The dream of a broken field / Diane Glancy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Glancy, Diane.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Glancy, Diane.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Indians of North America--Social life and customs.

Indians of North America.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 206 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2011]

Summary:

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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Book 1 The Old Geography Lessons of Language

A Personal History w/Paper Dolls, the Beginning of Travel, et al. 1

More Than Anything 3

The Names 5

M(other) 6

Black House 8

Outlets 9

The Album 10

Discourses on Paper Dolls 11

The Old Geography Lessons of Language 17

The Girl Made of Cotton Grass 30

Mukluk 31

Holocaust 33

A Book of Roads 35

Book 2 Geographies of a Realigned Language

Native American Literature, Issues, Ou'Wash, and Creative Theory 45

Flatland 47

Soldiers as Paper Dolls 50

The Paper Doll Witch Trial 54

Terrorists 55

Ou'Wash 58

This Journey of Paper Dolls: this escape from entrapment 59

Re: The Native American Boarding School Policy 61

The Return from Carlisle 62

Boarding School Physics 65

Piecework 67

Geographies of a Realigned Language 69

The Eskimo Wars 76

Dichotomy 79

Book 3 The Dream of a Broken Field

Academia and a Sudden Retirement.

A House, a Cabin, and a Summer Trip 83

On the Academic Front 85

I Am Wearing the Dialogue of Another 86

Costume 89

A Dress of Rain 94

A House 95

A Room 97

A Cabin 98

Intaglio 100

Rocks 105

I Pick Them Up in Travel 106

Engraved on a Rock 108

A Dock 111

The Dream of a Broken Field 113

Ascension Convention 115

Book 4 Geographies of Language

The Act and Question of Creative Nonfiction 125

A Rocky Shelf 127

Geographies of Language 134

Buffalo Nickel 136

Sonata 137

Is not telling the truth the same as lying? 146

Penmanship: The Return from a Conference on Nonfiction 149

Off the Road 153

Book 5 One Who Wears Moths

Faith and Writing. A Continuance of Research Trips and Travel for Teaching 157

Another Journey 159

On My Way from One Place to Another: On the Southern Edge of the Sandhills of Central Nebraska 161

Because 164

Re-entry 165

The Coldest Night in Texas 171

T(ravel) 175

The Mound Builders 178

The Shape of Privacy 185

One Who Wears Moths 187.

ISBN:

9780803234819

0803234813

OCLC:

679936429