Glancy, Diane 1941–

PERSONAL:

Original name, Helen Diane Hall; born March 18, 1941, in Kansas City, MO; daughter of Lewis and Edith Hall; married Dwane Glancy, May 2, 1964 (divorced, March 31, 1983); children: David, Jennifer. Ethnicity: Native American/European. Education: University of Missouri, B.A., 1964; Central State University, Edmond, OK, M.A., 1983; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1988. Religion: Christian.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Prairie Village, KS. Office—Department of English, Macalester College, 1600 Grand, St. Paul, MN 55105. E-mail—glancy&macalester.edu.

CAREER:

Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, began as assistant professor, became professor of English, 1988—. Oklahoma State Arts Council, artist in residence, 1982-92; U.S. Information Agency, lecturer in Syria and Jordan.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowship of Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa; Pegasus Award, Oklahoma Federation of Writers, 1984, for Brown Wolf Leaves the Res and Other Poems; named laureate for the Five Civilized Tribes, 1984-86; Lakes and Prairies Award, Milkweed Chronicle, 1986, for One Age in a Dream; Oklahoma Theater Festival Award, 1987, for Segwohi; Five Civilized Tribes Playwriting Prize, 1987, for Weebjob; Aspen Summer Theater Award, 1988, for Stickhorse; Capricorn Poetry Prize, 1988, for Iron Woman; Charles Nilon Minority Fiction Award, 1990, for Trigger Dance; fellowship from the National Education Association and Minnesota State Arts Board, and National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, both 1990; North American Indian Prose Award, University of Nebraska Press, and American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, both 1992, for Claiming Breath; National Endowment for the Humanities grant, 1992; Native American fellow of Sundance Institute at University of California, Los Angeles, 1998; McKnight fellowship/Loft Award of Distinction in Creative Prose, 1999; Many Voices fellowship, Playwrights Center, Minneapolis, 2001; Thomas Jefferson teaching/scholarship Award, Macalester College, 2001; Cherokee Medal of Honor, Cherokee Honor Society, 2001; Stevens Poetry Award, National Federation of State Poetry Societies, 2001; grant from National Endowment for the Arts, 2003; Juniper Prize, 2004, for Primer of the Obsolete.

WRITINGS:

SHORT STORIES

Trigger Dance, Fiction Collective Two (Boulder, CO), 1990.

Firesticks: A Collection of Stories, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1993.

Monkey Secret, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1995.

The Voice that Was in Travel: Stories, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1999.

The Dance Partner: Stories of the Ghost Dance, Michigan State University Press (East Landing, MI), 2005.

NOVELS

The Only Piece of Furniture in the House: A Novel, Moyer Bell (Wakefield, RI), 1996.

Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1996.

Flutie, Moyer Bell (Wakefield, RI), 1998.

The Closets of Heaven: A Novel of Dorcas, the New Testament Seamstress, Chax Press (Tuscon, AZ), 1999.

Fuller Man, Moyer Bell (Wakefield, RI), 1999.

The Man Who Heard the Land, Minnesota Historical Society Press (Saint Paul, MN), 2001.

The Mask Maker, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2002.

Designs of the Night Sky, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.

Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 2003.

POETRY

Traveling On, Myrtlewood Press (Tulsa, OK), 1982.

Brown Wolf Leaves the Res and Other Poems, Blue Cloud Quarterly Press (Marvin, SD), 1984.

One Age in a Dream, illustrated by Jay Moon, Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 1986.

Offering: Aliscolidodi, Holy Cow! Press (Duluth, MN), 1988.

Iron Woman, New Rivers Press (Moorhead, MN), 1990.

Lone Dog's Winter Count, West End Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1991.

Boom Town, Black Hat (Goodhue, MN), 1995.

Primer of the Obsolete, Chax Press (Tuscon, AZ), 1998.

(Ado)ration, Chax Press (Tuscon, AZ), 1999.

The Relief of America, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2000.

Stones for a Pillow, Chax Press (Tucson, AZ), 2001.

The Shadow's Horse, University of Arizona Press (Tuscon, AZ), 2003.

Rooms: New and Selected Poems, Salt Publishers (Cambridge, England), 2005.

Asylum in the Grasslands, University of Arizona Press (Tucson, AZ), 2006.

PLAYS

Segwohi, produced in Tulsa, OK, 1987.

Testimony, produced in Tulsa, OK, 1987.

Webjob, produced in Tulsa, OK, 1987.

Stick Horse, produced in Aspen, CO, 1988.

The Lesser Wars, produced in Minneapolis, MN, 1989.

Halfact, produced in San Diego, CA, at Modern Language Association Conference, 1994.

War Cries: A Collection of Plays, introduction by Kimberly Blaeser (includes "Webjob," "Stick Horse," "Bull Star," "Halfact," "Segwohi," "The Truth Teller," "Mother of Mosquitos," "The Best Fancy Dancer the Pushmataha Pow Wow's Ever Seen," and "One Horse"), Holy Cow! Press (Duluth, MN), 1997.

American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, University of Oklahoma (Norman, OK), 2002.

Also author of plays Stone Heart: Everybody Loves a Journey West, Jump Kiss, and The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for a Deer Dance.

OTHER

Drystalks of the Moon (poetry and prose), Hadassah Press (Tulsa, OK), 1981.

Claiming Breath (essays), University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1992.

(Editor, with C.W. Truesdale) Two Worlds Walking: Short Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Writers with Mixed Heritages, New Rivers Press (New York, NY), 1994.

The West Pole (poetry and prose), University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1997.

The Cold-and-Hunger Dance (poetry and prose), University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1998.

(Editor, with Mark Nowak) Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1999.

In-between Places (essays), University of Arizona Press (Tuscon, AZ), 2004.

Contributor to books, including I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1987; Talking Leaves, edited by Craig Lesley, Bantam (New York, NY), 1991; Stiller's Pond: New Fiction from the Midwest, edited by Jonis Agee, Roger Blakely, and Susan Welch, New Rivers Press (Moorhead, MN), 1991; Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short Stories of Contemporary Native American Experience, edited by Clifford Trafzer, Doubleday (New York, NH), 1993; and Freeing the! First Amendment: Critical Perspectives on Freedom of Expression, edited by Robert Jensen and David Allen, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

SIDELIGHTS:

Diane Glancy is a poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist, and novelist who often explores the quest for spirituality among mixed-race characters. One-eighth Cherokee herself, Glancy identifies with the Native American and mixed-blood characters she writes about, and like some other contemporary Native American writers, she experiments with genres and styles in an attempt to give expression to the reality of mixed-blood peoples. "The difference in Glancy's writing has to do with her attempts to construct Native American texts by combining oral and written traditions, fusing the visual and verbal, mixing poetry and prose, and experimenting with the arrangement of the text on the page," noted Julie LaMay Abner in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Though not all of her experiments are successful, Glancy has won numerous awards for her writings and critical applause for her deeply felt, poetic depictions of marginalized characters. Wendy Murray Zoba, writing in Books and Culture, commented on Glancy's quiet childhood, noting that eventually, Glancy "found the one voice that held the others together. Or the voice found her. It came through her writing. The result has been a body of work that defies literary convention." Zoba continued: "If she is hard to categorize, she has nevertheless found readers."

Known first as a poet, Glancy began to garner significant critical attention with the publication of collections of short stories and autobiographical poem-essays. Firesticks: A Collection of Stories centers on Native American characters in contemporary, urban settings who, critics noted, are hard to distinguish from non-Native Americans in their troubled and dreary lives. "Glancy invests her prose with tremendous emotional resonance … in tales that often seem more like poems than conventional short stories," observed a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, a collection of essays and poems, shares with the earlier volume an emphasis on "the importance of the written word and the act of writing," observed Mary B. Davis in Library Journal. In the pieces gathered here, Glancy explores the tangle of emotions evoked by witnessing ceremonies held by tribes other than her own, and universalizes her personal experience as the child of parents with differing cultural backgrounds. In pursuit of melding her Christian beliefs with her Nativist spirituality, Glancy reworks several Native legends to "bizarre" effect, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Like The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, Claiming Breath is a collection of short, related, autobiographical pieces that often meld genres. Often inspired by long stretches traveling across Oklahoma, the author muses on marriage and divorce, the uncanny influence of her Cherokee grandmother on her identity, and attempts to reconcile Native American spiritualism with her own Christian-based beliefs. The result is a "wildly uneven grab-bag in the form of a journal," according to a critic for Kirkus Reviews, who found "fresh language and banality, fine prose-poetry and self-indulgence," side by side in Claiming Breath. Nevertheless, the volume may serve as a model for those who advocate journal writing as "a road to self-actualization," this critic concluded.

The West Pole is another unusual collection of autobiographical prose and poetry musings on Glancy's attempts to define her identity as a Native American writer. But, like Claiming Breath, critics found the pieces of mixed value. "Glancy has a gift for language," observed Library Journal contributor Vicki Leslie Toy Smith, "but … she seems to stop writing before she has exhausted a subject." Similarly, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly found the collection "at best only sporadically rewarding," though Glancy's efforts at "deftly blending Indian beliefs and mythology with European Christianity" are "refreshing" compared to the angrier and more divisive sentiments found in much other Native American writing.

In her first novel, Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, Glancy retells the grueling tale of the thousands of Cherokee Indians who were forced to leave their home lands in North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee and walk to reservations in Oklahoma. The journey has gone down in history as the Trail of Tears, because so many people died along the way from exposure and disease. Glancy's historical novel centers on a young woman and her family, with numerous secondary characters including soldiers who enforced the march, white clergy, and Indians of all ages whose sufferings are recounted in the first-person. Critics focused much of their attention on Glancy's successful incorporation of a wealth of historical material relating to the forced march, and the evocative voice of her myriad characters to tell "an exquisitely sad tale," in the words of Booklist reviewer Kathleen Hughes. "The voices that comprise the narrative are vigorous, and the period details convincing but not obtrusive," wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Moreover, Pushing the Bear exemplifies, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, "the Cherokee conception of story as the indestructible chain linking people, earth and ancestry—a link that becomes, if not unmitigated salvation, then certainly a salve to the spirit."

Almost simultaneously with the publication of Pushing the Bear, Glancy published another novel, The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, a coming-of-age story that, in its focus on the spiritual life of its protagonist, set the pattern for future novels by the author. In this novel, Rachel Hume grows up as the second-oldest of nine children born to a deeply religious mother and her itinerant railway worker husband in the American South and Southwest. When Rachel meets and marries Jim, a soldier, her new life in military housing tests her religious faith as she is surrounded by people who daily break the rules she has learned to live by. In the midst of a postpartum depression, Rachel returns to her childhood home only to realize she must learn to face the world or give up her marriage. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly made special note of Glancy's "expressive prose [which] evocatively captures the intriguing complexity of life in the Bible Belt South."

Like The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, the protagonist of Flutie is an adolescent girl struggling to reconcile her powerful spiritual life with the realities of her emotionally and materially deprived surroundings. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews observed that "Glancy demonstrates a strong and very particular gift for catching the way in which spiritual yearnings work on an untutored mind." In this novel, Flutie Moses sees stories in everything and everyone around her, but can hardly speak to anyone with whom she is not intimate, and thus much of the narrative is given over to accounts of Flutie trying to speak. "This quite beautiful novel proves unexpectedly moving in the ways Glancy finds to write the sounds of silence," reported GraceAnne A. DeCandido in Booklist. Flutie's visions lead her toward a Cherokee spiritualism that is unavailable to the rest of her family, and in a book she gains inspiration from the legend of Philohela, whose brother-in-law cut out her tongue to prevent her from accusing him of raping her. With her newfound powers of speech, Flutie graduates from high school and prepares to attend college to follow her dream of studying geology. The result is "a story of great emotional honesty and power," observed Carolyn Ellis Gonzalez in Library Journal.

As in her earlier novels, the protagonist of Fuller Man is a young woman predominantly struggling with the role of religious faith in her life. Halley Willie, her sister Nearly, and her brother Farley each must find his or her own way among the battles between their devout mother and skeptical father. "In single images, remarks and disjunct scenes, as if from a journalist's notebook, Halley lays out each important moment of her maturation, from grade school to middle age," as she teeters between faith and doubt, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Like The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, the journey toward spiritual healing in the form of fundamentalist Christianity documented by Glancy's narrative in Fuller Man was noted by critics for its sympathetic treatment, a rare find in contemporary American literature. While the contributor to Kirkus Reviews found Glancy's efforts marred by her unusual, sometimes "cryptic," storytelling methods, "Glancy's determination to plumb an unfashionable question in fiction—how faith or the lack of it shapes and sustains our lives—is admirable."

The Man Who Heard the Land and The Mask Maker approach fiction from a more poetic angle than Glancy's previous novels. In the first, a teacher of environmental literature turns to his Native American roots to begin to get through his depression. The results, according to Mary Margaret Benson in her Library Journal review "are mixed: his life is still troubled … but he has a fuller understanding of himself." The Mask Maker, which Debbie Bogenschutz in Library Journal called a "truly dynamic" experiment, tells the story of a mixed-blood Native American mother, who deals with her feelings and emotions through the traditional artwork of the mask. Glancy accompanies her text with Bible passages and the thoughts of the main character in her own voice, each featured on the side of the page.

Designs of the Night Sky falls somewhere between a collection of stories and a novel; main character Ada works in a library and reads accounts of the Trail of Tears. Confronting problems in her own life and delving into historical accounts of tragedy, Ada seeks comfort in Christianity and at the Dust Bowl roller rink. The novel changes back and forth between the historical forced migration of the Cherokee and Ada's life and the stories of her family members. Debbie Bogenschutz in her Library Journal review called the book "an engaging novel," while a critic for Kirkus Reviews considered the book, perhaps in spite of its nontraditional format, "at its core a probing, honest tale." Howard Meredith, writing for World Literature Today, noted: "In every sense, this is Glancy's most ambitious endeavor."

In 2003, Glancy took on the challenge of presenting historical heroine Sacajawea's story in a novel format. Though it had been done before, Glancy's approach gave the story a new twist; while using a second-person voice to give Sacajawea's perspective on the Lewis and Clark expedition, Glancy featured excerpts from the Louis and Clark journals on a second column on the page. The narrative is two-fold; one gives the historical perspective of the white explorers, the other the thoughts of a young Native American woman. Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman who had been kidnapped by the Hidatasa tribe and then sold to a Canadian trapper as his second wife, was pregnant with the trapper's child when she served as a translator for the expedition. Glancy's depiction of Sacajawea neglects none of her strength of character; Margaret Flanagan wrote in Booklist that "Sacajawea is blessed with an inner vision that puts an earthy and vibrant spin on each individual experience and encounter." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly thought that many of Sacajawea's responses were "predictable;" however, the critic concluded, "Glancy's sharply observed details and lyrical stylings make for a lively, thought-provoking read"; a critic for Kirkus Reviews considered the book "a brilliantly artistically ambitious retelling." In Library Journal, Debbie Bogenschutz reported that "the interest in this retelling lies in the contrast between the two parties' journals"; Anne G. Myles in North American Review similarly commented, "This doubling is the narrative's most distinctive and difficult feature, as Glancy executes it literally, graphically on the page." Myles continued, "Such readerly dislocation is surely part of the point: we find ourselves, like the protagonist, out of our element; we have to work out for ourselves what kind of authority two incommensurable perspectives have within the novel and within our understanding of the truth."

Glancy defines herself as a Native American writer, and her fiction and nonfiction writings alike treat the consequences of that self-definition, especially for her spiritual life. Admiring critics have pointed to the evocative language she uses to create characters besieged by inner lives whose expression is not welcome in the worlds they inhabit, which are marked by poverty in the material, emotional, and spiritual senses. "Her work is a refreshingly honest depiction of contemporary American Indian life with common themes that are easily accessible to Indian and non-Indian readers alike: mixed-bloodedness, heritage, colonialism, middle age, feminism, divorce, death, power, and survival," wrote Abner in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. While some critics have found her autobiographical collections of short prose and poetry less satisfying than her novels, the journal-like musings found in Claiming Breath and The West Pole have been valued by other critics as a model for readers seeking identity and selfworth in times of trouble.

Glancy told CA: "I think language places us in the world. Language is the land on which I live. There is a Native American belief that our stories can't be separated from the land, but in the case of the Cherokee, who were removed from the original place of their stories in the southeast and forced to march west on the 1838 Trail of Tears, something else has to occur: a belief that the stories move also, or that we carry them within us. In other words, the land is an attitude or place located in the mind. Therefore, there is a geography of thought, an abstract geography which the language of writing establishes. Otherwise, we are left without stories."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 175: Native American Writers of the United States, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Native North American Almanac, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Notable Native Americans, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 1996, Kathleen Hughes, review of Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, p. 1881; March 15, 1998, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of Flutie, p. 1201; December 15, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of Flutie, p. 787; January 1, 2003, Margaret Flanagan, review of Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, p. 847.

Books and Culture, May, 2001, Wendy Murray Zoba, "The Voice that Found Her," p. 32.

Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 1992, review of Claiming Breath, p. 90; June 15, 1996, review of Pushing the Bear, p. 843; February 15, 1998, review of Flutie, p. 212; September 1, 1999, review of Fuller Man, p. 1331; September 15, 2002, review of Designs of the Night Sky, p. 1348; November 15, 2002, review of Stone Heart, p. 1642.

Library Journal, February 1, 1989, Rhoda Carroll, review of Offering: Aliscolidodi, p. 66; December, 1990, Debbie Tucker, review of Trigger Dance, p. 162; March 1, 1992, Jessica Grim, review of Claiming Breath, p. 91; April 1, 1993, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of Firesticks: A Collection of Stories, p. 134; July, 1996, Starr E. Smith, review of Pushing the Bear, p. 158; November 1, 1996, Janet Ingraham, review of The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, p. 106; March 15, 1997, Vicki Leslie Toy Smith, review of The West Pole, p. 70; March 1, 1998, Carolyn Ellis Gonzalez, review of Flutie, p. 127; November 15, 1998, review of Flutie, p. 67; September 1, 2001, Mary Margaret Benson, review of The Man Who Heard the Land, p. 233; March 1, 2002, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of The Mask Maker, p. 138; September 1, 2002, Nancy Pearl and Jennifer Young, "Native Voices, Old and New," p. 244; September 15, 2002, Howard Miller, review of American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, p. 62; November 1, 2002, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of Designs of the Night Sky, p. 128; January, 2003, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of Stone Heart, p. 154.

New York Times Book Review, April 11, 1993, Angie Jabine, review of Firesticks, p. 29; October 1, 1995, Dwight Garner, review of Monkey Secret, p. 32; January 5, 1997, Alexandra Lange, review of The Only Piece of Furniture in the Room, p. 18; May 17, 1998, Elizabeth Gaffney, review of Flutie, p. 40.

North American Review, November-December, 2003, Anne G. Myles, "Writing the Go-Between," pp. 53-58.

Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1993, review of Firesticks, p. 76; June 17, 1996, review of Pushing the Bear, p. 47; October 7, 1996, review of The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, p. 59; February 10, 1997, review of The West Pole, p. 76; March 16, 1998, review of Flutie, p. 55; August 31, 1998, review of The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, p. 57; May 31, 1999, review of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writing after the Detours, p. 89; August 23, 1999, review of The Voice that Was in Travel, p. 45; December 23, 2002, review of Stone Heart, p. 43; October 6, 2003, review of The Shadow's Horse, p. 81.

World Literature Today, July-September, 2003, Howard Meredith, review of Designs of the Night Sky, p. 151.