He started submitting his work to magazines and was published in Esquire , the New York Quarterly and several other publications. At eighteen Alexie began to drink heavily, but still made time for his poetry and short stories. When his first book, I Would Steal Horses was accepted for publication in , he quit drinking. The following year the book won a prestigious poetry award and Alexie was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts poetry grant. March 17, March 12, February 12, February 11, Your email address will not be published.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Related Posts. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Skip to main content. Sherman Alexie Plainspoken Inspiration. Sherman Alexie. What is Inspiration? Where Inspiration Lingers [Inspiration] is everywhere all of the time. Other Articles in this Issue. Chris Thile Days Full of Music. Muriel Hasbun Getting to Know Oneself.
Septime Webre Trigger Points for Inspiration. Tod Lippy Providing a Context for Art. Jeanne Gang Urban Inspiration. Taylor Ho Bynum Notions of Inspiration. Brad Mehldau Ways of Organizing Sound. Inspiring Thoughts. Soon, booksellers across the Pacific Northwest were recommending The Business of Fancydancing to their customers. For his first reading, held at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company in , Alexie gave an impromptu stand-up performance. Arriving minutes before showtime, dressed in an old coat and carrying a bottle inside a brown bag, he stood at the back of the store and hollered, "Where's that IN-jun poet?
After shedding his disguise, he began reciting his work from memory, without a book or manuscript, as he still does today at readings. I also became increasingly aware that my audience was made up of white faces. It bugged me that there weren't more brown faces. Then I realized that books weren't going to do it. I needed to broaden things, working in art forms that were more accessible to Indians. Although poetry remained an abiding love he published four additional volumes in the next two years , Alexie began concentrating more on his fiction.
The novel begins with legendary bluesman Robert Johnson arriving at a Spokane reservation crossroads and bestowing his guitar to young Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas and his rock 'n' roll band then careen through a roller coaster of triumphs and misadventures in the music business. Like most of Alexie's work, Reservation Blues sparkles with black humor and lyricism, and its roots are in the Native American traditions of mythology and story-telling. Thomas repeated stories constantly.
All the other Indians on the reservation heard those stories so often that the words crept into dreams. An Indian telling his friends about a dream he had was halfway through the telling before everyone realized it was actually one of Thomas's stealth stories.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sand, gave you itches that could not be scratched.
If you repeated even a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and your hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut.
They pretended to be friendly and sweet-talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked. Alexie chose to go in a different direction with his second novel, Indian Killer, a murder mystery about a serial killer who scalps white men in Seattle, and the racial tension that ensues.
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