's almost here. 

I give thanks to the spirit of the story. I never know where it will lead me. 

**** **** **** **** **** **** 

I was nervous about my family reading CRAZY BRAVE. Yesterday, my stepsister, who was the daughter of the stepfather in the memoir told me that she noticed I had been very careful, that I had held back. The stories about her father and what happened to all of us were much worse. 

I still haven't heard from other family members. My sister Margaret gave it her approval. 

A sister-in-law was concerned for me. She thinks people will think I made it all up. But I have witnesses, I said. She's still concerned. No one ever believed her. She told me other stories I hadn't heard, as did a sister-in-law who was a close confidant of my mother, her mother-in-law.

CRAZY BRAVE keeps attracting more stories. I want it to inspire others to claim their story, no matter the path of it, no matter the failures and successes. 

This isn't just my story but it echoes the story of many others in the world.