Interview with Joy Harjo

There are always tests and challengeswhat motivates me to keep moving through them are the
leaps deep into the mystery of the spiritual realms. Poetry is one tool for diving
As / Us Editor Tanaya Winder interviews writer and musician Joy Harjo
1. After spending time in the MFA machine which often drills us on linear structure, particularly in
the way time is handled, I found CRAZY BRAVEs form based on the four directions to be refreshing,
even empowering. Can you elaborate on your choice to structure your memoir around the four
directions or speak to that break away from a traditional memoir structure (if I can call it that)?
There are many kinds of times and approaches. I have been considering ancestral time, that is, looking
at a time structure based on generations. This has helped me understand waves of generations and
how each generation is connected, no matter culture or environment. One kind of earth time is
cyclical by way of direction, though all time is cyclical. I came upon structuring the memoir this way
in one of the later drafts. The chronology in basically from before birth to twenty-two years old. Yet,
within that linear progression are many leaps of time and space. The narrative went through
successive shape ideas. These included many titles and subtitles for vignettes. The subtitling had the
effect of breaking the narrative. It was somewhere in this creative chaotic soup that directions
occurred to me. Each direction is symbolic with many working elements. That arrangement pulled the
weave into a tight design.
2. That leads into a follow-up question. I know writers in particular are always curious about ones
process in undertaking a project. Since this is your first memoir can you talk about struggles you
encountered in writing a longer creative nonfiction piece. What were some narrative/craft muscles
you felt you needed to stretch after writing mostly poetry and songs?
This is a question asked by a poet! As primarily a poet and a songwriter, when I write prose I tend
more toward smaller moments, a kind of poetic prose or vignettes. I wrote a column for my tribal
newspaper for about two years. That form was about the right length for a poet writing prose. I notice
that I naturally leap from one time/space/event to another. Id prefer not tobut Ive had to learn to
work with that tendency. I dont understand why that isOne of my first ideas for writing the memoir
was to write it in vignettes, each vignette of memory curled around a song. We humans often plant
memories around songs. Then when we hear the song, memory rises up along emotional cords. There
is no more time. There we are fifteen again and in love with an impossible love. All senses are blown
open. I fought against the need for a single narrative, and then saw that the vignette idea was not
working. Eventually I gave in to the spirit of the story and only then did the story begin moving with a
little grace and heft.
3. I found it interesting that the sections of your memoir with the most amount of dialogue are those
Indian school sections. Did you purposefully craft it this way because you felt that you physically and
spiritually had more voice during those years or do you just happen to remember more dialogue and
conversations in those years as opposed to the years you were pregnant with your first child back in
Oklahoma living with your husband and stepmom?
InterestingI probably talked more at Indian school, though someone recently said I was the shyest
kid at Indian school. I dont think I was the shyestthere was a Hopi kid in Middle Dorm, Arden H.
who was shyer than me! The Venus story in CRAZY BRAVE was a chapter in an earlier version of
the memoir, when I decided to make the memoir a collection of short stories, all in the time period of
Indian school to becoming a teenage mother. In that earlier version, by the time I got to the Venus
story I was inventing characters or adding other elements to make the memories form artful short
stories. I revised it and included it in an italicized section in the memoir. There I wrote a disclaimer of
a sentence or two to differentiate it from the rest of the memoir because of the invention of a character
and parts of a situation. All of it was true to some extent. Some of the characters were composites.

I went through much of my earlier life with very few words. I did not speak in most social situations
and Indian school was the first school I felt comfortable enough to express myself. There certainly
wasnt much communication going on when I was pregnant with my son in Oklahoma and living with
my husband and his mother. I was very conscious of myself as a diminished presence in that time. I
did not have my own place or resources and was forced to live at the mercy of others. To be a
pregnant, young, Indian woman in Oklahoma was not a powerful position. Today I understand how it
could be a very important and pivotal place. Every event has a place of power located somewhere
within it.
4. Theres a scene in your memoir where you describe being in the first grade coloring a ghost green
instead of white like most of your peers. Then, they taunt you for not fitting into the mold and so you
ask them if any of them have ever seen a ghost before. You have a line in there that reads: What I
had seen did not fit into this kind of place. Something about that line, that scene, that moment, and
memory resonates deeply with me and I sense others who feel a similar artist calling which can
sometimes make one feel distant and separate from ones peers. How did that feeling of being out of
place affect you? Were there ever times you felt that your art was a burden and if so how did you deal
with that?
I think I must have come into the world with that kind of being out of place feeling. I was aware of
being in a particular box or sequence in the story matrix, and could move with great facility in and out
of the reality of my body, my crib, and my parents house where I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I knew
even then, before speech, that to do so was not a usual state of being and I would not be understood so
I kept it to myself. This awareness surfaced and still surfaces in my life, even now! It keeps me a little
on edge when it comes to dealing with the status quo of social situations, prevailing theoretical
thought streams, and other configurations and institutions. Maybe I perceive in this manner just
because Im Indian, Yet I come from a family that is both church and traditional, native and nonnative, and so many other oppositional forces. I am always aware of these forces and literally often
feel myself as a bridge between them, even between states of perception.
My art isnt a burden. It has given meaning and shape to these larger forces that make up who and
what I am in this time and place. What has been a burden is feeling out of time and place with my art.
I came to writing poetry at a time when to perform poetry was to speak without emotion coloring, to
keep the words and meaning clear, without interference. When I took up saxophone in the very late
80s and began playing with a band in the early 90s, the act of performing changed the way I read
poetry. So did recording. No one else was doing quite what I was doingYet, I had to keep going in a
direction that made sense to the art-making part of myself. The burden is in feeling you will never
quite fit anywhere. Yet, conversely you find yourself home in places all over the world with other
artists who understand what and how it means to walk on the edge of the impossible.
5. CRAZY BRAVE only takes us up to a certain point in your life. In the years covered we see different
moments of hope, connection, and bouts of disconnection and crises moments. Do you see yourself
writing another follow-up memoir down the road? If so, what would be the main message you would
want to convey? What are some crucial crises moments or climatic moments you know you would
want to include?
I do see a follow-up memoir, the memoir I wanted to write. It would include the political awakening I
experienced as a young native woman in the early seventies and into the eighties after natives rights
movements, the feminist movement, and several trips to Nicaragua as a witness of the Sandinista
Movement. My experience as a young native woman was very different than the men in those
situations. I suppose I could write a tell-allI think people would be surprisedmaybe notbut
thats not my way. Ive considered a sensual memoir, whatever that isI always admired the poet
Audre Lordes Zami, what she called a biomythography. Ive also considered all the teachers Ive
had and continue to have in my life. Ive considered doing an honoring, of them, what they taught and
teach me. Some of my teachers include enemies. Not all of them are human nor do all inhabit a body.

6. Throughout the memoir we see a young, gifted Joy who ultimately manages to transcend situations
and circumstances because of her gifts. More specifically poetry helps her survive. I know that our
lives are never done with struggles and trespasses and I wonder what keeps you surviving struggles
now?
There are always tests and challengeswhat motivates me to keep moving through them are the leaps
deep into the mystery of the spiritual realms. Poetry is one tool for diving, so are music and dance.
The natural world is intricate with mystery and beauty, even as it is stolid and dangerously forceful.
And human beings will always surprise you and keep you awake.
***
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of
poetry, which includes such well-known titles as How We Became Human- New and Selected Poems,
The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses have garnered many awards. These
include the New Mexico Governors Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement
Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from
the Poetry Society of America. For A Girl Becoming, a young adult/coming of age book, was released
in 2009 and is Harjos most recent publication. She has released four award-winning CDs of original
music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the
Year for Winding Through the Milky Way. Her most recent CD release is a traditional flute album:
Red Dreams, a Trail Beyond Tears. She performs nationally and internationally with her band, the
Arrow Dynamics. She also performs her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning
Light, which premiered at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles in 2009 with recent performances
at the Public Theater in NYC and LaJolla Playhouse as part of the Native Voices at the Autry. She has
received a Rasmusson: US Artists Fellowship and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and
Cultures Foundation. Harjo was commissioned by The Public Theater in NYC to write a play, We
Were There When Jazz Was Invented. The story will reinstate southeastern indigenous peoples and
our music to the story of the origin of blues and jazz. She is a professor at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. Harjo is working to help start an arts council for the Mvskoke Nation, where she
now lives.