The Dream of a Broken Field

`

The Dream of a Broken Field

Diane Glancy

220 pages

Paperback

July 2011

978-0-8032-3481-9

$30.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

July 2011

978-0-8032-3607-3

$30.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

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.

Author Bio

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).

Table of Contents

<CT>Contents</CT>

Acknowledgments   000

Book One

The Old Geography Lessons of Language: A Personal History w/ Paper Dolls, the Beginning of Travel, et al.    000

     More Than Anything      000

     The Names   000

     M(other)    000

      Black House 000

      Outlets     000

      The Album   000

      Discourses on Paper Dolls     000

      The Old Geography Lessons of Language     000

      The Girl Made of Cotton Grass 000

      Mukluk      000

      Holocaust   000

      A Book of Roads   000

Book Two

Geographies of a Realigned Language: Native American Literature, Issues, Ou'Wash, and Creative Theory   000

      Flatland    000

      Soldiers as Paper Dolls 000

      The Paper Doll Witch Trial    000

      Terrorists  000

      Ou'Wash     000

      This Journey of Paper Dolls: this escape from entrapment    000

      Re: The Native American Boarding School Policy  000

      The Return from Carlisle      000

      Boarding School Physics 000

      Piecework   000

      Geographies of a Realigned Language 000

      The Eskimo Wars   000

      Dichotomy   000

Book Three

The Dream of a Broken Field: Academia and a Sudden Retirement. A House, a Cabin and a Summer Trip  000

      On the Academic Front   000

      I Am Wearing the Dialogue of Another      000

      Costume     000

      A Dress of Rain   000

      A House     000

      A Room      000

      A Cabin     000

      Intaglio    000

      Rocks 000

      I Pick Them Up in Travel      000

      Engraved on a Rock      000

      A Dock      000

      The Dream of a Broken Field   000

      Ascension Convention    000

Book Four

Geographies of Language: The Act and Question of Creative Nonfiction    000

      A Rocky Shelf     000

      Geographies of Language 000

      Buffalo Nickel    000

      Sonata      000

      Is not telling the truth the same as lying?     000

      Penmanship: The Return from a Conference on Nonfiction      000

      Off the Road      000

Book Five

One Who Wears Moths: Faith and Writing. A Continuance of Research Trips and Travel for Teaching    000

      Another Journey   000

      On My Way from One Place to Another: On the Southern Edge of the Sandhills of Central Nebraska    000

      Because     000

      Re-entry    000

      The Coldest Night in Texas    000

      T(ravel)    000

      The Mound Builders      000

      The Shape of Privacy    000

      One Who Wears Moths     000

Also of Interest