The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet’s vision and a storyteller’s voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre’s outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today.

 

Uneasily and yet firmly balanced between European and Native cultures—English and German on her mother’s side, Cherokee on her father’s—Glancy continues to search for a language that articulates the Native experience with both the fullness of tradition and the lapses inherent in a broken heritage. Accordingly, The Dream of a Broken Field offers a narrative that pauses and circles, connects and changes direction and travels great distances with grace only to stop sharply for a startling insight. Writing of weekend trips and long journeys, of natural landscapes and burial mounds, of Native American cosmology and a Christian upbringing, of Native American boarding schools and indigenous writers in American universities, Glancy captures the opposing demands of a hurried life and the timeless reflections of a history forever unfolding.

Diane Glancy is a professor emerita of English at Macalester College. She is the author of numerous novels, short story collections, and essay collections, including Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea; Designs of the Night Sky (Nebraska 2002); and The Cold-and-Hunger Dance (available in a Bison Books edition).