Enrique Cerna Interviews Author and Poet Sherman Alexie

This is a transcript of an interview with Sherman Alexie on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on July 11, 2008.

EC: Sherman Alexie, welcome. Good to have you here.

SA: Good to be here

EC: Winning a National Book Award, is it like winning an Oscar?

SA: It’s exactly like winning an Oscar. Someone had heard that, and somebody called it the Oscars for nearsighted people... nearsighted homely people. But uh, you know it’s a big formal ceremony, you’re in a room and they call your name out as one of the nominees in your category, and then they announce the winner. So you don’t know until they announce your name. So, the same set of nerves is there. In fact, lamb was for dinner, so when they called my name out I vomited just a little bit of lamb, just you know, essence of lamb, eau de lamb. And immediately afterwards my wife my agent my editors, all these women started kissing me because I’d won. So, I just kept thinking, ‘I am making out with people and I have, lamb aroma going on.’ So, I think it saved me though, cause once I got up to give the talk, all I could think about was the lamb.

EC: Winning a National Book Award, and especially in this category, young people’s literature, and, a book really about you.

SA: Yeah. Well it’s an autobiographical tale of a young indian guy…

EC: Right, it’s fiction.

SA: …who leaves his rez to go to the white school on the border where he becomes the only indian except for the mascot. So it received this attention, this award. It’s been on the “best of” list for every major young adult literary publication. It’s up for the LA Times Book Prize here at the end of the month. Uh, it’s been not only a validation of my literary career, but a validation of the life choice that I made when I was 14. So I feel validated in all sorts of ways. And of course, being who I am, as soon as I feel validated I have the need to rebel against that. So I’m going to write something invalidating next.

EC: The life choice at 14?

SA: To leave the rez. To leave my tribe in a sense. You know, tribes used to be kinetic and nomadic, and I think reservations have in many ways made us static. And growing up I was certainly taught to be suspicious of the outside world. I was taught to be suspicious of white folks and anything related to white culture. So the move itself was not just a move away from fear, away from isolation, but it was an embrace of the world, of all the possibilities in the world. And the fact is, because of that choice I have ended up experiencing the world. I’ve traveled all over the place, I’m published in 22 countries, I’ve been in places where no Spokane Indian has ever been. So to get this award related to the choice that first began all of this, I mean I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be writing these books if I hadn’t left my reservation, is amazing.

EC: Did you have any fears, any doubts, about writing about yourself?

SA: Oh I, I have fears and doubts every time I sit down to write. It’s an incredibly insecure profession. But the big part of it was I dealt with a lot of pain again. When I left, not only leaving my reservation, but I experienced a lot of death in my family. Eight family members died that year. In the book it’s three. So in rewriting and revisiting that year, I also had to revisit a lot of that grief. Certainly a lot of time has passed and there’s been a lot of healing, but it’s still, it’s not too difficult to remember that pain and to feel that again.

EC: Let’s talk about Sherman Alexie. Let’s talk about where he grew up, which is the essence of this book.

SA: Yeah.

EC: And, your life. You were born and you grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

SA: I was born in Spokane, in Sacred Heart Hospital, and I grew up on an indian reservation. My mother is Spokane, my late father was Coeur d’Alene. I grew up there, off and on I lived in Spokane a little bit when my parents would move to Spokane. I lived in the Bluebird Motel, in Spokane for a while.

EC: Really

SA: I lived in the Parklane Motel in Spokane for a while. The Arlington Court Apartments in Spokane for a while. But mostly, in fact almost 99 percent, was on the reservation. Grew up across the street from the tribal school, have four siblings… five siblings, forgot one. And generally lived a fairly typical rez life. Mother and father were alcoholics. My mom sobered up when I was seven. Randomly employed, mostly poor, growing up in government housing. My mom and my siblings, my sisters, were pow-wowers. My dad and my brothers were basketball players. So, I followed the basketball path and not the pow-wow path.

EC: But you were sickly. You were born…

SA: Hydrocephalic.

EC: Right, water in the brain.

SA: Water in the brain. Too much cerebral spinal fluid was crushing my brain. I had brain surgery at six months of age, which is fictionalized in my book, and survived the surgery, obviously.

EC: But you weren’t expected to live long…

SA: No.

EC: …and even if you did live…

SA: I was supposed to be severely mentally damaged. And I’m only moderately to minorly mentally damaged. (laughs) But there are all sorts of issues related to brain damage of course. Even now when I go to get my cat scans and MRIs, the colors are all wrong.

EC: Really?

SA: Yeah, and the technicians will start laughing. You know, which is not really what you want people… your health care givers to be doing when they look at your brain scans as they giggle.

EC: So growing up did you have seizures?

SA: I had seizures, I had, you know, physical health problems. My body reacted in a weird way.

EC: Bad eyes…

SA: I have 42 teeth, I’m nearsighted in one eye, farsighted in another, my head is enormous. So I had all sorts of secondary health problems related to the brain damage and the brain surgery. So I struggled for the first seven years of my life to have any kind of health. And spent most of the seven years of my life fairly cooped-up. I mean in the hospital, laying on a couch, in a hospital bed.

EC: A little kid that has health problems of any sort, and then has any type of physical health problems that people can see, and then growing up on a reservation…

SA: I was a freak. In every way possible.

EC: Were you bullied?

SA: I got bullied quite a bit. As anybody with any difference will be, physical differences. But I was also different in terms of what I loved. I loved reading. Almost immediately. Part of that was my father. My father was a big reader. It was genre stuff. Westerns, mysteries. He loved The Executioner and The Punisher. So I grew up with books. The idea of books.

EC: You actually learned to read very early.

SA: Really early. I mean you’re lying flat on your back there’s not much else to do. And I loved my father and I wanted to be like him, and my father loved books so, I loved books. A very paternal relationship with books. So I learned to read early. I read like crazy, I loved school, you know, all these qualities made me a target on the reservation.

EC: Yeah I think, that’s not necessarily what a reservation kid is all about supposedly.

SA: Right, exactly. Once again loving books, loving school, the concept of school, was seen as being white. The notion of any sort of success was seen as being white. So I was labeled early on as an apple -- red on the outside white on the inside. There are other ethnic variations of that: bananas, Oreos. That was me, I was an apple.

EC: So at 14, as we talked before, you made the decision, you had the desire, to leave the rez to go to a nearby high school which was Reardan High School.

SA: Well I had been thinking about leaving anyway. And then, the first day of 7th grade, I opened up my math book and my mom’s name was written in it, my mom’s maiden name. So I was looking at a 30-year-old math book. And I knew then that I had to leave. It took me a year to get up the courage, and I said it almost everyday for a year. I kept telling everybody I was leaving the rez school to go to Reardan.

EC: Now why did you know that you had to leave?

SA: I wanted to go to college, I wanted to be a doctor at that point.

EC: And so you knew you had to get out.

SA: I knew I had to get out. To have a chance of even succeeding in college, I knew I needed to get out. It’s strange when you think about the brain damage that almost killed me, in order to survive it, it instilled in me this will to live that was stronger than most people’s. This competitive instinct was stronger than most people’s. The brain damage actually made me stronger, you know. Nietzsche in hydrocephalus. So I always knew I had to leave. Even when you look back at those reports where people say “what do you want to be when you grow up?” On my reservation it would say, NBA basketball player, NBA basketball player, powwow dancer, sculptor…. And mine would say pediatrician. Even at the earliest of ages.

EC: So what was that like, 14-year-old kid who lives on the rez, who already has all these issues that makes him a target, even on the rez, and then you decide you’re going to leave the rez.

SA: I was terrified. I thought that everything that made me a freak on the reservation would make me freak off the rez. I also thought that all white kids would be geniuses, rich geniuses. I thought everybody was going to be Richie Rich and have these magical translucently white powers. It felt like sailing toward the edge of the Earth and there were dragons there, and they were white dragons, snow dragons, big ice dragons. It’s funny to think that, because now, if anybody goes to Reardan, the white town where I went to high school, they’re just going to see a fairly typical white little wheat farming town.

EC: It’s a small town.

SA: Tiny, but for me at that point in my life, it might as well been New York. It might as well have been Manhattan or Los Angeles or Valhalla, for that matter. I was terrified. Terrified. And my dad drove me to the first day of school and we sat outside waiting, and he kept saying, “you can change your mind, you can change your mind.” And there was nothing I wanted more at that moment than to go back to the rez.

EC: But it seems that you would probably face something new in Reardan and who knows the unknown there, but were you ostracized on the rez, for making this decision?

SA: oh yeah, I was pretty immediately a pariah, and it got worse, I ended up playing sports of course for Reardan, and we played flag football against Wellpinit, the tribal school. And that day was crazy because I woke up on the rez, my dad drove me 22 miles to Reardan, where I got on the team bus, and drove back to the rez to play a flag football game against all my cousins and friends, and it was a brutal game. After a while, they quit even trying to play the game, they were running every play to hit me. And so I was getting beat up and my coach asked me, he would pull me from the game if he wanted to, and I said no I have to stay in. so this flag football game turned into something Mad Max like. But I knew I needed to stay in it and living on the rez still at night or on weekends, where people would see me, I would get threatened and insulted, so it came to the point where I didn’t even leave the house when I was home, I stayed in the house whenever I was home. So I wouldn’t have to deal with people’s words or threats.

EC: Did you ever think about giving up and coming back? SA: At one point, I almost had to. Because we were running out of money, and we just couldn’t afford for me to be driving everyday to school. And then a family, in Reardan, offered for me to stay there for free, so during the week, I would stay there a couple days, sometimes I would stay over weekends, but it was this family in particular. And at one point I actually turned in all my books that first year on a Friday, thinking I was going to have start school on the rez on Monday. And you know the humiliation of that, even now, I get a nauseous, how humiliating it was going to be.

EC: So from Reardan, you go on to college, first to Gonzaga?

SA: Gonzaga for a couple years, then couldn’t afford it any longer. Transferred to the University of Washington, but never actually attended. I moved over here following a girl, as many young men do.

EC: Yes, Been there, done that. (laughs)

SA: You know that story, and that didn’t work out. And I ended up back at WAZZU (Washington State University) following a different girl. And I decided I wanted the cougar version of a childhood sweetheart.

EC: But you wanted to be a doctor?

SA: Yeah I started wanting to be a pediatrician, but I couldn’t handle the anatomy, the actual putting of your hands in a human body, I kept fainting. I took a lot of classes, and the class I took that really got me instantly was a poetry writing class. I’d never read anything read by an Indian. I had no idea that we actually wrote about our lives. And the teacher, Alex Kuo, handed me this anthology of contemporary Native American poetry, called Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back. And I took it home that night and read all 400 pages of poems straight through, and read it again, and read it again. I read that thing every day probably for two years, stunned that you could write about our lives. About a life as a reservation indian, as an indian, about poverty and beauty, and pow-wows and fry bread, and backward driving cars and all this stuff. I had no idea that my small life would appeal to anybody. With that anthology and all those native writers who came before me that I realized that my story might be important.

EC: Alex Kuo was a big influence on you.

SA: A huge influence. Still one of my best friends. In fact before I came here to tape the interview, he and I were texting each other.

EC: And he still teaches there.

SA: Still teaches in Washington State. He’s in Warsaw right now with his wife. Still a major influence. In fact, if you read his work and read mine, the influence is still very strong.

EC: So you started as a poet, and you had some success, won some awards, how did the transition go from being a poet…

SA: To being a fiction writer? Well, in college, I took this fiction writing class, because I was in love with this woman who was taking fiction writing classes. She was a lesbian so it was an impossible dream. She’s still one of my best friends, maybe my best friend actually, so I followed her into the fiction writing class, so it was a romantic move. So I wrote a couple stories in college, and there were a couple of stories in my first book of poems and it got a great review in the New York Times. And then people saw it asked me if I wrote fiction and I said yes, and then I went and wrote it. So, it was pretty much people asking for fiction that got me to start writing it.

EC: How do you go about writing? Is it a painful process?

SA: Oh, only for a year and half, when I had writers block, was it painful. Other than that year and half, it’s actually the reverse, it’s actually like I have writers diarrhea.

EC: Are you one of these, “get up at four in the morning and boom”…

SA: I’m always writing, always. I have notepads everywhere. I will find stuff I’ve written that I forgot I wrote. Like I have so many notebooks, I’m always loosing them and misplacing them. I have all these, moleskin notebooks—I have them all over the place. I’ll be digging through a pile of stuff “Oh, here’s a notebook” and I’ll open it, and there’ll be a hand written poem in there, and I’ll go “hey, that’s pretty good” or the beginning of a story, so I’m always writing, always.

EC: Of all the books that you’ve written, anything that you feel is your best work that you are most proud of?

SA: You know, you aim for greatness every time, and out of the thousands of pages I’ve written, I have maybe 100 pages of greatness. Maybe 1% of 1%.

EC: This book, The Absolute True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian, you know it’s so personal. Have you suddenly found a new audience?

SA: Well you know it’s for young adults, so all these teenagers, it’s been amazing. You know when you write literary fiction like I do, you’re generally appealing to about 150,000 serious readers in the country. That’s pretty much it for literary fiction. About 150,000 people. So you’re always hoping for a certain percentage of that. If I write a great book that’s really successful, I’ll get two thirds of that. But with young adult literature, you’re talking about a couple of million serious readers.

EC: So this is a new audience for you?

SA: A brand new audience. A passionate audience. I mean I remembered what I was like when I was sixteen. And you’d find the book. THE BOOK. And that was it. Or, the music, or the show, or the movie. So, I feel like I’m getting these readers in their infancy, when they’re their most passionate, when they’re their most devoted, when you could really change somebody’s life. I’ve never gotten a letter from some 45 year old dude, you know saying, “yah, you changed my life”…but I get those letters from teenagers now constantly

EC: Letters or emails?

SA: Emails, emails. I say letters because I’m still of that old fashioned generation, but uh, emails, constantly getting emails. And at my readings now, my crowds, I visit high schools.

EC: How does that feel, I mean considering where you came from, what you’ve gone through in life. And where you knew at times people would make fun of you, ostracize you, suddenly you know, hey man, you’ve opened up a new world for me!”

SA: I’m a freak with power. And uh, I feel like the carnival side show that now has some social influence. But, I spent most of my youth fairly lonely. And I think most of us do, and I think this book acknowledges that and you know a lot of it’s about race and class in the book, about feeling like an outsider. But what you realize when you talk to young people, is that everybody feels like an outsider, everybody feel ostracized, so…

EC: And the confidence issue…that’s the big thing.

SA: Yeah, and what you learn is that every 16 year old feels like a freak.

EC: Alcoholism touched your family. Your sister died, she was drunk and died in a fire at her home. And you write about this here. How did you avoid that?

SA: Well, I didn’t avoid it completely. I didn’t drink on the rez, I started drinking my senior year in high school, at the white high school. And that continued until ‘91. I drank alcoholically from about March of 1985 till March of 1991. What made me quit actually was… I never drove, I never really participated in anything dangerous, but one night I drove and I sort of came to in my alcoholic stupor that I was driving. So I stopped the car and I don’t remember getting home, but I woke up in the morning with a knock on my apartment door and it was the police telling me that somebody had stolen my car and left it running on the Old Palouse Highway. So, in my black out, my near black out, I stopped driving and I got out of my car and walked home, but I left the car on the highway running. Ah, and that was pretty much enough for me to say, “Ok, I’m done”. So I could have very easily died that night. So, I got lucky, you know, but your luck can only run for a certain number of those nights.

EC: Where you angry at all about the alcoholism on the reservation and about the alcoholism that touched your family?

SA: Oh I’m still angry about it. Ah, but what really gets me angry, and I write about it a lot, and people assume it’s a stereotype. When anybody uses that word to describe alcoholism among Native Americans as a stereotype, that what really gets me angry, it’s a disavowal of the truth. Alcoholism is epidemic among Native Americans, and anybody who says otherwise is either drunk or they’re lying. Or they’re romantic fools. And so it’s not the alcoholism itself that gets me angry, it’s the denial that surrounds it.

EC: You write in this book, about you’re sister’s situation, it’s obviously the story and its very painful incident that happened. You were also involved in the making of Smoke Signals in 1988 in which you were the writer. And there’s a scene in that movie…

SA: House fire. In that house fire, Thomas Builds the Fire, the storyteller, is saved and born as a storyteller. So I think in a metaphorical way, my sisters house fire gave birth to me as a storyteller. She always thought I was going to be a writer. Which is funny to think about, because it was never even a possibility. She loved books so much and I loved books so much, and we were always trading books, and she was always said, “You should be a writer…You should be a writer…” And one of the great regrets of my life and one of the great sadnesses is that she’s not alive for this career of mine. She loved books, so the notion that her little brother would have been running around the country with these books would have delighted her completely. And I have a cousin, a first cousin, who looks so much like her, so whenever I give readings in Spokane and I look out there and I see my cousin Connie and she looks so much like my sister, my heart just aches. So, it’s amazing how much you miss the people and lives they would have led.

EC: You’re dad has passed on? But you’re mother’s still alive.

SA: My mom’s still out there.

EC: I understand that she’s kind of funny about this, but she tells you about what’s in the book.

SA: It was so funny, because on the book tour last fall I was driving between Milwaukee and Chicago and there was all construction everywhere so I got stuck for an hour at one point so I was calling everybody I knew, and I called home to talk to mom and she had read it in galleys and prepublications and didn’t get it. She told me that, “I didn’t get it.” Thanks mom. But she read it again and she was on the phone. “I just finished it again…its was so funny and it made me cry…wait, wait listen to this” and then she started reading me parts of my own book as if I hadn’t written it. She goes “isn’t that funny” or “isn’t that sad.” But, the book for my siblings and my mom, really also validates them, even though my siblings aren’t in it. There was only one sibling that was in it. My living siblings were teasing me, “how come you put the dead one in there and not the living ones?” Because the dead ones can’t sue me. But, it really validates our family’s decisions as well. Because none of this would be possible, I couldn’t have gone off the rez without my families support. Because my sisters came a year later also, but getting through college and all that, my siblings and my parents all helped me financially so. Any career is the result of a family and group effort and my family has always, always supported my literary career, even when I was telling family secrets.

EC: What’s the next book?

SA: The next book coming up is a book of poetry, this out fall. From Hanging Loose, my old poetry publishers. It’s called Thrash. And my new young adult novel will be out next may, and it’s called Radio Active Love Song.

EC: Your children. You’re a father of two boys. What do you want to give them, about where you came from and for them to understand?

SA: Very little! You know the magic and the beauty of it, but not so much the pain. I can, I am very proud, my sons, have not so much as seen any indian so much as sip alcohol. Not even a sip. So, you talk about giving your son something, is stopping that image. They don’t even know it. They have no concept of an indian being intoxicated. And that for me is one of the greatest gifts that I could possibly give them, is ending that cycle. When they become adults, who knows what kind of problems they’re going to have, but its not going to be the result of having grown up in that kind of environment. So the best possible gift for them is my wife and my sobriety.

EC: Well you’ve given me a gift, by giving me you’re time.

SA: Ah, always Enrique

EC: Thank you, Sherman Alexie.