Diane Glancy Transcript

November 15, 2007

Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors radio. Today is the Centennial of Oklahoma state. Established as the 46th state in the union on November 16, 1907. Native Americans were already there long before 1541, when Vasquez de Coronado, Spanish Conquistador happened through.

Oklahoma was the dust bowl state of the 1930’s and the end of the tragic and deadly “Trail of Tears” in the 1830’s. The birthplace of Woody Guthrie and the birthplace of Mickey Mantle. Happy birthday Oklahoma.

On the show today, our writers Diane Glancy, Francine Ringold, and Joyce Carol Thomas and special guest musician Tom Paxton. We are celebrating some of Oklahoma’s rich heritage.

My first guest is Diane Glancy. Welcome Diane.

Diane Glancy: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: She was an artist in residence for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma for a decade. Her poetry, her scripts, essays, and fiction have gotten her many prizes including the Oklahoma Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, the American Book Award, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize and the list goes on.

She’s a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, thought she’s on a sabbatical. Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself?

Diane: What would you like to know? I spent my adult years in Oklahoma and I started traveling the state for the state Arts Council and I’ve always found that the land has voices. The land has a voice. There are stories to be told.

One important thing I do as I write, is to travel to different places and there I get ideas for my stories. I have been a writer for many years. I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. My father went north to work during the depression. I was born in 1941. I spent my life teaching and writing.

Dr. Kent: You have quite a story attached to your Cherokee Great‑Grandfather.

Diane: That’s right.

Dr. Kent: Can you tell me a little about that?

Diane: That’s right. I would almost rather not. He committed a crime just before the Civil War. Fled Oklahoma territory and ended up in the Tennessee Calvary during the Civil War and tried to return to Oklahoma, and could not and settled in Viola, Arkansas where my grandmother and then my father was born. The father who went north for work during the depression.

Dr. Kent: So you are both Cherokee and European?

Diane: Yes, my mother was English and German.

Dr. Kent: Oklahoma is such a rich heritage; it’s both Native American and European.

Diane: The settlers.

Dr. Kent: What do you feel from this state? Do you feel that tension’s been resolved?

Diane: No, I don’t think it really has and may never be. Tension is important in a way. The tension of heat and cold, the atmosphere. Tension makes things happen often, I would say. I moved away I believe it was ‘87 that I left Oklahoma and to this day I still write about it. The land was so powerful, my experience there.

I lived in Minnesota for 17 years, that’s where Macalester College is. I did write a book about the land there, but it is always Oklahoma that I return to. One of the books, “Flutie,” I’ve been writing into a film script and I want to go to Vici, Oklahoma, where I worked and make a film. The struggle for economic stability, the struggle for education that is still there for the Native people, the mixed blood people.

Dr. Kent: My father is a developmental pediatrician and my mother is a poet. The two of them find ‑ and they both live in Oklahoma. They both find very different things in the land there. Both of them work with the Native American people, and they also work with the European people. They find that the culture is very different. Did you grow up with both of those cultures?

Diane: Yes I did. It was mainly my mother’s people that I grew up with. We were in Kansas City and my father’s people were in Arkansas. We would make trips back down there, and my mother was very uncomfortable, so I knew much less of them than I did my mother’s people.

Dr. Kent: I know it’s a dramatically different thing. What did you think about it as a child?

Diane: I remember the mystery. I remember a sense of fear in a way. There was something that was there, that I couldn’t really put my finger on that was not talked about that was pushed aside or ignored.

When I lived most of my adult life in Oklahoma, I began going back to Tahlequah, which is the Cherokee capital, to Sallisaw where my great‑grandfather had been born. Not in the city, not in the town but surrounding area. That’s where I began to reconnect with that part of my heritage. That side of the family.

Then I went to the outdoor drama of the “Trail of Tears.” How did the Cherokee get to Oklahoma from the Southeast in 1838 and I began writing, “Pushing the Bear” which is the story of the “Trail of Tears” which took me about 18 years to write.

I got in my car and drove back to Georgia. New Echota is about 75 miles north of Atlanta. I drove those 900 miles not all at once, but in different years. I would go back and find another piece of the story and then another piece and more voices. It was a long work, a layering to find the voice that had been missing in my life. What exactly happened? Nobody would ever talk.

Dr. Kent: Oklahoma is a very… I know you were talking about the land. I have spent quite a bit of time myself in the Appalachian Mountains, in that area. It is quite a different landscape than it is in Oklahoma. What do you think about that? I mean the Trail of Tears, the beginning and end are so different, the places that they started and ended. How do you think it changed the people?

Diane: Oh I think it changed them a great deal. Although Northeastern Oklahoma, which is the Cherokee settlement, is an extension of the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks, so there are hills and woods. It is much different than Oklahoma when you get out in the western part that is actually prairie, flat prairie. That wonderful red soil that is in the middle of Oklahoma is also in Georgia. So, in a way it was very different.

I am now working on Pushing the Bear resettlement because people have often asked what happened after they got there. How do you start again from nothing? How do you rebuild and what was it like? There has been a lot of work done on the more affluent Cherokee. Some of them even had plantations, but my interest has always been in the common people, the farmers, which were my grandfather, great grandfather… the people that really did have to start again from nothing. That is what I am interested in.

As I’m working on this project ‑ I’m jumping ahead now to something else ‑ the first thing I’ve done for this little film I want to make is to go back and video some of the parts of Oklahoma. There are salt plains, great salt plains near Jet, Oklahoma up in the northern part just under Kansas off I‑35. Then there are the Glass Mountains. There are all these slits of red soil, green grass, winter wheat. The land just has such a distinctive voice as does the Canadian river.

I’ve just been establishing land over which I am going to put this story.

Dr. Kent: Is that the play you are working on also or is that a separate project?

Diane: No, right now, I am in Los Angeles working on a play called, “Salvage.” It is entirely different from Oklahoma although it is a native play. The family has an accident and the man they hit begins to stalk them. It is about reservation wars, us against us, you know? It’s about the swift and irrevocable change in the way of life.

Dr. Kent: Can you tell me a little bit about your writing process? How are you writing this?

Diane: Well, I picked up the play when I was driving on Highway Two in Montana several years ago. I was doing research for Sacajawea, which is another book I have written, “Stone Heart, ” about the 1804‑1806 Lewis and Clark expedition. Somewhere in Montana, there was this edge of the Highway Two, there was a dirt lot, and there was a corrugated fence that possibly belonged to a salvage yard. That image got into the car and has been with me for years and I began writing about it. The play is called, “Salvage.”

So I began writing simply by driving on the land, picking up ideas and then I’d go back to my word processor and I get a rough draft, something that is half‑baked. Then I come out here to Los Angeles, where there is a group called, “Native Voices at the Autry.” The actors read the play and then I come home and re‑write and go back the next day, re‑read it and we all talk about it. It is more of a communal process than writing a poem or a novel. [background music]

I’m getting ready at noon to go back to the Autry. I’ve been here all week. There will be a first public reading of the play tonight at eight o’clock. Then the audience; we have a talk back afterwards and the audience also gives their input so it’s communal. It is very nice. You get to work with people as opposed to writing a novel.

So from the road, I pick up voices from the land. I think the land carries history and heritage. I am very interested in giving voice to those, who have not had a chance to speak to tell their side of the story. Then I go through this long process of writing and re‑writing and re‑writing. One of the actors asked yesterday, “How many more changes are there going to be in this play?” I don’t know. It’s a long process, a long cycle.

Dr. Kent: You are not sure yet.

Well, it has been a true pleasure talking about the land and talking about your writing. I look forward to checking out your progress on that. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Diane: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: The next guest on Sound Authors is Dr. Francine Ringold. Come on back.

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