Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

But place and class are only part of the story. Many people tell me that they had no picture of contemporary reservation life, or even urban Indian life, until reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . To break Indians out of museums and movies and Chief Wahoo — that’s a legacy for any book. The book and Smoke Signals gave many their first picture of contemporary Native American life.

Autobiography of the soul is a great phrase. I remember someone on the reservation telling me back when I covered the Spokane Tribe and your book came up, “You know what that book seemed like to me? The news.”

So, what do you make of people who have called your work “magical realism”? I wonder if there isn’t a cultural gap in that phrase, a whiff of colonialism. I’m a big García Márquez fan and reading his autobiography is not so much different than reading his fiction.

SA:Describing my book as “magical realism” does make me feel like a witch doctor in blue jeans. I’ve got a friend who calls me Shaman Perplexy. I like that. Isn’t all fiction (and nonfiction) magical realism? Aren’t we all making shit up, and if we do it well enough, it can feel surreal? Anyway, I’m not nearly as much of a magical realist as Flannery O’Connor.

What is your favorite story in the book?

JW:What feels surreal to me are those stories of kids growing up on the Upper East Side, going to summer camp, then prep school, then choosing between Harvard and Yale … sci-fi.

“Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother …” is a huge story, dreamy and plaintive. I’m not surprised to hear you were contemplating your faith as you worked on this book. I have a sentimental sweet spot for the stories about basketball, especially “Indian Education” and “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore.” One of my favorite first lines is from “The First Annual All-Indian Horse Shoe Pitch and Barbecue”: “Somebody forgot the charcoal; blame the BIA.” But I think the story that moved me the most at the time was “This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” When I went back to that story, I was amazed you accomplished all of that in 16 pages. That story was a novel in my mind.

Jess Walter is the author of eight books, including the bestseller Beautiful Ruins and The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award. He grew up in Spokane and on a small ranch bordering the Spokane Reservation. He and Sherman Alexie have been friends for twenty years.

IN FEBRUARY 1992 Hanging Loose Press of Brooklyn, New York, published my first book of poems and stories, The Business of Fancydancing, and I figured it would sell two hundred copies, one hundred and twenty-five of them purchased by my mother. After all, it was a first book by a twenty-six-year-old Spokane Reservation Indian boy from eastern Washington. There was a good chance it would only sell twenty-two copies, seventeen of them purchased by my mother, the formalist, who constantly asked me why my poems didn’t rhyme.

“It’s free verse,” I said. “And some of them do rhyme. I’ve written sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. I’ve written in iambic pentameter.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the ba-bump, ba-bump sound of the heartbeat, of the deer running through the green pine forest, of the eagle singing its way through the sky.”

“Don’t pull that Indian shaman crap on me,” my mother said.

So my mother certainly wasn’t impressed by my indigenous rhetoric, but she would have been deliriously happy if I’d become a messianic doctor or lawyer (or a doctor or lawyer with only a messiah complex) and saved the tribe. In a capitalistic sense, that’s what the tribe needed (and still needs). But I was a former premedicine major who couldn’t handle human anatomy, and I knew far too many lawyers, so I chose the third most lucrative pursuit: small-press poetry.

My family was surprised, but they weren’t disappointed. Since I was one of the few people from my tribe to ever go to college, I was already a success story. My mother worked a series of low-wage social-work jobs for the tribe, and my father was a randomly employed blue-collar alcoholic. I made more money delivering pizzas than they did while working far more important jobs. I might have been considered a black sheep if I’d come from a more financially successful family, but my literary ambitions made me a white sheep, albeit a lamb who published in tiny poetry magazines like The Black Bear Review, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, Impetus, and Slipstream.

Don’t get me wrong. I was excited and proud to be a publishing poet (and still have copies of every journal where I’ve been published), but I also kept my day job as a program information coordinator (secretary) for People to People, a high school international-exchange program in Spokane. I knew that I would eventually return to college (I left three credits shy of my B.A. in American studies), get that degree, and then trudge through graduate school in creative writing. But I was in no hurry to do that. I just wanted to write my poems (and the occasional story) and live as cheaply as possible. I knew how to live in poverty, having grown up on an American third-world reservation, so my urban six-dollars-an-hour job was almost luxurious.

But a New York Times Book Review editor named Rich Nicholls changed my life when he noticed The Business of Fancydancing lying in an office slush pile. As he later told me, he thought the cover was extraordinarily beautiful — it featured a surreal photograph of a Navajo fancydancer that some readers wrongly assumed was my self-portrait — and that was the primary reason he picked it up and flipped through the pages. He assigned the book, as well as a few others as part of a survey of contemporary Native American literature, to James Kincaid, an English professor at the University of Southern California. My Hanging Loose editors were shocked to hear one of their books was being reviewed, because there are Pulitzer Prize — winning poets whose books don’t get covered in the Times. And more shocking, my book was part of a front-page review. Yep, right there on the cover of the Times Book Review was a photograph of some Indian guy on a motorcycle (I’m terrified of any vehicle with less than four wheels), and inside that review was Mr. Kincaid declaring me “one of the major lyric voices of our time.”

I was sitting at my desk at People to People when my Hanging Loose editor, Bob Hershon, faxed me an advance copy of the review. I read it once, ran to the bathroom to throw up, then returned to my desk to read one sentence again and again: “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”

As Keanu Reeves, the Hawaiian balladeer, would say, “Whoa.”

I didn’t believe I was one of the major lyric voices of our time (though I’m probably in the top 503 by now), but I guessed that review was going to help my career. In fact, that review tossed my ass over the stadium fence directly into the big leagues. After Kincaid’s compliments went public, I started receiving phone calls from agents and editors. Many phone calls. Dozens of calls. A Hollywood producer interrogated me.

“Are the film rights available?” he asked.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “But you know it’s a book of poems?”

“What do you mean, a book of poems?”

“I mean, poems, you know, with skinny lines, stanzas, mostly free verse, but some rhyming stuff, too. My mom thinks they’re pretty cool.”

“You mean poem poems?”

“Yes.”

“Do your poems tell a story?”

“Most of them are narrative.”