Diane Glancy Books In Order

Pushing the Bear

It is February 1839, and the survivors of the Cherokee Trail of Tears have just arrived in Fort Gibson, Indian Territory. A quarter of the removed Indian population have died along the way, victims of cold, disease, and despair. Now the Cherokee people confront an unknown future. How will they build anew from nothing? How will they plow fields of unbroken sod, full of rocks too heavy to lift? Can they put aside the pain and anger of Removal and find peace?

Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears tells the story of the Cherokees’ resettlement in the hard years following Removal, a story never before explored in fiction. In this sequel to her popular 1996 novel Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, author Diane Glancy continues the tale of Cherokee brothers O ga na ya and Knobowtee and their families, as well the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead, a Cherokee Christian minister. The book follows their travails in Indian Territory as they attempt to build cabins, raise crops, and adjust to new realities.

The novel begins with a nation defeated displaced, starving, broken, still walking that hated Trail in their dreams. Debate rages between followers of the old ways and converts to Christianity, and conflict between those who opposed and those who authorized resettlement eventually erupts into violence. In the aftermath of confusion, despair, and turmoil, a new nation emerges

The Only Piece of Furniture in the House

This coming of age story tells of a young, naive southern girl’s growth to wife and mother. After marrying a military man, Rachel must leave her family for life on an army base where everything is foreign. Overwhelmed with memories of home, she sinks into a depression. Rachel ultimately reconciles the differences in her new life with the memories of her beloved childhood.

Flutie

Thirteen year old Flutie lives on the edge of an enormous quiet that she wants to transcend. Her family’s life in Western Oklahoma, her father’s job repairing old cars and tractors, her brother’s betrayal, and her mother’s indifference are all parts of a story Flutie wants to tell if she can just find the words. In a library book, Flutie reads the myth of Philomela, whose tongue was cut out by her sister’s husband so she cannot tell that he raped her. As Flutie faces the poverty of the the land and the turmoil of her family, she feels she is also without a tongue. She is not just afraid to speak, she is afraid of being. She especially fears her own imagination which produces visions of deer and a spirit woman that she doesn’t understand. For a time, Flutie loses herself in drinking and drugs and a friendship that turns oppressive. But through her inner resources and the influence of a kind neighbor, she claims her own voice.

The Closets of Heaven

Poetry. Alongside the rise of Native American writers such as Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich, writers like Diane Glancy have been quietly expoloring other possiblities for Native American writing. Infused with a religious sensibility, peopled by the characters of the Bible, this is prose with the elevation and resonance of poetry. Diane Glancy is the author of the dramatic collection WAR CRIES Holy Cow, IRON WOMAN New Rivers, and numerous other books available from SPD.

Fuller Man

Set in rural Missouri, Fuller Man is narrated by Hadley Williges, the youngest of Bill and Ann’s three children. Ann’s family are devout Christians, so when Ann marries Bill, a nonbeliever, Ann’s sister Mary predicts trouble. Indeed, bitter fights erupt when Bill, a reporter for the Kansas City Chronicle, goes off chasing stories for the newspaper. The parents’ stormy relationship affects each of the Williges children in different ways. Gus ends up on the periphery of reality, Nealy becomes a missionary in Nigeria, and Hadley searches for the meaning of the Biblical passage ‘And a highway shall be there, and a way.’ An exploration of religious faith and faith in humanity, of Christianity as a divider and a healer, Fuller Man is a complex and satisfying read.

The Man Who Heard the Land

In this haunting novel by celebrated Native American author Diane Glancy, an unnamed man driving a lonely Minnesota highway hears the voice of the land but he can’t make out what it has said. The man is a professor who teaches a ‘Literature and the Environment’ course, but he soon realises that there is much he must still learn about the land, his past, and his home state. What follows is a kind of odyssey of self discovery. He submerges himself into the history of the region, trying to piece together geology, Native folklore, and early explorer literature, all in an effort to decipher what the land has said. Along the way he experiences the deaths of his parents; he is stranded in an ice fishing house for a cold winter night; he helps rescue a family from a flood of the Red River. He encounters more elusive obstacles when he tries to gather his material into a book but becomes hopelessly entangled in complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions. But the more the man works to uncover universal truths, the more he circles toward certain inescapable realities in his own life. This is a small masterpiece of prose at once an enthralling narrative of one man’s personal quest and a deeply probing meditation on each person’s place in history.

The Mask Maker

In The Mask Maker, Diane Glancy tells the story of Edith Lewis, a recently divorced mixed blood American Indian, as she travels the state of Oklahoma teaching students the art and custom of mask making. A complex, subtle tale about f1esh and blood human beings, this enchanting novel shows how one woman copes with alienation, loss, and questions about identity and, in the end, rediscovers meaning in living. Through Edith’s daily life and efforts to teach, Glancy explores the power of the mask and mask making. When Edith tries reaching out to a listless, alienated student, she knows enough to ask, ‘Where would you want to go?’ He replies, ‘Nowhere,’ to which she responds with the advice, ‘Then make a mask to take you nowhere.’For Edith, masks go beyond the limitations of words and surface gloss. ‘A mask is a face when you have none,’ she reflects. Yet some stories need to be confronted, so Edith struggles with the question of how to use masks to tell stories without using words. Glancy’s Edith is no idealized sage but a very human character struggling as best she can while enduring clueless officials and teachers. When Edith explains to one teacher how the art of mask making reaches students on a creative, intuitive level, she is chided as impractical: ‘We’re supposed to reach them through math and English.’In The Mask Maker, Glancy provides the reader with intriguing new ways of looking at identity, at language, at intangible values, and at love. This captivating novel on the human need for self expression will delight readers of all ages.

Designs of the Night Sky

In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world. Ada Ronner, a librarian at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, hears books speak and senses their restless flow as they circulate. The same relentless energy and liberation of the story is also felt by Ada as she roller skates at the Dust Bowl, a local skating rink, floating far ahead of her husband, Ether, a physics professor. Hearing ‘the old Cherokee voices’ when she skates and works in the Manuscript and Rare Book room in the library, Ada grows increasingly aware of the continuing power of Cherokee tradition today. Coming from a culture based in oral tradition, Ada discovers the potentially liberating role of the written word, and she finds her own empowerment as its promulgator and reinventor in the twenty first century. Designs of the Night Sky moves between the turbulent history of a tribe and the experiences of the survivors of that history still caught in turmoil. Rolling from past to present and present to past, Diane Glancy’s story provokes and illumines while it invites us to reconsider the form and effect of Native American stories in today’s world.

Stone Heart

In Stone Heart, Diane Glancy grippingly retells the story of American legend Sacajawea, the young Shoshoni woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the West. Presented in Sacajawea’s voice in the form of a diary, the book makes moving and illuminating fiction out of a famed piece of history that has long been masked by myth. Glancy adds breadth and immediacy to the story by juxtaposing excerpts from Lewis and Clark s diaries with her brilliantly imagined journal of Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark recorded the external journey; its physical challenges and its wonders. Glancy s Sacajawea experiences the expedition on a different plane, one in which the dream of a small white stone shaped like a beaver is emblematic of the thin membrane between the worlds of the mundane and the magical. Sacajawea hears the clouds talking, feels the thunderous hooves of ghost horses, and savors the wetness where a buffalo calf licks her arm from the other side. In Stone Heart, the Lewis and Clark Trail springs back to life in a stunning work of imagination that vividly depicts the day to day tasks, ordeals, and triumphs of the famed expedition. At once a trail uncovered and a life revealed, Stone Heart draws a lingering portrait of a woman of resilience and courage.

Firesticks

Incorporating elements of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry, Diane Glancy’s stories are lyrical yet down to earth, often tough and gritty. Experimental, sometimes surreal in form, they nevertheless concern people who are very real a color blind young boy who watches planes in flight and imagines color; a shy stamp collector who speculates that he and his friend, like the stamps, could go anywhere via the U.S. Post Office; an old woman who dies in the cold landscape of her inner life but retains her vision; a cynical woman reluctant to take risks with yet another traveling man. In spite of life s hard realities, Firesticks is filled with humor and hope and a stitching together of cultures, as the crossblood characters search for their identities.

The Dance Partner

Diane Glancy sees books as being akin to maps, and often finds the Native American voices she writes about as she travels. Once, when driving through western Nevada, she stopped at Grant Mountain and Walker Lake, where the Ghost Dance began and still lives. There she found inspiration for ‘The Dance Partner‘, this outstanding collection of short stories that begins in the present, jumps back to the time of the Ghost Dance, goes further back to the Sioux Uprising, and then moves forward again across 117 years of Plains Indian history. The Ghost Dance was a late 19th century phenomenon among Native American groups in the West. Followers believed that whites would disappear and that the ‘old ways of living’ would return. In fact, Glancy’s stories form a kind of Ghost Dance, circling what is with what was and will be. History is not in the past at all, but has a presence in the present in a way that transforms the future. In a culture where much has been erased, forgotten, or lost, the fragments of what is known are woven with the possibilities of what could have been in a technique that is called ghosting. Ghosting in writing presents voices that might have been alongside voices known to have been. Glancy takes the words of Native Americans Porcupine and Kicking Bear, along with those of ethnologist James Mooney, and adds imagined voices. The past roams into the present. History comes down the road in many vehicles, out of chronological order, carnival trucks with different rides, each setting up unreality in fun house mirrors that distort them into new ways of seeing what is true. Glancy writes from a historical perspective and the imagination of what could have been. In the end, the Ghost Dance symbolizes the possibility of a rewritten life.

The Reason for Crows

The story of a seventeenth century Mohawk woman’s interaction with her land, the Jesuits, and the religion they brought.

War Cries

drama, 9 plays set in tribal Oklahoma & New Mexico

American Gypsy

In American Gypsy, a collection of six plays, Diane Glancy uses a m lange of voices to invoke the myths and realities of modern Native American life. Glancy intermixes poetry and prose to address themes of gender, generational relationships, acculturation, myth, and tensions between Christianity and traditional Native American belief systems. The six plays included, The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance, The Women Who Loved House Trailers, American Gypsy, Jump Kiss, Lesser Wars, and The Toad Another Name for the Moon Should Have a Bite, run the gamut from monologues to multi character pieces and vary in length from fifteen minutes to over an hour. Glancy concludes the collection with a thought provoking essay on Native American playwriting.

Two Worlds Walking

incl mixed Native, Latino, African writers

Claiming Breath

Like poets of legend, Diane Glancy has spent much of her life on the road. For years she supported her family by driving throughout Oklahoma and Arkansas teaching poetry in the schools. Claiming Breath is an account of one of those years, what Glancy calls a winter count of sorts, a calendar, a diary of personal matters…
and a final acceptance of the broken past…
. It’s a year that covers more than a year.

The Cold And Hunger Dance

The Cold And Hunger Dance is an imaginative and honest account of Diane Glancy’s journeys to and from the margins of memory, everyday life, and different cultural worlds that combine her Cherokee heritage and her Christian faith. Along the way, familiar images and concepts are juxtaposed to create a literary terrain that is both engaging and unsettling: the Bible and Black Elk Speaks converse; Glancy’s dispute with a local bakery is played out as if on a world stage of warring nations; eggs and cultural identity implicate each other; and lost Native languages speak powerfully through their silences to modern Native writers. The creative twists and darting metaphoric excursions engendered by this journey provide an intimate glimpse into the process and problematics of language for modern Native authors.

Visit Teepee Town

Coffee House Press invites readers into the world of Native American postmodern poetry in a groundbreaking anthology sampling the work of twenty two authors who lead us into new conceptual terrain. Visit Teepee Town is the first anthology dedicated solely to postmodern North American Native poetry and poetics. The works selected here resist established methodologies of defining indigenous aesthetics, and include bilingual texts, reinterpretations of traditional tales, and critiques of the Western tradition in anthropology and the social sciences.

The collection features both new and established authors, including James Thomas Stevens, Lise McCloud, Gerald Vizenor, James Luna, Rosemarie Waldrop, Carolyn Lei lanilau, Barbara Tedlock, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, Maurice Kenny, Hachavi Edgar Heap of Birds, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Victoria Lena Manyarrows, Besmilr Brigham, Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, Diane Glancy, Phil Young, Larry Evers and Felipe Molina, Juan Felipe Herrera, Greg Sarris, Peter Blue Cloud, and Louise Bernice Halfe.

Certain to spark lively debate in the classroom and beyond, Visit Teepee Town sidesteps the roadblocks and knocks down the barricades that have limited contemporary criticism and poetry. A revival of the magic of sound and oral tradition, Visit Teepee Town redefines contemporary and postmodern poetry and poetics as it leads readers to the Teepee Town at the end of the mind.

In-between Places

‘There is a map you decide to call a book. A book of the territories you ve traveled. A map is a meaning you hold against the unknowing. The places you speak in many directions.’ For Diane Glancy, there are books that you open like a map. In between Places is such a book: a collection of eleven essays unified by a common concern with landscape and its relation both to our spiritual life and to the craft of writing. Taking readers on a trip to New Mexico, a voyage across the sea of middle America, even a journey to China, Glancy has crafted a sustained meditation on the nature and workings of language, stories, and poems; on travel and motion as metaphors for life and literature; and on the relationships between Native American and Judeo Christian ways of thinking and being in the world. Reflecting on strip mines in Missouri ‘as long as there is anything left to take, human industry will take it’ and hog barns in Iowa writing about them from the hogs’ perspective, Glancy speaks in the margins of cross cultural issues and from the places in between as she explores the middle ground between places that we handle with the potholder of language. She leaves in her wake a dance of words and the structures left after the collision of cultures. A writer who has often examined her native heritage, Glancy also asks here what it means to be part white. ‘What does whiteness look like viewed from the other, especially when that other is also within oneself?’ And in considering the legacy of Christianity, she ponders ‘how it is when the Holy Ghost enters your life like a brother in law you know is going to be there a while.’ Insightful and provocative, In between Places is a book for anyone interested in a sense of place and in the relationship between religion and our stance toward nature. It is also a book for anyone who loves thoughtful writing and wishes to learn from a modern master of language.