Rejection letters, geoscience, the editing process and the basics of comic writing. These were some of the topics of discussion at a panel with Lipan Apache author Dr. Darcie Little Badger on Sept. 19.
Little Badger was the most recent guest speaker for Fort Lewis College’s SkyWords Visiting Writers Series.
SkyWords is a series that brings writers, especially Native American writers, that are meant to represent the student body to campus that was developed by Dr. Candace Nadon, an FLC associate professor and faculty advisor for IMAGES Magazine, with support from former Dean of Arts and Sciences Dr. Jesse Peters whose specialty was Native American literature, Nadon said.
“I think it’s really powerful as a young writer to see another writer who is like you and who is successful. I think that says a lot,” Nadon said.
The idea of SkyWords is to connect people, like student writers, who love words and stories with other writers they may not have been introduced to otherwise, Nadon said.
Little Badger’s second novel, “A Snake Falls to Earth”, was part of FLC’s Common Reading Experience and is a recent example of the growing diverse voices in Indigenous fiction.
As Indigenous stories find more recognition in the literary world, what does that look like for Indigenous writers at FLC?
One of the ways young writers can get their work published through FLC is via IMAGES, the school’s arts and literary magazine which is open to all students.
One of the goals of IMAGES is to increase the diversity of contributions to their biannual issues, Nadon said.
IMAGES is also an opportunity for students to share their work with each other as well as get it published on a local scale, June Wisteria, a Diné student editor for IMAGES who attended the Little Badger panel, said.
Another way for students to publish work is through poetry magazines such as Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Poetry Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, online literary magazines and different contests, Wisteria said.
A part of submitting work is to not be afraid of rejection as it can help a writer hone in their craft and understand their vision better, Wisteria said.
“Just having that mindset where people telling you ‘no’ is not going to stop you from creating if that is what you really want to do,” Little Badger said.
Wisteria mainly writes poems, short fiction and creative nonfiction, she said. Some of the subjects she explores in her work are plants, the environment and the experiences from her childhood that shaped her today, which also involves exploring her Indigenous identity, she said.
“It fuels my experience and my understanding of the world, and allows me to see things in different contexts outside of the very Western academic way of thinking where everything is always linear,” Wisteria said.
For Wisteria, the Little Badger panel was helpful to her because the experience of looking into someone else’s writing process is intimate, personable, and lends an insight into how they experience and contextualize the world around them, she said.
“The process of writing is kind of like a science and a magic within itself,” Wisteria said.
Despite the goal of connecting young writers to underrepresented stories and authors, one of the biggest issues the Common Reading Experience, and by extension Skywords, faces is the expense of the program.
“A lot of it does come down to funding, and what’s great is that I think we have an administration and other faculty and a foundation that really want to support our student writers, “ Nadon said.
Something else to work on to help this issue is to find a grant to support that, along with bringing back alums to campus to host panels and pay them for their time, Nadon said.
Another concern that Little Badger touched on at a later panel is the fear about the focus on Indigenous stories being trendy, Nadon said.
In the face of improving representation, there are still gatekeepers that have told Little Badger that once Indigenous stories are no longer trendy they will no longer have the opportunities that they have gotten, Little Badger said.
As a business, publishing will publish what people buy, and they will publish what they think is going to sell, Nadon said.
In previous generations, Indigenous authors were often expected to write within high-literary fiction that dealt with certain subjects, so writing within genre fiction was not something that was seen as an option, Little Badger said.
“Why follow someone else’s expectations when for so long the colonial expectation of Indigenous peoples was to render them obsolete,” Wisteria said.
Even when participating in local poetry festivals, there are still diversity issues in regard to Indigenous representation, Wisteria said.
Now that Little Badger has become relatively established in the publishing world, she has been looking for opportunities to hold the door open for other writers to support the community such as working in projects like the NDN Girls Book Club, she said.
“What I’m hoping for is that the more of us that are out there, the more of us who are establishing to help other people, the better things would get,” Little Badger said.
One of the most important ways to support these writers is to buy their books and ensure that the door stays open, Nadon said.
Historically, written words and languages were used in an attempt to take away power from Indigenous cultures that utilized oral storytelling, but through those colonial actions they assigned more power to them, making Indigenous literature inherently decolonial and all the more gratifying, Wisteria said.
“We can write science fiction, fantasy, and poetry and literary stuff,” Little Badger said. “We can do whatever we want.