New Literary Voices: The Storytelling of Tommy Orange and Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Tommy Orange, Politics and Prose, July 25, 2018 WHAT IF the stories others tell about the land where you live don’t reflect your experience of that place? What if you are told, from the time you are a toddler, that home is faraway and that this place where you live will never be your true home? What if Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield’s mother is correct, “the world is made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories”? What if, like Sierra’s mother tells her, the land really does “swallow us whole, wrapping its beauty around us so tight it’s like being in a rattlesnake’s mouth”? What if Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset is correct when she tells us that the land’s relationship with language, with storytelling, is about the sound that travels across it, and about how new stories keep the ancient wisdom alive because the mirror neurons firing in our brains allow us to live these stories? Science, it seems, is finally catching up to what storytellers