![]() ![]() He hadn’t intended to apply for one until he learned about the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe and its Native-based program. That distrust made him wary of MFA creative-writing programs. ![]() “Having the freedom to only read what I loved and not having an institution be a part of that, I think that led to me finding my voice.” ![]() There he fell in love with reading, especially books in translation and South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges. “I didn’t trust the old white men in this country and what our canon is largely based on,” Orange said. It’s a masterful literary construction from a writer with an unconventional literary education that began in adulthood, when Orange started working at a used-book store. ![]() The threads intersect in sometimes surprising ways, the chorus building to an explosive climax at an Oakland powwow. There are a dozen narrators, each bearing the weight of historical trauma in a modern world. After that devastating prologue, “There There” splits into a multiplicity of Native voices, as if making up for lost ground: Tony Loneman, a young man who has grown up with “The Drome,” or fetal alcohol syndrome Edwin Black, who struggles with morbid obesity and Internet addiction and is on the hunt for his birth father and Jacquie Red Feather, a recovering alcoholic with one dead daughter, another given up for adoption and three grandsons she’s never met. ![]()
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