Contributors

CHAPTER EIGHT

Debra Magpie Earling

I stopped in the middle of the road and dust rose up and past me with the smell of long-ago Idaho. Mint. Sage. Milk of Owyhee River. Victor wouldn’t have led me this far without answers. At the very bottom of the weathered box was a brownedged piece of paper. Onion paper. The kind of paper Victor had used to write home. I’d mistaken it for lining. But I remembered something he’d told me when I was a child. Every object holds a story and every story holds hidden clues. Things are never what they seem. I peeled back the paper and it cracked beneath my prying. I lifted it to the sunlight and saw three bold words. Marion Two Bulls. I saw more but the words were inked in candlewax, withered, illusive. I pulled my lighter from the glove box, and candled the paper, careful not to light it. And there, beneath her name, these words appeared.

You will lose your faith in your own writing because you are a person of substance, and writing to express yourself alone is not in your nature, but this woman Marion went missing the summer you left home for university. No one spoke about her. Her voice has been silenced like so many Native women and people. She lived not far from the cabin and we’d hear her voice, and other voices, on cold winter nights. The poetry of those longago voices called to the voice within you. Those voices were nature driven, splintered in wood, and broken against our window panes, broken on our colony of houses surrounding their sacred land, blocking their ancient songs and stories. In spite of her loss across the years, and in spite of what we know and what we have lost, and all we have loved, let yourself always see the world in a spirit of inquiry, and let your writing bring you home, not to wallow, nor to feel piteous, instead, let all the things we have lost along the way, and your voice serve the voices of many. WRITE.

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CONTRIBUTORS

DR. NGUYEN PHAN QUE MAI is an award-winning author of eleven books in Vietnamese and English. Her writing in Vietnamese has received the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Capital’s Literature & Arts Award, and First Prize in the Poetry Competition celebrating 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her debut novel and irst book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an International Bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, Winner of the Blogger’s Book Prize 2021, and Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for “a work of exceptional quality” and for “contribution to peace and reconciliation”. Quế Mai is an editor of DVAN’s publishing series with Kaya Press and Texas Tech University Press. She has a PhD in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. She has just been named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring Vietnamese women of 2021. LAUREN WILKINSON’S debut novel, American Spy, was a Washington Post bestseller, an NAACP Image Award nominee, an Anthony award nominee, and an Edgar Award nominee. It was short-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble Book of the Month, a PBS book club pick, and was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Recommended Reading List. Lauren earned an MFA in iction and literary translation from Columbia University, and has taught writing at Columbia and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She splits her time between New York and Los Angeles where she works as a writer for television.

CRYSTAL BOSON writes short, dense poems that lay bare the complicated geographies of the United States and the lives of the Black, queer, and marginalized bodies that dwell within its boundaries. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow and was

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awarded the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in 2014. She has work published in Blueshift Journal, Pank, and Parcel, among other locations. Most recently her work, The Bitter Map, was selected as the winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest by Saeed Jones. She currently writes about and resides in the midwest.

MALIA COLLINS is a writer, editor, and teacher. Born and raised in Kailua on the Island of O’ahu, she served as editor of The Hawai’i Review and The Idaho Review, and was named Idaho’s Writer in Residence in 2019. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines, featured in a series of books about Hawai’i, and she is the author of a children’s book, Pele and Poli’ahu: A Tale of Fire and Ice. Collins currently lives in Idaho with her husband, Josh, and two children, Max and Mehana. CMARIE FUHRMAN is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of A LIterary, Artistic, and Natural History Guide to Cascadia (2022), and Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). She has published poetry and noniction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Whiteish Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, the translations editor for Broadsided Press, noniction editor for High Desert Journal, director of the Elk River Writers Workshop, and faculty at Western Colorado University’s MFA Program. She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho.

PATRICIA MARCANTONIO is author of the Victorian mystery series, Felicity Carrol and the Perilous Pursuit and Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace (Crooked Lane Books); Verdict in the Desert, published by Arte Público Press, the largest US publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by US Hispanic authors and ailiated with the University of Houston; and Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos (FSG) which earned an Anne 32