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Mo Yan, a Novelist and Short Story Writer

Mo Yan was born 17 February 1955



Little known fact

Guan Moye finally adopted his pseudonym as his official name after having difficulty claiming his royalties because of the convoluted administrative process in place while still serving in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). (Wang)

Much better-known fact

Mo Yan, Wade-Giles Romanization Mo Yen, was a pen name for Guan Moye and it means “don’t speak,” an admonishment from his parents in rural China many years ago.


Guan Moye grew up in Shandong province in northeastern China where he left school to become an agricultural worker and a factory worker during the Cultural Revolution. He enlisted in thePLA and ultimately became an officer. While serving, he became educated through self-study and an assignment to a PLA institute where he began to write. Using the pseudonym Mo Yan, he became a novelist and short-story writer known for his imaginative and humanistic fiction—not always with the warm approval from Chinese leadership, particularly while he was still serving in uniform. His work found popular acclaim and awards starting in the 1980s. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, the first citizen of the People’s Republic of China to do so.

Early life and career


Guan Moye’s parents were farmers in a poverty-stricken village in the People’s Republic of China—very much like the fictional Gaomi County in his fiction. It was there with his family that he survived the Great Famine of 1958-61. During the end of the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution of 1956-66, he left school in the fifth grade to work in agriculture and later in a factory. In 1976, he joined the PLA to escape the isolation and poverty of the province. In Change, described as a novella posing as an autobiography, he describes several unfulfilling assignments as an enlisted man. However, he showed enough promise that when his unit is given a quota for a test for entry into a PLA institute of higher learning, he was given the opportunity. The unit’s quota was lost toward the end of his six months of self-study before he could stand for the testing, but his enhanced knowledge led to his being appointed during an army-wide push to increase literacy as a military base mathematics instructor and later as a political instructor—both positions normally filled by officers. In 1982, he accepted a commission as an officer and did get another opportunity to take the admission test. As a result, he earned an appointment to the Literature Department of the PLA’s Arts College, from which he graduated in 1986. During that time of intense study, he found initial success in publishing his work. He was well known as an author by the time he was invited to attend Beijing Normal University for a Master of Literature and Art, awarded in 1991. He left the army in 1997 and became a newspaper editor, continuing to write fiction, still drawing on his rural hometown to create his imagined setting and his vibrant characters warring, loving, and enduring the crushing experiences of his formative years.

Major relationships

In 1979, he got permission from his superiors to go home on leave for a few days, get married, and return to his unit alone. Under those constrained conditions, he married Du Quinlan, and they celebrated the birth of a daughter in 1981.

Writing career


In Change, Mo Yan recalls several failed attempts to publish his writing: a short story “Mama” and a six-act play Divorce. His first published short story, a “Rainy Spring Night,” appeared in Baoding literary journal Lily Pond in 1981, followed the next year by “The Ugly Soldier.”

In 1984, the year he entered PLA’s Arts College, he earned a literary award from the PLA Magazine, adopted the pseudonym Mo Yan, and published his first novella, A Transparent Radish.

In 1986, Red Sorghum won the national best novella award, becoming an internationally known film the next year. This sequence launched Mo Yan’s career as a writer as well as the careers of the film’s director Zhang Yimou and the lead actress Gong Li.

Since then, Mo Yan has published more than a dozen novels and has received every major national literary award China has to offer. In the process, he has had works pulled off the shelf and banned more than once because of his satirical treatment of Chinese institutions and historical movements—seen through the eyes and experiences of the people rather than the makers and implementers of policy.

Mo Yan writes about the gut-level aggression and bravery of peasants against Japanese soldiers, against both sides of the Chinese Revolution, the Great Leap Forward’s forced migrations and collectivization, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath—through oral traditions, histories, and personal observances. He portrays the violent vitality of men engaged in war and sex, and he elevates the resilience and forbearance of the women he has seen in these histories. The women are extolled for their determined and creative drives to endure their lot (exploited and taken for granted) while the men drink, love, and fight single-mindedly. Critics note that in most of his novels, “a blunt and unrelenting masculinity…serves as a stark contrast to the usual tame and sexually repressed heroes of the proletarian literature of previous generations.”

In his writing on these social and economic themes within their historical contexts, Mo Yan draws on his determinative experiences and on settings in the county-level city of Gaomi in eastern Shandong province. He has lived in, endured, and escaped rural isolation and famine. He has witnessed and lived with the legacy of grim decisions made by common people under duress.

The Nobel Committee’s “Bio Notes” describe his work as a “mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives.” His work, they say, is “reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez.” Mo Yan would agree to having been influenced by those two icons, but several critics declare his voice is quite distinct from those voices. The Notes go on to allude to “a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” a claim that some scholars like Sun take great exception to as discussed below.

Mo Yan’s Change is clearly an example of a “people’s history.” He provides us with a bottom-up lens rather than a top-down one of a country in stormy fluctuation. As his writing evolved, he experimented with his narration to the extent he cast himself as a character in one of his novels like Vonnegut. “All his novels create unique individual realities, quite different from the political stories that were told about the countryside in the Maoist years, when Mo Yan grew up” as Guan Moye. (Flood)

In fact, he draws in the reader to actively consider which of the many cataclysmic events the characters are surviving because no labels are put on movements or political platforms or even wars; it is very much the way common people in remote areas view these events that bring armed men into their areas and other men and women to recruit local men and women to the point that relatives are reluctantly coercing and bullying one another when they get the upper hand. And then there are those—in the usual point of view of a closely observed Mo Yan character—who are avoiding taking sides and suffering at the hands of those with weapons.

Mo Yan provides his readership of the novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips with reminders of the propagule pressure on rural families to produce male offspring—to the point of uncles discretely (at the urging of their own wives) providing services as active sperm donors for the wives of sterile nephews. He gives us a view of the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and the warring between the Nationalists and the Maoists through the eyes of a small boy without ever using the labels of those events—conveying a truly surreal and violent drama not understood at all by the rural Chinese. He delivers the horrific unintended consequences of agrarian and industrial policy like the Great Leap Forward—consequences he survived as his family struggled through the Chinese Famine.

He treats social decrees like the One Child policy developed later in hauntingly personal prose in Frog where he draws a portrait of an agonized world of “desperate families, illegal surrogates, forced abortions, and the guilt of those who must enforce the policy.”

Mo Yan says he has been greatly influenced by a broad spectrum of writers such as William Faulkner (Nobel 1949), James Joyce, Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel 1982), Minakami Tsutomu, Mishima Yukio, and Ōe Kenzaburō (Nobel 1994).

Critical look at controversies and aesthetics


The Chinese government warmly received the news of the Nobel Prize award, mentioning Chinese writers and the Chinese people have been waiting for such recognition for far too many years.

Then the criticism began. There were those writers and dissidents who criticized his lack of solidarity with other intellectuals who were continually denied freedom of expression in the Peoples Republic. These comments were echoed by European literati like 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Müller who grew up and wrote under the Communist regime in Romania. (Maslin and En Khong)

En Khong criticizes Mo Yan for dealing with China’s troubles at the local level and indicates this focus shows Mo Yan’s alignment with state strategy for the allocation of blame away from the political center.

Charles Laughlin, a professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Virginia, published “What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong” on ChinaFile to take on the early disparagers reproving Mo Yan of what they asserted was trivialization of grave historical calamities through the use of black humor and amusement. Laughlin maintained that Mo Yan’s intended readers already knew that “the Great Leap Forward led to a catastrophic famine, and any artistic approach to historical trauma is inflected or refracted. Mo Yan writes about the period he writes about because they were traumatic, not because they were hilarious,” he declared.

“The effect of Mo Yan’s work is not illumination through skilled and controlled exploitation, but disorientation and frustration due to his lack of coherent aesthetic consideration. There is no light shining on the chaotic reality of Mo Yan’s hallucinatory world.” This is the way Anna Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College, starts out her blistering critique. She declares Mo Yan’s writing as coarse, predictable, and lacking in aesthetic conviction. “Mo Yan’s language is striking indeed,” she writes, but it is striking because “it is diseased. The disease is caused by the conscious renunciation of China’s cultural past at the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.”

However, if one reads her whole critique, it becomes clear her real discontent lies in Mo Yan’s use of language and his failure (due to, she admits, the fact he was denied access given the time of his birth and formation) to acknowledge through emulation and cultural reference the two thousand years of Chinese Literature that preceded Mao.


Regardless of the sincerity of Mo’s social and political critique, Sun sees his language as a language that survived the Cultural Revolution, when the state implemented a radical break with its own literary past. “Mo Yan’s prose is an example of a prevailing disease that has been plaguing writers who came of age in what can be called the era of ‘Mao-ti,’ a particular language and sensibility of writing promoted by Mao in the beginning of the revolution.” (Sun)

The burden of this heritage can be seen not only in Mo Yan’s work, but also in the work of many other revered literary writers—even political dissident writers outside of China like the novelist Ma Jian. “This is perhaps the ultimate tragedy of the fate of contemporary Chinese writers: too many of them can no longer speak truth to power in a language free of the scars of the revolution itself.” (Sun)

There are some critics who recognize that the need for obliqueness under difficult circumstances can also make the case (that Mo tries to make in his own defense) that literary imagination can become more resourceful under stressful conditions.

“Such is the case with Mo Yan’s deeply interesting fiction,” says Mishra. However, Mo Yan’s writing is rarely discussed because of the political choices he has had to make. The West is very uneven in the standards they apply to writers’ politics. While Mo’s choices can be considered shameful, that level of scrutiny is not applied to his counterparts in the West. (Mishra)

Professor Laughlin offers a comprehensive analysis of Sun’s article about what is artistically wrong with Mo Yan’s fiction and, therefore why, in her mind, it does not deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature. He notes that Sun does not describe or interpret specific works by Mo Yan, though she declares that his main translator, Howard Goldblatt, creates translations of Mo Yan’s work that are artistically superior to the originals. He also points out that Sun does not identify any other deserving Chinese writers and that, by her argument, it is not clear that the prize should ever go to a Chinese writer. (Laughlin)

The “mostly devoid of aesthetic value” assertion by Sun doesn’t obtain for long, as the literature professor points out, the history of the world and its literature have departed from the moral certainty of Dickens some time ago. Laughlin, the scholar of literature, schools the sociologist about how the emergence of avant-garde techniques like stream of consciousness or psychological realism in the wake of World War I (Mann, Woolf, and Joyce) provided a means of coping with historical trauma. He points to of the absurdism of a Kafka, Orwell, and Borges as alternative ways to deal with the ghosts of socialism, bureaucracy, and alienation since then. (Laughlin)

Finally, Laughlin notes that Mo Yan “grew up in cruel times and at times treated people with cruelty, only reflecting on or regretting it much later, too late for his remorse to remedy the damage.” It is apparent in the reaction to Mo Yan’s award that we want Nobel laureates born in repressive societies to be heroes. However, Laughlin points out, the appearance of heroism often disguises human frailty and even cruelty. And, if artistic expression of that reality “requires courage, it also requires honesty, it requires being painfully honest, and such honesty is not beyond the reach of contemporary Chinese literature.”

Magical realism and hallucinatory realism

Magic realism can prompt readers to connect more intensely humanistic and sociopolitical realities than realist fiction—perhaps because the introduction of ambiguity pushes the reader into an active process of turning over the ambiguity to resolve it based on individual experience and education.


Hallucinatory realism has links to the concept of magical realism. Hallucinatory realism connotes a notion of a dream state, and that was the term used in the explanation for awarding Mo Yan the Nobel Prize in Literature. Certainly, there are moments in Mo Yan’s narratives such as Large Breasts and Wide Hips where the narrator’s descriptions take up the reader into the distortions of the moment’s visual or tactile experience, often to be brought down harshly by the reality of the situation—along with the narrator who is experiencing violence up close and personally.

In this brand of magical realism, there is not so much turning a perception over and over (as in Western minimalist exaggeration) as it is a turning once over to consider the age and experience of the character perceiving the distortion and to nod at the briefness of the momentary escape from the reality of a grim moment.

 

A few quotes of Mo Yan 

“I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers.” He concluded, “For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated.”
“Why did a novel about the Sino-Japanese war have such a great impact on society? I think my novel expressed a shared mentality of Chinese people at the time, after a long period of repression of personal freedom. Red Sorghum represents the liberation of individual spirits: daring to speak, daring to think, daring to act.”

 

A few quotes about Mo Yan

“If China has a Kafka, it may be Mo Yan. Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments.” — Publishers Weekly, on Shifu: You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh

“Red Sorghum represents a new articulation of the Chinese national spirit, a cry for the liberation of libido” — Anna Sun.
Mo Yan is “probably the most translated living Chinese writer, very well known, very respected [and] although he’s had his spats with the literary censors … generally speaking not regarded as politically sensitive” — SOAS professor of Chinese Michel Hockx (Flood)

 

Awards, Prizes, and Nominations (selected)
2005: Kiriyama Prize, Notable Books, Big Breasts and Wide Hips
2005: Doctor of Letters, Open University of Hong Kong
2006: Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize XVII
2007: Man Asian Literary Prize, nominee, Big Breasts and Wide Hips
2009: Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, winner, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
2010: Honorary Fellow, Modern Language Association
2011: Mao Dun Literature Prize, winner, Frog
2012: Nobel Prize

 

Notable Works


Red Sorghum (1986, English 1993)
The Garlic Ballads (1988, English in 1995)
The Republic of Wine (1992, English 2000)
Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996, English 2004)
Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh (2000)
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (2006, English 2008)
Sandalwood Death (2004, English 2013)
Wa (Frog) (2009, French 2011, English 2014)

Sources


Bio NOTES Nobelprize.org.
En Khong. “Nobel winner Mo Yan and China’s cultural amnesia: The Nobel laureate’s comments on literary censorship were unforgivable,” The Telegraph 7:00AM GMT 14 Dec 2012.
Flood, Alison. “Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize in literature 2012: Novelist, the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate, praised for ‘hallucinatory realism,’ ”The Guardian Thursday 11 October 2012 07.38 EDT mod Wednesday 4 June 2014 00.21 EDT.
Laughlin, Charles. “Why Critics of Chinese Nobel Prize-Winner Mo Yan Are Just Plain Wrong,” ChinaFile December 12th, 2012. Web. 21 February 2016.
Mishra, Pankaj. “Why Salman Rushdie should pause before condemning Mo Yan on censorship: The Nobel laureate’s political choices are deplorable, but why don’t we expose western novelists to the same scrutiny?” The Guardian Thursday 13 December 2012 08.30 EST; last modified on Friday 15 January 2016 13.34 EST.
Mo, Yan. Big Breasts & Wide Hips. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996.
Mo, Yan. Change. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. London: Seagull Books, 2012.
Sun, Anna. “The Diseased Language of Mo Yan,” Kenyon Review OnLine
Talks At The Yenan Forum On Literature and Art May 1942. Marxists Internet Archive. Internet encyclopedia project Web. 10 February 2016.
Wang, David interview. ChinaX: Introducing Mo Yan SW12X Uploaded on Feb 18, 2015. Wood, James. “Tell me how does it feel? US novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter,” The Guardian, October 5, 2001 5 October 2001 20.05 EDT Modified 5 January 2010 12.09 EST.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, and he is working on a historical novel and a collection of stories. He lives with his wife in Northern Virginia.

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George Saunders on reading, writing, and teaching – The New Yorker

About George Saunders

I was born in Amarillo, Texas, grew up in Chicago, and (barely) graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in exploration geophysics.  There was an oil-boom on, which meant that even someone like me could get work in the oil-fields.  So after college I went to work in Sumatra, as a field geophysicist.  We worked four weeks on and two weeks off, in a jungle camp that was a forty-minute helicopter ride to the nearest town – so this is when my reading life really started.  The game became filling up an entire suitcase with books sufficient to get me through the next two weeks of camp life.  About a year and a half at this job, I got sick after going swimming in a river that was polluted with monkey shit (I remember looking up at about 200 of them, sitting on our oil pipeline crapping away, and thinking: “I wonder if swimming here is okay?”) and came home to try and be Kerouac II.  I worked as a doorman, a roofer, a convenience store clerk, and a slaughterhouse worker (a “knuckle-puller,” to be exact), and all of this contributed to my understanding of capitalism as a benign-looking thing that, as Terry Eagleton says, “plunders the sensuality of the body.”

I’d always been interested in reading, ever since a nun I was secretly in love with turned me on to “Johnny Tremaine” in third grade.  But I’d never met a writer and so it took me awhile to realize that a person could actually write for a living. 

In 1986, at a wild party in Amarillo, Texas, I found a copy of People Magazine in which Jay McInernry and Raymond Carver were profiled.  Before this, I’d never heard of an MFA program.  I applied to Syracuse, got in, and had the great good fortune of studying there with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger.  I also met my future wife, Paula Redick there, and we got engaged in three weeks, which I believe is still a program record.  Paula got pregnant on the honeymoon, went into early labor at four months, and had to go on total bedrest.  Our first daughter, Caitlin, was born in 1988.  Our second daughter, Alena, was born in 1990, by the same method: five months of bedrest.  So we had two daughters before we’d known each other three years, and it was off to the races.

We had no money and so I worked as a tech writer, first for a pharmaceutical company and then for an environmental engineering company.  During this period (1989-1995), I wrote three abortive first books and then an actual one, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”  One of the stories from this book, “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” ran in The New Yorker in 1992 – the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with that magazine.

Since 1996 I’ve taught in the Syracuse MFA program, where I’ve had the privilege of teaching some of the most remarkable young American writers of the last 15 years.  I write short stories for The New Yorker and travel pieces for GQ.  The latter have been part of an attempt to avoid the mental rictus that comes with old age.  I’ve traveled to Africa with Bill Clinton, reported on Nepal’s “Buddha Boy,” gone on patrol with the “Minute Men” on the Mexican border, spent a week in the theme hotels of Dubai, and lived incognito in a homeless tent city in Fresno, California.

In addition to my new book, “Tenth of December,” I’ve written three other short story collections “Pastoralia,” “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (both New York Times Notable Books) and, most recently, “In Persuasion Nation.”  “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.  “In Persuasion Nation” was one of three finalists for the 2006 STORY Prize for best short story collection of the year.  I’ve also written a novella-length illustrated fable, “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil” the New York Times bestselling children’s book, “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” illustrated by Lane Smith, (which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands), and, most recently, a book of essays, “The Braindead Megaphone.”

I’ve also written two screenplays (one of which is in development with Ben Stiller’s company, Red Hour Films) and have collaborated with the playwright Seth Bockley on stage adaptations of two of my stories, “Jon,” and “CommComm.”  The director Yehuda Duenyas staged “Pastoralia,” at PS 122, and a musical version of “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” was produced and performed in Austin and Los Angeles.

 My work has appeared in the O’Henry, “Best American Short Story,” “Best Non-Required Reading,” “Best American Travel Writing,” and “Best Science Fiction” anthologies.  In support of my books, I’ve appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report. 

I’ve read at hundreds of bookstores and universities, including the main reading at AWP in 2011, to a crowd of 2000, and events in support of the work of PEN/ACLU at the Sundance Film Festival and Cooper Union.  I’ve also read and taught in Russia, Belize, England, Amsterdam, Italy, and this summer will be a Writer in Residence at DISQUIET, in Portugal.

In 2001, I was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 top most creative people in entertainment, and by The New Yorker in 2002 as one of the best writers 40 and under.  In 2006, I was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.  In 2009 I received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  I still teach at Syracuse, and live in the Catskills. Read More

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Sherman Alexie—Writer, Film Director, and Comedian

Born: 1966


Little Known Facts


There was an early expectation that Sherman Alexie would suffer mental retardation because he was born with hydrocephalus (or, water in the brain). He underwent brain surgery, and he suffered seizures throughout his childhood. 


He planned to be a doctor, following an uncle’s suggestion that after credentialing, he return to help his reservation; so in college, he enrolled in a pre-med track. 


Some Native Americans have reacted to his success by calling him a “fucking apple”—white on the inside and red on the outside—for having “sold out” to corporate publishing. His response: “Get off the reservation and make your own luck happen.”

Much Better Known Facts


Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation.


When he found his mother’s name written in a textbook assigned to him at the reservation school, he made a decision right then that he would not attend the reservation high school.

Snap Shot


Sherman Alexie is a contemporary novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter, film director, and comedian who is not always celebrated by his fellow Native Americans. He overcame physical and socio-economic adversity and broke out of the reservation mentality he describes in his poetry, prose, and films. He is an award winner in all three areas and gives highly animated and entertaining interviews.

Early Life and Non-Writing Career


Sherman J. Alexie, Jr., a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, was born in October of 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, about 50 miles northwest of Spokane.


He was born a hydrocephalic (water on the brain), and underwent brain surgery at the age of six months without the doctors or his parents expecting him to survive. When he did survive, the prognosis was that he would live with severe mental retardation.


In spite of these adversities, Alexie learned to read by age three, and was reading novels by age five. All these things separated him from his peers at an early age, making him the object of ridicule on the reservation. Consequently, he discovered his own isolation within his reservation that was in itself an isolation from the rest of America.


As a teenager, he made a conscious decision to attend high school off the reservation in Reardan, about 20 miles south of Wellpinit, where he suspected he would get a better education. At Reardan High, he was the only Indian (apart for the school mascot). He performed well academically and became a standout player on the basketball team. He was the high-school class president, but he points out that earlier on the reservation, he was a bookworm whose nose was broken six times by bullies. This collection of middle school and high school experiences ultimately inspired his first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.


In 1985 after Alexie graduated from Reardan High School, he attended Gonzaga University in Spokane, on a scholarship. After two years at Gonzaga, he transferred to Washington State University (WSU)  as a pre-med student. 
Alexie’s plan to become a doctor was set aside after he fainted several times in human anatomy class, and he soon found another path after he found his way into a poetry workshop at WSU.


Alexie developed a problem with alcohol at Gonzaga, but after learning that Hanging Loose Press agreed to publish The Business of Fancydancing, he immediately gave up drinking at the age of twenty-three. He has stayed sober ever since. 


Alexie has done stand-up comedy with musician Jim Boyd, a Colville Indian. They collaborated to record the album Reservation Blues, which contains songs from the book of the same name. In 1996, Boyd and Alexie opened for the Indigo Girls at a concert to benefit the Honor the Earth Campaign.


In 1997, Alexie embarked on another artistic collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian, who discovered Alexie’s writing while at the New York University’s film school. They collaborated on a film project inspired by Alexie’s “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” a short story from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Shadow Catcher Entertainment produced the film that was released as Smoke Signals at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1998. The film won two awards: the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy. 


After success at Sundance, Smoke Signals was distributed by Miramax Films in 1998 and in 1999, the film earned a Christopher Award, an award presented to the creators of artistic works “which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” Subsequently, Alexie was also nominated for the Independent Feature Project/West (now Film Independent) 1999 Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.


In 2002, Alexie made his debut as a director with The Business of Fancydancing. He wrote the screenplay based loosely on his first poetry collection. The film was produced and distributed independently, and subsequently earned numerous film festival awards.


Major Relationships


Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife, Diane, and two sons.

Writing Career


Alexie found encouragement from his poetry teacher, Alex Kuo, to the point he realized he’d found his new path in life. As a WSU graduate with a BA in American Studies, Alexie received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship in 1991 and then the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992.


The year after he left WSU, his poetry collections, The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses, were published. His first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993, earning a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.


In 1998, Alexie competed in and won his first World Heavyweight Poetry Bout competition in June 1998 in Taos, New Mexico. He went up against then world champion Jimmy Santiago Baca. During the next three years, he went on to win the title again and again, becoming the first and only poet to hold the title for four consecutive years. 


Taking A Critical Look


Some, like author and critic Gloria Bird (Spokane), argue that a work by a Native American author is capable of subverting Native American identity and sovereignty by idealizing preconceptions that form an outsider’s mythologies of the American Indian. Essayist Nicolas Myers insists that Alexie shouldn’t be painted with this brush and is adamant that Alexie’s Reservation Blues does not promote any totalizing representations. While the novel does addresses many mythologies, it is done in an exaggerated and ironic manner. It “never falls into a trap of stereotypical representation because it never allows for fixed representation of any kind.”


Magical Realism


Alexie’s imagination plays tricks on the reader and Professor Kenneth Lincoln sees him as the best Native American example of one stealing into Olympus to claim legitimacy while neither proving himself to be the “bungling host” nor “the agile parasite.” Throughout Reservation Blues there are “mirrors that redirect any determined gaze until the readers find themselves gliding along with the characters—on an unstoppable ride of laughing, gut-wrenching indeterminacy,” says Myers in his recalibration of Gloria Bird’s criticism of Alexie for exaggerating the negative dimensions of life on a reservation while side stepping the obligation she feels he has to present his community in a more positive light.
There is more to Alexie’s exaggeration than this. There is a deliberate technique being used here that is familiar to readers of Latin American Magical Realism, where exaggeration and hyperbole are often utilized to convey a sense of the unreality of the real—a point made and explained by Gabriel García Márquez in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize.


An example of Alexie’s exaggeration is the character Lester FallsApart who, Alexie tells us, is the most accomplished drunk on the Spokane Reservation and a tribal hero because Indians always flock to the kindest alcoholic on the reservation. The Spokane Indian Reservation loved Lester so much that hundreds came to his dog’s wake and funeral.


A first reading might see this as reinforcing the drunken-Indian stereotype. But the products of these exaggerations and the logic of all of it should be seen differently: “The hyperbolic embrace of Lester is analogous to a very real embrace of the vice—a strong critique, in my opinion, of a particular aspect of reservation culture,” writes Myers.
 This conclusion is reinforced by the fact Lester FallsApart is often Alexie’s alter ego when he takes the stage, as well as a recurring character in his fiction and his poetry.

A Few of Alexie’s Quotes


“Up until now, I’ve always written Joshua B. stories. I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there. The lesson of both the young-adult book and in a sense the new book is ‘Get off the rez. Be nomadic.’ ” (Konigsberg interview)



“I’d rather see myself played by a Puerto Rican or an Italian with a tan than have them ruin the basketballness of me.” (Konigsberg interview)

“Liz Cook-Lynn [Dakota] is utterly incapable of irony, of understanding irony, of even seeing the ironic nature of her own existence. So, the stances she has are a kind of fundamentalism that actually drove me off my reservation. I think it’s a kind of fundamentalism about Indian identity, and what “Indian” can be and mean, that damages Indians.” (Nelson interview)

“The social pressures, the social rules inside the Indian world, and the essential conservatism, big C and little c, of Indian people, is something that outsiders rarely understand. I mean, Indian communities are theocracies.” (Nelson interview)

A Few Quotes about Alexie


“Sherman Alexie doesn’t believe there is such a thing as selling out. He has no qualms about his commercial breakthrough’s coming when he wrote a young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, despite the fact that he had already published 18 volumes of fiction and poetry to considerably less fanfare.” (Konigsberg)

“In War Dances he has given readers a few characters of indeterminate ethnicity for the first time.” (Konigsberg)

“But while I was silent, Sherman Alexie wrote the truth. In his books, I found all the ugly and beautiful stories of reservation life laid out right there on the page, for millions to read. He wrote about our poverty, addiction, and repeated cycles of violence and despair. I both envied and resented the freedom and openness of his words.” (Purser)

“His work is wizened with poetic anger, ribald love, and whipsaw humor. The crazy-heart bear is dancing comically, riding a wobbly unicycle, tossing overripe tomatoes at his audience.” (Lincoln)

Awards and Prizes (Selected)


2003—Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award, Washington State University 


2007—Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award


2007—National Book Award in Young People’s Literature for his young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. 


2008—Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award for middle grades and young adults 
2010—PEN/Faulkner Award for short-story collection War Dances 


2010—Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award

Notable Works


Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Business of Fancydancing, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Sources


Konigsberg, Eric. “In His Own Literary World, a Native Son Without Borders.” New York Times Books. Oct 20, 2009. Web. 5 October 2015.


Lincoln, Kenneth. “On Sherman Alexie.” Modern American Poet. Web. 10 October 2015.


Myers, Nick. “Birds of a Feather: Representation, Exaggeration, and Survivance in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues.” Academia.edu. Web. 10 October 2015.


Nelson, Joshua B. (Cherokee) “Humor Is My Green Card: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie.” World Literature Today. July 2010. Web. 7 October 2015.


Purser, Heather. “Sherman Alexie, How Do You Dare to Tell the Truth?.” YES! Magazine. Summer 2009. Web. 7 October 2015.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.