Shell Play, with Toni Jensen

About the Guest

Toni Jensen is author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land. She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2020 she received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Best Books

Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, by Toni Jensen.

Dog Flowers: A Memoir, by Danielle Geller.

Masterplans, by Nick Almeida.

Hum, by Jamaal May.

Transcript

BLAIR HODGES: This episode includes discussion of violence and sex trafficking. Listener discretion is advised. 

TONI JENSEN: The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.

BLAIR HODGES: Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. Toni is a Métis woman, with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. She's no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies and lands of Indigenous people, especially women, and the ways that violence is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

Our interview was recorded on May 24. When it ended, I turned my phone back on and was instantly met with breaking news out of Uvalde, Texas where a young man murdered 19 children and 2 adults with a high-powered firearm. This episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges is dedicated to the memory of those destroyed by gun violence.

Sparks for the book – 1:20

BLAIR HODGES: Toni Jensen, welcome to Fireside with Blair Hodges. It's great to have you here.

TONI JENSEN: Thanks. It's great to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land. Was there a spark that led to this book? Or was it something that just built up over time, because it talks a lot about violence, it talks about firearms, especially Carry itself, the title, can mean a lot of different things, including carrying weapons or being carried or the weight that we carry. So I wondered, was there something that made you want to write a book that focused on firearms and violence, or was it just building up over time?

TONI JENSEN: It did build up over time. But also, there were three sparks in quick succession. There's a chapter in the book about my nephew having a gun held on him by a woman in an affluent suburb, that was a spark. That happened the same summer as the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and I used to teach in Orlando. And so those two things in close proximity, followed by my visit to Standing Rock, which comes up in chapter one of the book—those three things happening within, you know, a few months of each other really were the sparks for writing this book.

BLAIR HODGES: In approaching this book, I might have expected it to be something about how firearms are just unequivocally bad, but you seem—I wouldn't say ambivalent, but there's not a sense here in which you would just make all firearms disappear. Or maybe you would, I don't know, but this doesn't come across as a screed against gun ownership, per se.

TONI JENSEN: It is not a screed against gun ownership. I grew up in gun culture, I grew up with guns in my house. I think there are lots of ways in which we're getting all of that wrong when we make it such a polarized issue. You know, my favorite uncle, for example, who lived up in northern Minnesota, and had a gun he would carry with him in case he needed it, right, out in the woods. It's remote area. I don't have any problem with gun owners possessing firearms like that.

It's complicated, though. And he was my favorite uncle, he was not a domestic abuser. Had he been a domestic abuser, then there's a wrinkle, there's a complication.

BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.

TONI JENSEN: Domestic abusers, generally, also speaking statistically, are the ones who carry their guns into places like Pulse nightclub and commit mass shootings. I mean, there's a huge correlation, well over 50%, closer to 80% of overlap between domestic abuse and mass shooters. And so I just think we need to be talking more about these wrinkles.

No, I don't have any problem with someone owning a shotgun when they live in a rural area. I don't have any problem with bird hunters or deer hunters, if they're responsible about other people's property, and they're responsible—they're going to eat what they kill. That's the way that I grew up, right? Very rural, you needed a gun for certain things.

But I think the face of gun ownership in America is changing, has changed. We've jumped that shark long ago, and we don't talk about it. Now, the average profile of someone who owns a gun is a suburban white, affluent, or upper middle-class person. And I was really surprised to learn that. So really, I didn't come in to Carry with all this knowledge, necessarily. I had stories and a lot of reading, and a lot of research led me to this knowledge.

And so yeah, I try to see it from all sides if it's possible. But I generally say that the book is anti-gun violence, it's not anti-gun,

Being Métis – 4:34

BLAIR HODGES: I want people to get a sense for your voice that comes through in this book. You're a very powerful writer, a very moving writer. And so I asked you ahead of time if there were some excerpts you could read, and I picked a few out.

Before we get to the first one though, let's take a second to define Métis [pronounced meh-tee]. This is a really important concept in the book and about who you are as a person. So let people know about Métis.

TONI JENSEN: Sure. Being Métis means you're of mixed Indigenous and usually French or Scots Irish heritage. In my case it's a little of both, but mostly Irish. And so Hudson Bay trapper traders, the first trapper trader companies to come to Canada, men would often intermarry with the women. And that's the history of how Métis people became a distinct identity, a distinct political entity, in a way separate, but also still enmeshed in the tribes from which they came.

In my case, it's Alberta Métis. But I grew up in the United States, there was a split in the family and we came down to the states, so I grew up in Iowa. My older uncles went back and forth when they were young, and my father worked a trap line, which is something many Métis do. I grew up with my aunts and uncles with my cousins, with my grandmother, but I didn't grow up in Alberta.

I think having some experiences of what could be considered traditional, but also having a lot of silence around it—a lot of white passing around being Métis, you know—all of that has formed my identity. So I just consider myself to be a Métis person who's very disconnected from land and place, but not very disconnected from the ideas, from the culture that influence land and place, if that makes sense.

The writing workshop – 6:08

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, thank you. Alright, so let's get to this first section. This is a memory you write about from a writing workshop you did back in grad school. Let's just get right to it and hear about this experience, please.

TONI JENSEN: Sure.

When I was a graduate student in Texas, the first time I brought a story into workshop, a fellow student told me if I was going to “write about Indians,” I would need to separate my writing more from that of Louise Erdrich. Then this man misquoted from the beginning of Erdrich's novel Tracks, ostensibly to show how similar it was to my story. At the end of workshop, when it was my turn to speak, I corrected his misquotation and suggested in my most polite voice that perhaps to him “Indians” writing about snow all seemed the same. I assured him we were not. I assured him though we might both have written about snow, neither of us was “writing about Indians.”

There were so many things that afternoon I did not say. I did not tell this man how it felt, in my first weeks on campus, to have my favorite book mistreated this way. I didn't trust my voice for that. I did not explain how “Erdrich” rhymes with brick, not witch. I did not trust my voice for that either.

Her books were sent to me by a friend when I was young and lived in Wales for nearly a year, so far from home I thought I might float from my skin. . . Her stories were the first fiction I read to contain the word Métis. I kept that part very quiet. There was no part of me that wanted to hear this word mangled and spit from this man’s mouth.

I did make two friends that day in workshop, a Black woman and the white, Republican son of a wealthy Texas oil family. I learned fast that I would be surprised in this place by who would be good company.

The class held mostly white, female faces, and not one of those women looked me in the eye or spoke to me, then or any time soon after.

Later, more company arrived—queer writers and Latino and Chicano writers and another Native writer—so I had far more company than did Marie, far more voices pushing alongside mine.

We needed each other. The next semester another white, male student wrote as his comment on one of my poems, “Stop writing the in for the moment but sure not to last Indian poems.” What I was writing, it seemed, was considered a fad, temporary, “sure not to last.” I was writing my life, as had so many generations of Métis before. So then I was, we were, temporary, a fad, “sure not to last”? How can you stay in a place if your very existence is “sure not to last”? If not for my company, I might not have stayed. If not for my company, it could have been a last straw moment.

The next year yet another white, male student in workshop started writing hate stories using all of us in the class as recognizable characters. He put only the thinnest of veils around all the terrible things he thought about each of us, yet mine was the only character he killed off over and over and over again.

The second-to-last time, the character was run over by a Ford Escort. The Ford Escort then backed up and ran over the character that was me but was not me, of course, of course. It backed up and ran over again and again and again. At the bar, after class, every time my company called me by my name, I shook my head and said, “I now only answer to the name Ford Escort.” I drank plenty that night, despite not having bought a single drink.

In the weeks after, they called me "Ford Escort" in the halls. They maybe said it too loud because the next story from this writer was a different sort of story, a domestic violence sort of story, featuring my character tied to a chair, a man holding to her head a gun.

The land on which that university sits was for so many years land lived on and fought over by Apache and Comanche people, who still live there, of course, just not in such numbers. We were all of us visitors. We were all of us invaders—though some more than others.

“Why—” my friend Marcus asked in that workshop, “why do you think you can do that to her?” He clipped the ends of his words, so that it sounded like someone snapping a towel. I admired how he could do this—make spoken language sound dangerous. I admired the level of control.

“It's a character,” said another white man.

Marcus let out a sound like a hiss, like a deflating balloon or a coiled snake, and the writer began to laugh.

The writer’s laugh was not believable as humor or comedy, and it went on much too long. I felt such anger but also a little sorry for him, for how long everyone held the silence, after.

It was in that same workshop where I learned how to shut down these men. When we arrived to class one day, the same white man who told me to stop writing my “sure not to last” poems had written a story set in Mexico City, in the garbage dumps. Locally, the people there sometimes are called Garbage Dump Dwellers, so they are known by location and also for their ingenuity—for making homes and a meager living through recycling everyone else's garbage. In this man's story, the people who lived there ate with bare hands after sorting through garbage, their faces were filthy, and their movements were described like those of animals.

It is not that difficult to see more variety into people if you're looking. A quick Google search, for example, provides images of men wearing gloves and cowboy hats, children who work and also play, mothers who make meals from what they find.

One friend in the class, the only Mexican American person in the class, was so angry his voice shook when he told the writer, “They're like animals. You've made them like animals.”

“I've been there,” the writer said, “with my church group. This is how they live.”

His words were answered with a chorus of "They" and "Who are you calling—" and each voice shouting over the next.

There are so many ways this place, this South, was and is bad for me, but this day also—like you're supposed to in graduate school—I learned.

“What if the kid,” I said. To be heard, I had to pause a moment, to wave my arms around like I was perhaps trying to fly. “What if the kid had a toy?”

Everyone looked at me like I was a crazy person. The thought was clear in their eyes, their expressions. Why was I talking about toys when, clearly, we had a racist among us, or why was I talking about toys when we had an accusation of racism hanging above us, beneath us, in between us?

But then everyone quieted.

“If the kid had a toy,” I said, “we'd see him playing with it. He's a person then, doing person things.”

A few people nodded, but most still looked doubtful.

“People throw out toys all the time,” I said. “It's plausible.”

“What if the mother had a flower,” I said, “just one flower—plastic or cloth or whatever—just one beautiful thing?”

My friend looked at me now like maybe I wasn't crazy. The writer still shook his head, but he had stopped talking.

“Stereotypes are bad because they're lazy writing,” I said. “I don't believe this story because I don't believe the characters. I don't believe the characters because there's no teddy bear, no flower, nothing beautiful.”

“It's a little boring,” I said, “when everything's so ugly in a predictable way.”

The writer of course, looks like he wanted his friend to resurrect the Ford Escort, but the writer also was not arguing. The professor agreed with me, and we moved on to the next story.

After, I was shaky but also not sorry. I had gone into that class thinking I already was a teacher, but I left knowing I hadn't been one before. You can’t teach racists to be less racist by calling them what they are. They remain unbothered by insinuation or even direct accusation of racism, but they are not fine with being told their writing is bad.

The commonality in workshop, then, sometimes is not common humanity—it's a desire to write better. In the South, I decided thereafter I would foreground every workshop I lead with talk of how stereotypes are harmful, yes—and also how their indicators of bad writing. I would shut down these men and, yes, sometimes also women, before they had a chance to begin, before they could begin to harm.

That day is the how and why of earning Marie's trust. That day is the how and why I don't quit.

My friend, that semester in Texas, the lone Mexican American student in the class, would not come back to workshop, after. He finishes the class as an independent study with the professor. I imagine everyone in that class passed, as per Webster's definition number four: “to give approval or a passing grade to.” My friend goes on to finish his degree, to publish another book, to teach writing at a university. He doesn't quit, either, and I respect his choices, but that semester, I greatly missed his company as cost to his passing. [Carry, pages 238–242.]

Racism in the academy – 15:32

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. You mentioned Webster's near the end there. And we'll get to that soon because Webster's Dictionary is kind of an interesting character throughout your book. But I wanted to ask if racism like you depict in this story, like you describe in this story, was fairly common in your experience in the academy.

TONI JENSEN: Yes, it's fairly common. West Texas is a more—everyone's very clear sort of place. So this is a clear example. And that's why I pick it. There could be probably thirty more examples where people are murkier, or more veiled, or where there's crying instead of running over with a Ford Escort, right, where people are crying.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah.

TONI JENSEN: When you tell them in a veiled way that they're racist.

BLAIR HODGES: Good grief.

TONI JENSEN: I mean, I've lived all over the country. I've taught all over the country. And what racism looks like place to place is different, how it's enacted, but it exists everywhere. I think people from the coasts get this wrong sometimes thinking it's only the South. “Oh, well, you chose to go to graduate school in Texas, what did you expect?”

I actually prefer the kind of a very direct and clear confrontation, because it can be met directly and clearly. When every interaction with the person is a microaggression and you have a whole list of them, you can write them down. But it's still harder to deal with moment to moment in a way, because it's nebulous, it's not as clear cut, it's the kind of thing that if, say, an administrator, or a program head wanted to misunderstand, they absolutely could.

BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.

TONI JENSEN: And that's still the lived experience of queer folks, of Black folks, of Latino, Chicano, Asian American, and Native American people throughout the academy. And I wish it weren't so, but it is so.

BLAIR HODGES: And I noticed throughout the book, you had different ways of confronting that, and also as a woman too, the sexism that happened, and sometimes the outright misogyny where there were times when you found you had a voice to speak in the moment, and other times when you had to sit back, you know, we get to see you handle these kind of scary at times experiences in a lot of different ways.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: There's no single way to respond to it.

TONI JENSEN: There isn't. Sometimes you're up to confrontation and sometimes you're not, it's generally that simple. If it's a safety issue for me, or more importantly, for someone who has less power in some way than I do, then that's not necessarily the time to assume that person wants me to be the voice for them, right? And so sometimes it's good to save the processing of it, and the coming forward about it for another day.

I would say in workplace situations now though, I'm a tenured professor, and so now, there's very little that I won't speak back to you directly. Also, you know, the environment where I work is pretty good in that way. At University of Arkansas, but also Institute of American Indian Arts, it's a whole different environment. They're mostly Native faculty, and mostly Native students in our little residency MFA. And I quite enjoy being able to sort of take that cape off my shoulders and set it down when I enter that space. It's a whole different environment.

BLAIR HODGES: And the piece you just read also begins with someone basically saying, “Oh, you're an Indian writing about this, that's been done”—kind of basically saying, “You're an Indian writer, that's what you are. And that's all you are.”

I can also see a flip side of that where people might sort of tokenize, like “you're the Indian writer”—and this is something I face as a podcaster, right, doing a podcast like this, I try to get a lot of different voices, a lot of different perspectives, but what it ends up meaning is you're the one Métis person that I've interviewed, and I don't want to give the impression that you're the Métis author, that you're representative of everything. And so, there's a way to be condescending about it, like, “Oh, we've already heard from Métis,” and there's also a way to kind of tokenize it and say like, “Oh, you're representative.”

Do you feel that in the stuff that you've published, where maybe sometimes—we have an example here of a person being condescending about it. Do you feel the other way sometimes where people are kind of like, “Oh, come and be our Métis person that we're going to have—Do the Indian thing for us,” right?

TONI JENSEN: Yes, absolutely. That does happen. And I think it happens less and less. I think the literary landscape is changing faster than the academic one.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good.

TONI JENSEN: The academic model is still kind of one-and-done in a lot of places, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, “We got our Indian author and on to the next thing,” right.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah. I will say that right before I was hired to teach at University of Arkansas they hired several other Native faculty members, including in the English Department. And so it isn't that way for me there. I arrived with company, you know? and that was terrific. And that remains true, even as faculty ebb and flow. It isn't that kind of environment there. But I still see that being replicated somewhat across other academic spaces, other academic cultures.

In publishing, it's opening up. The last five years has seen an explosion of Native writers being published. And it's just amazing to see. Now my recommendations for books by Native writers—and not just poets, I mean, the poetry explosion has been going on longer is why I say that—but in prose, we're starting to catch up. Now there are lots of new books to look forward to at any given moment. And it's amazing. It's amazing. So I do think it's changing.

But if you look, statistically? Yeah, publishing is still dominated by—you know, white men are still the top demographic, white women close to follow. And then everybody else, it's still just such a small percentage. But it's still nice to see all the new voices being published. It's both.

Opening things up with personal stories – 20:39

BLAIR HODGES: That's Toni Jensen. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and we're talking about the book Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land.

Toni, early in the book, you address the fact of being raised in a violent home. Your first memory of water, for example, is of your father trying to drown your mother. There are some very painful scenes in this book and I wondered about what it's like for you to write such sensitive stories. It's a really personal story and you're publishing it in a book and just wonder what your feelings are about that.

TONI JENSEN: I get asked this question, or a version of this question, quite a bit. And really, I've talked with so many people, so many students who are writing similar stories all over the country, when I go and give workshops or in my teaching since I've lived lots of places. So I felt like for me personally, there isn't as much risk. The risk then comes because I'm not just writing about myself. I'm writing about my family.

And so, you know, where the lines were, and how personal, and how detailed to make scenes that involve domestic abuse toward my mother, for example, right? Like, I had to think carefully through how to craft those moments or those scenes. Because she deserves dignity. She certainly well earned it. I mean, we all deserve dignity. But you know, she and I are very close. And so those were the ones I really had to think carefully about, when it was about family members.

I'm okay with having that part of my life be an open book, because I decided long ago that silence is not serving any of us, and women need to know—and men too, men can also be victims of domestic abuse, especially boys, right? And so everyone needs to know that this is just a topic of discussion we can have.

I mean, for years you weren't supposed to talk about—what? Politics, religion, race, those sorts of things at the dinner table, it wasn't considered polite conversation. That's gone out the window in most American homes, I would venture to say. Not all, certainly, but a good many. That has changed in my lifetime.

There isn't any reason we can't have open discourse about gun violence and domestic violence, both. There really isn't. It's just that it's just a hurdle we have to jump. And those of us who were willing to put a face to it, right? there's no reason then that we shouldn't be leading. It doesn't cost that much.

BLAIR HODGES: We get to see you as a writer reflecting on this too in some of the pieces. For example, there's a part early on in the book where you're talking about your father and alcohol, and you say, "There's a danger in writing about my father's drinking. I know this. Native men, including Métis men, so often are depicted as drunk, hopeless, more drunk, more hopeless. My father is Métis, and also he drinks."

As you're preparing a book like this, maybe say a little bit more about what that danger is and how you reckon with it as a writer.

TONI JENSEN: I get very irritated when otherwise excellent contemporary American writers who are not Native write about Native men in drunken caricature ways. Or about the women in hypersexualized, or “Mother Earth” sort of caricature ways.

BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.

TONI JENSEN: The Mother Earth stereotype is at least positive. But come on. We can all do better. You know, if you're otherwise a really skilled writer, you can bother to craft these characters well.

Or also if there's the sense that in a place where they're unaware that there are still Native people, where there's an absence, and the Native presence is only through the history or “Oh, this is the land on which,” sort of land acknowledgement sort of thing where it's just “these people used to be here,” well, they're still there. Bother to learn that and bother to put a character in the story and craft the character well. You can do it with literally all other manner of characters of other backgrounds. So there's no reason that Native characters can't be depicted fully.

And so I felt a special responsibility then, to make sure—because my dad is going to be depicted as a complex full person—

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

TONI JENSEN: —you know? Yeah, he's there drinking at the bar, but so is literally everyone else in the town, almost, you know? It was really common. I'm from a town of fewer than a thousand people, and there was always more than one bar operating, you know? And the churches do outnumber the bars still, but really, quite a few bars for a population of that size.

BLAIR HODGES: Probably pretty close.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah. And so, it isn't also that first, it's the second chapter. You know, I talk about going there and drinking orange soda and eating barbecue potato chips.

BLAIR HODGES: As a child!

TONI JENSEN: As a child! I really liked going to the bar! I mean, there's no trauma there in those memories, like really zero. And so, you know—

BLAIR HODGES: It was almost a safer place for you compared to some of the other situations you found yourself in. I mean, maybe it set up for some danger later right, with alcoholism or the effects of alcohol. But yeah, you do depict a kind of fondness for the safe little place where you had your chips and your OJ. [laughter]

TONI JENSEN: Yeah, it was not bad. It was really not bad at all. And so, it's a small town. Everyone knows one another, right? And so, you know, you’re a little girl in your ballet leotard and your ballet shoes if you forgot to change out of them, which I often did, you’re not supposed to wear them on the street, but I would just walk across and I don't know—I mean there's a fondness there.

BLAIR HODGES: It comes through it's really beautiful.

TONI JENSEN: I think you need that for balance, any time you're gonna write a story about a person doing terrible things. If you know the terrible things are coming, I feel the responsibility to craft them as a whole and complete person. And the same with the town. That town covers up a lot of things—then and now, right? You know, stories that could be brought to the light, but it's mostly Scandinavian immigrants, right? Danish, Norwegian. And culturally, that's the way of the people, is not to discuss everything.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

TONI JENSEN: And to be reticent, and to be more withholding. And that's okay. But also there's a cost to that. And so, if I'm going to talk about the cost of those sort of cultural ways of not discussing so many things you could not talk about, then I have to show that there are also lovely things.

There are also the people who will bring out the shovel and shovel your driveway. There are the people who will be nice to the little girl in the leotard at the bar with her dad, even though everyone kind of knows he drinks too much and is not always nice when he drinks too much, right?

So if you want to render everything with complexity, you have to start somewhere. And it's good to start with yourself and be honest, and with your own family and to be honest.

BLAIR HODGES: We see this throughout the book as well, there are times when it seems like there's more you could say, or there's more to a story, but you kind of let it go in passing, or perhaps don't want to bring it up. And I just wondered how you negotiate that as a writer.

Do you kind of just write and let whatever comes out on the page come out, and then maybe go back and maybe say “I should take that out?” Or like how do you handle disclosure versus—you know, being discreet versus being honest and authentic about it?

TONI JENSEN: Sometimes I have a good sense going into the writing of what I want to reveal and what I want to hold back. Other times, I don't know for sure and I write it all down. And then I sort that out in revision. And I never delete those sections. They go into what I call an “extra file.” And the extra files for Carry are almost as big as the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah, there are a lot of incidents, unfortunately. I've read books where the writer goes very hard toward the trauma and there isn't balance. There's not any description of birds or Webster’s or, you know, no one ever goes to the bar and it's not terrible, right? And I did not want to write that book.

So I wrote those scenes down, or I wrote some of those moments down. But not everything goes in. I made a conscious decision early on to have balance in the book, to have humor, to have whimsy, to have also socio-political issues and structures, you know, all of that be a part of it. Because I'm not really interested in replicating trauma narratives without something else.

Webster’s Dictionary – 28:04

BLAIR HODGES: And you mentioned Webster's, let's talk about that for a second. Webster's Dictionary is kind of a character in the book; it comes up quite a bit. And I laughed the first time you said, “Webster's defines…” because that's kind of a cliche way to start a speech or something, right? But you use this as a way to explore language and thought. Talk about your attraction to Webster's, it seems like a really important book to you, frankly.

TONI JENSEN: I felt like I wanted to include etymology and definitions. And it's really interesting to me when words come into the lexicon, and why they might have come in at a certain moment historically. I got very interested in that and decided to include it, both in a literal and sometimes in a whimsical way.

I think there's a chapter early on, “The Invented Histories of Domestic Birds” essay, where some of the Webster's definitions are obviously made up and so [laughter] so anyway, I do that once in a while. But mostly, they're all very literal.

I just think exploring our language around any given topic can add some insight into why we think the way we do. “Campus carry,” for example, we all know what that means. Concealed carry, open carry—these are not terms that people in other countries are as intimately familiar with as we are in America. And so I find that fascinating, you know, at what point does campus carry make it into the lexicon? At what point do we start to normalize that, instead of being horrified by the idea that people can just carry weapons on a college campus? Sure, why not? With very little or no training in a good many cases.

And so, you know, what all of that means goes back to language. Sometimes it's whimsical, sometimes it's purposeful—as with a term like “campus carry,” and I picked Webster's because the OED just frankly seems a little fancy for what I want to accomplish. Shortly after I started doing that, maybe two years after I started doing that, Webster's started becoming more political on Twitter. And I thought that was—

BLAIR HODGES: Their Twitter is funny!

TONI JENSEN: It's so funny, and so political. And I think that's really amazing. But that was just happenstance. I sort of maybe knew that intuitively about Webster’s versus let's say OED or, you know, other choices.

BLAIR HODGES: It's very strange, like the origin of Webster’s is quite the opposite of that. When he started it, it was kind of a colonization project, a way to create respectable—read in brackets “[white]” society—

TONI JENSEN: Mmhmm.

BLAIR HODGES: —and a dictionary was a tool to kind of enforce a dominant group and to get everybody, every white body, on the same page. And now [laughs] on Twitter, it's more subversive, and you're playing with that throughout your book. It's a really interesting journey that Webster's has taken.

TONI JENSEN: Absolutely. I think it's really fun to take something—also studying birds or weaving birds throughout my book. That's typically the province of old white men too. And boy have we seen that change in the last few years. But I've literally never worked in any English department where there wasn't one older white man who wrote mostly about birds.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right.

TONI JENSEN: And, and I love that they pay the attention and that they spend the time. This is not a critique of their doing that. But it is a critique of our structures where the rest of us then are left to do social justice work in our writing, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Sure, yeah. Instead of birds.

TONI JENSEN: Instead of birds. And so, there are a few writers especially who are not academic writers who seem to—Jonathan Franzen for example, you know, in his bird study, and I just felt like he was sort of a tipping point for me. And I thought, well, I can do this too, you know? The rest of us can decide willfully to have some joy and some beauty in our writing, too. But also, to do the work that is necessary and that literally no one else is going to be doing.

So yeah, Webster’s and the birds, that was all sort of part and parcel of the flipping of the order.

Shale play – 31:44

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. A few of these chapters, Toni, also talk about some reporting and activism you've done around oil pipelines and fracking and the environment. So there's another excerpt we can dig into here from chapter 10. Let's hear it and talk about it a little bit.

TONI JENSEN: A “shale play” is a formation of fine-grained sedimentary rock that also contains a notable amount of natural gas. In oil and gas terms, the Niobrara Shale Play is most often called “an emerging play” or “an exciting new play” or “a young play.” It is an active play, producing natural gas through hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Water and sand and chemicals, millions of gallons, are forced down into the shale, the rock, to break it apart, to release the gas, which is then taken.

In October 1865, the Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledge the government's blame for the Sand Creek Massacre. But the treaty also took Cheyenne and Arapaho rights to land titles in the state of Colorado. The language matters, and the actions do not speak, they shout.

What has happened since fracking began in June 1998 in the Barnett Shale of Texas, what is happening today across the country, is this continued shouting. The degradation and exploitation of Indigenous women and children continues through the force and power of history, through the force and power of this fracking industry.

Indigenous women and children are sold for sex to fracking camp workers; they are exchanged, they are bartered, they are trafficked; they are supply meeting demand. They are made to be goods on the land their families once inhabited, their own lands.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies, of our most vulnerable bodies—our women, our children.

In the Bakken Shale Play in the Dakotas, there has been a 30 percent increase of sex trafficking cases filed in the last three years. In April 2015, a coalition of Indigenous women filed a formal request for the United Nations to intercede on behalf of Indigenous women who are being trafficked for sex near fracking sites across the Great Plains.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.

In rural northern Pennsylvania, along the New York State border, sex trafficking around the Marcellus Shale sites has grown so great, a local YWCA received a $500,000 federal grant to provide help to trafficked women and children, many of whom come from nearby reservations in New York. The organization Sing Our Rivers Red has taken its art exhibit to New York and to North Dakota and to most states across the country. They collect single earrings and display them on red backdrops to memorialize the missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies. [Carry, pp. 186–187.]

BLAIR HODGES: A lot of this was news to me. And you have been thinking about it and covering it, researching it for a while now. How did you get interested in that work? And why do you think it isn't more widely known about?

TONI JENSEN: There's been some really good reportage on it. Amy Dalrymple, who used to write for the Fargo Forum and then wrote for the Oil Patch News in North Dakota, she's, I would say, one of the best writers on the subject of fracking and Indigenous women. There's a book by Sierra Crane Murdoch too that's a really good book on the subject of people going missing around fracking sites in the Dakotas.

But I've lived not in North Dakota, but in South Dakota. I've lived in West Texas, and I've lived in rural Pennsylvania when I taught at Penn State. Plus, I'm an Indigenous woman and so for me, being on the ground in those places, and while things were happening, made it such that there was no way to be looking the other way.

When I taught at Penn State in the spring, I would usually teach on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, a Native and sometimes a Native/Chicano literature class. And so I would arrive at the building where people from oil and gas were there to recruit. It was a Sciences building and so people were there to recruit graduate students and undergrads to go work in the oil and gas industry.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, right.

TONI JENSEN: So I would show up to teach a class where I would be discussing the same things that are in my book, that were in other literature, and there would be the notes they would leave about their “facts” on fracking, and the salaries they were going to offer our young graduates. And I just—the dissonance was so great for me, knowing the cost of it, but then also being in an environment where it was so celebrated and still is so celebrated.

And oil and gas money and what it means to a place, what it means to the nearby institutions, the universities, the research entities in small towns, the high schools, you can tell who took the frack money in small town America in frack lands by looking at their library and by looking at their high school, right? If it's new and shiny, that's what they've spent it on. If it's not new and shiny, either they didn't take the money and they fought fracking, or it went into individual hands.

But I always like, at least, when they get a good looking high school and a good looking library out of it, because the roads will be ruined, and the water will be ruined, and the air will be ruined, and individual homeowners will profit. Individual landowners will profit. But then their quality of life will go down dramatically. That's what you see.

I've gone back to the Marcellus Shale many times. And there are roads that I went to years and years ago, my daughter's fifteen now and she was little then, not even in elementary school yet. So more than a decade ago. And the cleanup that was supposed to come to those roads never came. And the houses are uninhabitable. You can't get down the road because the fracking trucks ruined the roads. And you know, there were supposed to be hilltops that were supposed to be built back up and things were supposed to be planted. None of that is happening. None of that will happen.

And so the boom-and-bust cycle, what it does to the land, and the piece about Indigenous women being trafficked—I think all of that has to be connected more forcefully and more intricately than we've been connecting it. Because you wouldn't think necessarily that they have anything to do with one another in a place like rural Pennsylvania, but they absolutely do.

BLAIR HODGES: It's so—I mean, I have to ask, where's law enforcement? Where are people who could care about this and try to do something about it? The statistics are there, so someone's keeping statistics.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah, the statistics are starting to be there, the Indigenous Women's Resource Center is starting to keep statistics. Other individuals have started to keep statistics. Social workers, for sure, are the unsung heroes of all of this, because they're working actively to get grants, like the one I mentioned in the piece I just read.

In rural Pennsylvania, most of those people were my resources. And so I can't even begin to describe the work they're doing, where they're working actively to get funds and also you know to help get women out of these situations. And they're also working actively to raise awareness. And then they're working actively on the individual level to get women out of the life and to get them into better situations. And so yeah, it's a complex sort of layered or tiered approach. And they're the ones doing most of the work—sometimes in harmony with law enforcement, and sometimes not, depending on the place.

BLAIR HODGES: And I'm struck too by the fact that you're writing about it, because on the one hand, you talk about being protected when you want to be by a “white privilege raincoat.” In other words, you can kind of put on this presumed whiteness, people might see you and just think, “Oh, there's a white person.” And also, you're in the academy, you're an educator, you're a writer, and both of those things could give you plenty of cover to not engage with such a difficult, really harrowing thing. In fact, in some cases, it could even be dangerous for you to engage in that kind of research and work.

So with those options ahead of you, I'm just curious about your own drive to participate in that kind of research and that kind of writing.

TONI JENSEN: I think it's much more dangerous for people who don't have the kind of cover that I have. My white privilege does protect me in most situations—not all but most. I'm still a woman, right? I'm still an Indigenous woman. And it's interesting who figures that out and who doesn't.

But yeah, I do feel like all the things you say are true. But then I have more responsibility. I have this privilege. Those of us who have these privileges—I didn't come from these privileges, but I've earned them. And so, since I've earned them, it's my responsibility, then—it's all of our responsibility, those of us from privilege, to do better.

It wouldn't be safe for a good many of my female students to be out doing this sort of work. It is pretty safe for me to be doing it. I come from a journalism background, I understand, you know, laws and rules and how to get a story in a way that affords me a lot of cover and a lot of knowledge. I'm older than they are.

While I've been up here in Alaska, I met with a former student who was talking about wanting to write about a murder that had happened and how she's just not ready. And I said, “You know, I'm probably twenty years older than you are or fifteen years older than you are, and so you might get there, and you might not, and that's okay.” But she doesn't have much of the structural privilege that I have. And she doesn't have the years on the planet that I have.

And so, you know, I didn't start doing this work until I was in my late thirties, probably middle of the late thirties. I think those of us who can do it should do it, I guess. And I can do it. And so why not?

Guns and privilege – 41:18

BLAIR HODGES: And when it comes to privilege, we get to see privilege on a number of different levels throughout the book. I'm thinking, for example of chapter 13, which is called “Chicken,” and you introduce us there to three different people who handle firearms for very different reasons and with very different outcomes.

There's Carla Tyson, who's a wealthy white woman connected to Tyson Foods. There's Christopher Hancock, who's working class at a Tyson factory, oddly enough. He's armed but doesn't end up shooting, receives a huge sentence for it. And then there's your daughter in that same chapter who goes shooting with friends. And so maybe spend a minute on that juxtaposition of those different privileges, different possibilities, different outcomes, all surrounding firearms.

TONI JENSEN: I felt like that was such an interesting case. Carla Tyson pulling a gun on those young people while they sat in a parked car in front of their family home was a clear-cut illustration. And I know Carla, right? Because I lived in that neighborhood. We lived in the same neighborhood briefly. And it was a social neighborhood where there was an ice cream social when we first moved in, and I thought, “Where have we moved to that there's an ice cream social literally the day after we move in?”

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Nice.

TONI JENSEN: What in the world? Yeah, what is this place? But it was, it's a lovely neighborhood. And you know, by then, by the time I wrote that chapter, I had learned more about who the average gun owner is in America. And they look a lot more like Carla Tyson than a person might think. And so I felt like then it was really important to include that section.

Also, it gave me a chance to write about Northwest Arkansas where I live. And it's a super interesting place because it's the headquarters and home of Walmart, of course, of Tyson Chicken, of JB Hunt, and of the university. And so you have all these worlds merging. It's a big mountain biking community now, and back to the landers—people who when land got to be too expensive in Vermont, people who would have moved to the communes in the free land sort of movement there started coming to Northwest Arkansas. And most of my neighbors, when I first moved to where we live now in southern Fayetteville, were those people.

All these people living together, it's bound to be interesting. And in Arkansas we have one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the nation. And also there's plenty of gun controversy where I live, so that chapter gave me a chance to talk about who owns guns, who gets to wield power, who gets what sort of a sentence, and why Christopher Hancock, for committing—almost committing—a gun crime, right? for threatening to commit a racially motivated gun crime and then not doing it, whereas Carla actually pulled the gun out and held it to the window of the car and received a lesser sentence than him. And both those people are white, but also the levels of socio-economic privilege are very layered and interesting there, and what wealthy white people can get away with in America by way of gun ownership still remains quite disturbing and fascinating to me.

BLAIR HODGES: Then how did you feel with your daughter going shooting with friends. I mean, you've experienced, throughout the book, a lot of really scary situations with firearms, firearms on college campuses, people that—you've lived next door to a woman who ended up murdering people. I mean, a lot of different things, and then your daughter's going shooting with friends.

And you know, I grew up in a house without any firearms. My father was, I would say was pretty anti-firearm, he went hunting once with his father-in-law and got shot at by accident. And that was it for him. He [laughs] he wanted nothing to do with it. Although I grew up here in Utah, where there's a fairly robust gun culture, I didn't experience it. So when I think about my kids, like, I have to confess I don't even like seeing my son pretend to have a gun, like do anything like that. And he's a young white kid, too. So there's even some privilege that would protect him in that.

I don't know, it was interesting to read your thoughts about your daughter because you seem a bit ambivalent about it, honestly.

TONI JENSEN: I was surprised to find that I was ambivalent. In her growing up years, her “childhood” childhood, I really thought I would have more of an “absolutely do not ever with guns” sort of approach. I trust these neighbors, they were some of our first friends, you know, she's grown up with their son and she also learned how to butcher a chicken out of the family farm that same day and I got a good report that she was good at both at shooting and butchering. And they were shooting it cans mostly and so it seemed okay to me in the moment. It seemed like she wanted to get the skills that are very rural American skills, and I trusted them.

I do remember being very nervous and texting her, you know where to stand right? You never ever—like don't stand in front of your friend, ever. Don't walk—like walk in the back, walk behind everyone else, because also I did have a friend in high school whose father was shot and killed in a hunting accident. And it was just an accident, but it can totally happen and that was what I was nervous about. Not her becoming a gun zealot or anything like that, right? [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

TONI JENSEN: Or loving it too much. I will say she's gone to the shooting range with my father-in-law. So her stepfather’s dad, who I also trust implicitly, and she's a good shot, and she enjoys—they have an old small shotgun, and she enjoys going and shooting at the range, and she's good at it. And she likes being good at it.

So, yeah, and when I asked her if she'll ever get a gun and she's like, “No! Why would I ever want to own a gun?” But she enjoys learning the skill of shooting. And I find that to be interesting. And I feel like it's my job as a parent to explain risk and reward and to watch her grow up and to let her do things she's good at.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That's hard with kids.

TONI JENSEN: So you’re right that it's totally, it's totally complicated, yes, that it is hard.

City beautiful – 46:39

BLAIR HODGES: That's Toni Jensen. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. We're talking about her book Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land.

Let's move to the last section that we planned to read here. This is about the Pulse Massacre in Orlando that you mentioned a little bit earlier. This is where someone went to a nightclub and wounded 53 people and killed 49 people. And so you know, I already gave a trigger warning at the beginning of this episode. But again, you know, we're dealing with violence and things here. So people may want to skip this part of that's difficult for them. But please, let's hear this part about the Pulse Massacre, which wasn't too far away from your own experiences.

TONI JENSEN: When their list comes, none of my names are on it, and I'm sorry for those, including people I love, who've lost dear ones. I watch with the rest of America as family members and doctors rush in and out of hospitals, as family members exit, some of them collapsing in grief against the trunks of palm trees out front or onto the soft and waiting grass, that thick-stemmed Florida grass that is lush and prickly all at the same time.

I come to realize one of the hospitals where the wounded are being treated, and, yes, where the dead are being collected or counted, also houses a wing that used to include my doctor's office. I rarely like a doctor. Perhaps this feeling is a byproduct of our treat-and-street healthcare system in this, our America. Perhaps this feeling goes back further, to childhood. Doctors are people to whom you could tell some truths but not others. Doctors, like policemen, could separate a family, could make an already bad situation worse.

But I like very much my doctor at this clinic in Orlando. He's young, the second-generation son of Chinese immigrant parents, and his father is refusing to take his thyroid medication. I take the same medication, and he's asking me how I remember.

“I just get up every day and take it,” I say.

“That's what I tell him,” he says. “He's too busy, he says to me,” reports the doctor. “He says he forgets.”

“It's important, though,” I say.

“I'll have him talk to you,” he says. “I'll put it on the schedule,” and we both laugh.

Pulse sits on the same block as this hospital, with this doctors’ office wing, where they took some of those who were shot. It is a tall brick building, but is not modern, is the seventies style you see in so much of Orlando—outdated and square, not notable—but with palm warblers strutting under the two palm trees out front that flank the sidewalk like sentinels.

My doctor has black hair that looks as if he's received a static shock. We talked several times about our fathers, and I imagine his has the same hair as his son.

On the day he takes my medical history, he asked the question no other doctor has asked before, at what age had I grown to my full height, and I say twenty-two. He pauses and says, “Do you mean twelve?” and I say, “No, twenty-two. I was just over five feet tall from twelve until twenty-two, and then that year, I grew almost four inches.”

“Eating disorder?” he says.

“No,” I say.

“Sexual abuse?” He says.

“No,” I say.

“The other, then,” he says in a clear but soft voice. “Physical abuse.”

When I do not say no, when I look at the wall instead, he explains to me, quietly and well, that sometimes a body will shut down this way, and once it's out of the bad situation, the body will remember itself—will literally allow itself to resume growth, but only after it feels safe.

At twenty-two I'd been out of my parents’ home for almost four years. It took my body four years to be sure it wouldn't have to go back.

When I get the news about Orlando, then, I'm thinking of my students, their beautiful bodies. I am checking my phone, refreshing my newsfeed, crying as each one marks him- or herself as safe. But I know, of course, they are not. Not really. They're alive, yes—we all are. And I am grateful for this fact. I am. But their world is changed. They are not safe, not exactly.

I think of my doctor, who is most likely there at the hospital, with the victims’ families, with the living.

That past day when he records my history, I must have a look on my face—a trying-not-to-cry look. On the way out, he stops me.

“Are you using your nose spray?” he asks.

“What?” I say.

“Your allergy spray?” he asks. “Every day?”

“Not every day”, I say.

“Every day!” he says in a voice that is almost a shout. “You breathe every goddamn day. Use your nose spray every day.” He grins at me, that hair standing on end.

“Okay!” I say, throwing my hands into the air, “Fine.”

“Okay!” he says, throwing his hands into the air, mirroring my gesture.

It was the perfect thing to do and to say, a regular and profane thing to get me to my car without falling apart, to get me all the way home.

I want to think he was there that night and into the next day, holding space for the families of the grieving. I want him to have been there with those families in the building that houses the only written record of my family's imprint on my body—the only written record till now.

Later when he is home with his own family, I hope someone says just the right thing to him to make him wave his hands around in the air, to make him laugh/cry, instead of crying only. [Carry, pp. 212–215.]

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. Have you been in touch with the doctor since, or was that it for you?

TONI JENSEN: Yeah, that was it. That was it. I didn't recall his name with enough particularity. I tried. I did spend several days on that, looking. But he was a resident, right? And residents move around.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, right.

TONI JENSEN: But he was an early enough—he was more of a beginning resident. So I thought it was plausible, you know residencies last quite a while and I thought it was plausible he would still be there, but not certain, and I couldn't track him down. But I did try it. Yeah, I liked him very much.

Things to help – 53:00

BLAIR HODGES: As I'm reading that piece, I mean, I'm so moved. But it's also so difficult to get through and I can't get through it without just wanting something to change. I want something to happen.

It reminded me of how I felt after Sandy Hook where a shooter went in and murdered children in his school and nothing happened, I feel like. And I mean, a quote from you here in the book, you say, "I don't know where to put these connections. I don't know where to put my grief and my rage sometimes in this, our America." And that resonates with me so much. I just—I don't know, reading this still leaves me wondering like, what can I—what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do with these feelings and these circumstances? And I think you probably feel the same way.

TONI JENSEN: I do feel the same way. It still induces in me such sadness and rage, and interest also, whenever we have a mass shooting. And keeping it in proportion, mass shootings make the news and mass shootings are more common depending on how you quantify them. We don't have a metric to quantify what makes a mass shooting. Generally, it's four or more people being shot. But say if a family member shoots four family members, you know, sometimes that'll be labeled domestic, not mass. And so it depends. It depends on how you're counting. But generally, four or more victims. And so, if you use that as criteria, there are quite a few. But if you think of them as more than that, statistically, it's really anomalous in the greater picture of gun violence.

We have far more incidents of individual one-on-one gun violence, and we have far more suicides. And so those are things we should be talking about even more than mass shootings. And there's a reason why the mass shootings come up in the book only when I'm directly related in a way to a place or to people. Virginia Tech, one of my friends was in lockdown during the shooting, right? That comes up. And then this one at Pulse Nightclub, because Pulse was the nightclub my students went to after workshop to hang out, and there were few students—Orlando's the kind of place where you get a lot of students from all over, but you get a lot of students from right there, and so many of my students still lived there when the shooting happened and could easily have been there that night. And so it was very personal.

Otherwise in the book I'm trying to make sure that there's a more balanced view, that we talk about all the ways gun violence affects us. But yes, I still feel the same helplessness and rage I think that most people feel. You can make a difference by getting involved in some sort of a way. Groups like Moms Demand Action are not just for moms, for example, and they're doing such good work all around the country. Everytown for Gun Violence doing such good work, you know. Having the conversations, too, makes you feel less impotent, I think. You know, starting the conversation and talking about it with breadth and clarity and becoming educated. Those are things even that can help. So all these things can help.

BLAIR HODGES: And when you've written and published a project on this, I just wonder what it's like to kind of walk away from that. Because, I mean, we just had the Buffalo shooting in between the time that we planned this interview and here we are talking about it. And we had another mass shooting, in addition to all of the suicides and all of the other gun incidents that have happened as well.

And so when you finish a project like this, and now it's out in the world, do you feel like it's something you can walk away from? Or what are you doing now, when it comes to this project that you finished, but obviously, there's still—everything you write about is still out here in the world. So we're still dealing with it.

TONI JENSEN: I would really like to put it down. But I learn all the time that I'm not really putting it down. I'm still researching, and I'm still so deeply interested and involved. So, I don't know that I'll be writing necessarily more about guns and gun violence, but I don't know that I won't either.

I did a talk recently through The Anti-Racist Book Festival with Dr. Carol Anderson, who's written I think three really good books on guns and gun violence and gun history. And I loved that conversation. I love talking with someone else who's been devoting so much of her life to these topics, and especially to race and racism, and the history of the Second Amendment was her last book and how basically, you know, it's an anti-Black piece of legislation in so many historic and important ways. And I don't think people know about that.

And so I found myself after the shooting in Buffalo, missing the shuttle I was supposed to take to give a presentation at the writing conference and having to walk up the hill instead, because the father of the young man who went into the grocery store and shot it up in Buffalo had not taken down his social media pages, which is a thing the families always do straight away. And I was deeply curious as to whether—people online were saying, of course, the family must be gun nuts, right? Like there must be all sorts of unsecured weapons in the home. And a quick perusal of his Facebook page and the Facebook pages of his friends indicated that was not the way this young man grew up. There are no pictures of people doing gun activities, you know, on the father's Facebook page, which he had not taken down, or on any Facebook pages of any of the friends. There were sporting pictures, there were fishing, and hiking, and a lot of those sorts of pictures, right. But it didn't seem like this young man grew up in gun culture as much, except for how all of America is gun culture.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

TONI JENSEN: So, I'm researching that. I'm researching that and missing my shuttle up the hill to the Writers Conference! So no, I'm not done! I mean, that really illustrated to me that, yeah, I'm not done. I would like to be done. But America's not done. So probably I'm not either.

BLAIR HODGES: And what is writing about it do for you personally, what does it feel like to do a project like this? Because it's not a light—It's not birds, you know? [laughs]

TONI JENSEN: It's not, no. But I think it's important. And I think now I have such a deeper understanding than when I began that I just feel as if there's another level, probably. Like in a video game, how you can level up, I feel like I can continue to level up with my understanding of policy, my understanding of history—reading Carol's book I didn't know some of the things about the Second Amendment that she puts forward, for example. There's more to do. There's more to learn. There's more to put forward.

And unfortunately, too, there will continue to be personal intersections, and there will continue to be, you know, ways in which my life intersects with guns and gun violence. And so, I'm not quite sure. I've been interested lately in gentrification of neighborhoods too. Our northwest Arkansas, since we've made all the “best places to move to” lists, we're gentrifying at a crazy, crazily rapid pace. And so, thinking of the lived history of a place, and what that looks like in relation to segregation in relation to guns and gun violence and gun laws has been kind of interesting. And that's something that I've been looking at recently, that wasn't something I took into account as much in Carry.

So yes, I'm probably not done, not all the way done. I would like to be only writing a book about gentrification, which is what I thought I was doing, but gentrification often happens through violence, right? And sometimes armed violence, and so I'm thinking through that right now.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. That's Toni Jensen, and we're talking about her book Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land.

Alright, Toni, do you have a second? We're going to take a break, but I'd like to come back and just take a second to talk about best books, is that alright?

TONI JENSEN: Yeah, that's great.

[BREAK]

Best Books – 61:25

BLAIR HODGES: It's Fireside with Blair Hodges. We're talking today with Toni Jensen, author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land. And now it's time for Best Books, a segment that I really love. This is when I get to hear from great authors about books that they've loved. Toni, I really enjoyed your book and now it's your opportunity to talk about a book, or books, that you'd recommend. And it could be about anything you'd like.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah, there's a book by a Diné or a Navajo writer Danielle Geller, a memoir called Dog Flowers. And I would highly, highly recommend that. Danielle's an archivist and brings that sort of sensibility, the sense of discovery and cataloging, to the really, truly beautiful and amazing story of her life. And so, I'd recommend Danielle Geller's Dog Flowers in nonfiction.

In fiction there's a chapbook out called Masterplans by Nick Almeida, who's a new writer and it's beautiful, short, short book of short stories. And so I would recommend that.

BLAIR HODGES: Say a word about what chapbooks are, by the way for people that don't know chapbooks.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah. Chapbooks traditionally are poetry, and they’re little condensed books, books not much bigger than would fit in your back pocket. I think they’re making a resurgence right now because we're all so busy and our attention spans have been Twitterized, right? Everything is so short, and chapbooks are making a real comeback, I think, because of that. It's just a shorter book. And they're usually condensed around one kind of aesthetic or one sort of idea. And they're often poetry, but sometimes they’re prose. In this case, it’s prose—quirky, funny, inventive, whimsical, but also kind of heartfelt short stories. So yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Masterplans. Great. Alright. And then did you say you had a third one, too?

TONI JENSEN: And then poetry—gotta do all the three genres—I would recommend Jamaal May’s book Hum. He has another one, The Big Book of Exit Strategies, that is also wonderful. So, I read his poems a lot while I was writing Carry, and he remains one of my favorite living American poets.

A memoir question – 63:16

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so we got a memoir, a chapbook, and then poetry. Really quick, one quick memoir, question.

TONI JENSEN: Yeah!

BLAIR HODGES: Because you recommended a memoir. I wanted to ask this, but I kind of skipped over it. I just wondered about memory and memoir for you, because you've written a memoir. And every time I read a memoir, I'm just sitting there thinking half the time, like, how did they ever remember all this stuff, because it really takes a lot of effort for me to think about—like, there's this beautiful scene you described as a little girl, and you're riding your little big wheel bike out in the road in front of your house, and your mom's kind of hassling you about it, but you feel safe. You do it all the time. She didn't know that. But anyway, you've got these vivid memories, you take me to these places. And I'm like, I wish I had a memory like that. And I guess sometimes I can work hard to dig something up and make it work. But how do you do it? Like how does memoir work for you? When you're reading a memoir are you like, how are these people remembering all this stuff?

TONI JENSEN: Well, I think for a lot of us—I remember what it felt like to ride that bike because it was so liberating, even if it was just, even if I only was allowed at first to ride, you know, right in front of the house up and down the street. I remember that vividly. I couldn't tell you much about yesterday or the week before as vividly, you know? [laughter] But certain things in time are just really fixed for me. And I suspect it's that way for a good many people. These days, if I experience something, I write it down right away. Because the older I get, the less reliable I am if I don't write it down.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I feel that.

TONI JENSEN: But no, I mean, from early childhood up through probably my early thirties, I had a much better sense of recall about things. Maybe that also somewhat, in later years from 18 on, had to do with journalistic training too, where you're taught to catalogue and remember, not just the what happened and the who was there and what was said, but also details that might make it come to life. I mean, I learned that in high school, maybe even a junior high. I think learning that early was super helpful.

BLAIR HODGES: Cool. I love memoir, but then I also have this thing in the back of my head whenever I read one like “Oh,” you know, “how could they remember?” So anyway—

TONI JENSEN: Yeah [laughs].

BLAIR HODGES: That's just kind of my own little pet topic. But thanks so much, Toni. This was great. I highly recommend your book Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land. And I really appreciate you joining us. And you mentioned you're there in Alaska, remind me what you traveled there for again?

TONI JENSEN: I was there for the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in Homer, Alaska, which is a really wonderful conference. And next year, they're going to have Robin Wall Kimmerer, the writer of Braiding Sweetgrass, an Indigenous writer, as their keynote. So yeah, it was really cool.

BLAIR HODGES: Very cool.

TONI JENSEN: It was a wonderful experience. Homer is really beautiful. I recommend it.

BLAIR HODGES: Great. Well Toni, again, thanks for being here. This has been a really rich conversation.

TONI JENSEN: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it.

Outro – 57:42

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions directly to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.

Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.

Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.