Showing posts with label young adult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label young adult. Show all posts

Saturday, January 09, 2016

The Truth About Native American Literature Will Blow Your Mind

 

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Today's guest is Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel the Medicine Woman of the Mohegan Indian Tribe in Uncasville, Connecticut and a young-adult novelist. Her latest book, Wabanaki Blues, is a mystical murder mystery, released this year. It is the first book in the Wabanaki Trilogy. Her non-fiction writings include Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (University of Arizona: 2000).
 
 

Best-selling Native American literature goes WAY back. I come from Mohegan Indian territory in Connecticut, birthplace of The Reverend Samson Occom. He penned the weirdly-popular A sermon at the execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, published in New London in 1772. Occom was not the first Native American to circulate a religious treatise. Popul Vuh, commonly referred to as "The Mayan Bible," is over two thousand years old. To learn more about ancient American writing, I recommend you check out Queequeg’s Coffin by Birgit Brander Rasmussen. It’s full of mind-bending accounts of Peru’s quipu knot texts, Mexican agave bark scripts and more. Those scripts are akin to old Wabanaki and Ojibwe bark writings in what is now the United States. Award-winning Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich describes the bark and rock writings of her people in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, saying "The rock paintings are alive."
 
Am I saying American word forms are animate? Yes, indeed. Because I come from the east coast, I offer painted ash splint basket and woven/carved quahog clam shell writing as examples. In A Key into the Language of Woodsplint Basket Designs, edited by Ann McMullen and Russell G. Handsman, Mohegans Jayne Fawcett and Gladys Tantaquidgeon describe the animacy of tribal painted basket symbols as "… a spiritual force that flows through all things, and if these symbols are true representations of that force, this spirit should be expressed in the designs." Tuscarora wampum expert Rick Hill suggests something similar when he refers to the "inherent intelligence of wampum" as noted in scholar Marge Bruchac’s insightful blog https://wampumtrail.wordpress.com
 
So what happened in the Northeast when colonial English pen and paper literature muscled in on this colorful, lively, three dimensional, Native American literary tradition?" In The Common Pot, author Lisa Brooks claims that "Birchbark messages became letters and petitions, wampum records became treaties, and journey pictographs became written journals." Native space focused on a network of social relations that included a wide range of living beings (including land/sky forms, as well as flora, fauna and fungi). She argues that such broadly engaged space demanded a broadly engaged narrative. In Red Ink, Drew Lopenzina describes this clash between colonial and Native concepts of story-keeping. "If colonial paradigms were generally geared toward the containment of space and knowledge, Native epistemologies seemed to favor a kind of engagement with the experiential world." Thus, I invite you to look deeper into The Story of America by experiencing Native American Literature, old and new.

http://www.melissazobel.com
 

Saturday, August 01, 2015

Three Tips for Writing a Mystery


This week’s guest blogger is Kate Jaimet who is the author of the YA mystery Endangered, coming out this month from Poisoned Pencil Press, and several other books for middle-grade and teen readers. Poisoned Pencil is the new young adult series for Poisoned Pen Press.

Visit Kate at her website at www.katejaimet.com.

Three tips for writing a mystery


Hey, buster. Wanna know a secret?

Yeah, yeah. Us author-types are always trying to blow smoke in your eyes, make you think that writing a novel is some deep creative mystery. Well, here’s the truth kiddo. It’s a craft. Like making a pair of shoes. Yeah, you gotta put in some time. You gotta learn some technique. And the more you practice, the better you get. But here’s the thing: it’s not like you gotta be born with a silver pen in your mouth, if you know what I mean. Any schmuck with a decent command of the English language and a helluva lotta perseverance can learn to write a mystery. And guess what? Because I like your face, I’m gonna give you a few tips.

Tip #1: Start with the dead body. You don’t got a mystery till you got a dead body. So start right there. In media res, as that Greek philosopher fella used to say. Throw some clues around the murder scene. Bring in your detective. Now you’re rolling.

Tip #2: Move the plot backwards and forwards. Think I’m getting all fancy on you now, huh? Soon I’ll be throwing around writerly words like “peripeteia” and “denouement.” Nah, all I’m saying is that lots of first time writers only concentrate on unraveling the murder that already happened at the beginning of the book (see Tip #1). Whodunnit? Why? How? Those questions are important alright, but unless you also have some forward motion to your plot, your book’s gonna end up boring. Think about what the suspects are doing while the detective tries to solve the case. Do they try to cover their tracks? Cast suspicion on each other? Get rid of eyewitnesses? These type of plot points (yeah, yeah, there I go tossing around writer jargon) can move your plot forward at the same time as the detective unravels the back-story.

Tip #3: Develop your detective. Who are the main characters of a murder mystery? The murderer and the dead guy, right? Only problem is, one’s dead and one’s trying to fly under the radar. That makes character development a little problematic. So who else have you, the writer, got to work with? A bunch of deadbeat suspects and, bingo! the detective. Readers love great detective characters. Think Sherlock Holmes. Perry Mason. Okay, even that blue-haired Marple lady. Spend time coming up with an interesting detective character. It’s worth your while, especially if you’re planning a series.

So there you have it. Three insider tips on how to write a mystery. Now here’s another one: glue your butt to a chair.

And good luck, kiddo.