Author spotlight: 2024 National Book Award Finalist Deborah Jackson Taffa

Interviewed by Moriah Hampton, PhD, an instructor in the University at Albany's Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI)

Deborah Taffa’s debut, Whiskey Tender, a 2024 National Book Award Finalist, has been named to best lists at Esquire, Oprah Daily, ELLE, and The Washington Post. With awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, and the NY Summer Writers Institute, Deborah received her MFA in Iowa City. A citizen of the Kwatsaan Nation and Laguna Pueblo, she is the director of the MFA CW program at the IAIA in Santa Fe, NM. 

Praise has followed the publication of Whiskey Tender in February of 2024. Has this response surprised you at all?

I would say yes and no. I can’t bear to watch the pot to see if the water is boiling. As a result, I was taken off guard by the National Book Award announcements. A friend texted the longlist news. Ten days later, I was sending an email to students when an editor at Publishers Weekly wrote to congratulate me on being a finalist.

I worked very hard on this book, but I think of it like a child who has headed out the door. You love and support them, but you can’t obsess over how they are doing. You must be confident that you didn’t let them go before they were ready, that you spent enough time with them, and gave enough love to their upbringing. The book is well written. It has unique content.

Yet even knowing how much work I put into it, there are many good books that never get read. You need luck in publishing, and I am grateful that there is a small star hanging over Whiskey Tender. More importantly, the response to the book gives me faith in this country. It gives me hope that Americans are finally ready to see our history clearly.

The memoir narrates your life story in the context of broader historical events, such as the Indian Relocation Act and the Red Power Movement. What role does creative non-fiction, or your memoir specifically, have for understanding historical events?

It was impossible to write an account of my family’s migration from the reservation to small town America without using a historic setting and context. As modern Native people, our lives have been consistently shaped by governmental policies.

To share our personal struggles, I had to recount little-known histories — the nuclear colonization of New Mexico, the Major Crimes Act, Public Law 959, Indian boarding schools, and other termination policies — or the story would have been incomplete. And there was another reason: it felt unethical to write about the suffering of my elders without also shining a light on the way they were treated by the U.S. government.

I was going to expose our lives to scrutiny, it had to be worth it. By including political histories, the book became more than a me-me memoir.; it’s an indictment of American greed. I believe that a good memoir tells us what happened, while a great memoir tells us what happened, as well as how the narrator was shaped by external societal pressures.

I wanted Whiskey Tender to tell a story with scope, to provide a more complete picture of Indigenous contributions. Researching it and writing it felt like putting on glasses to see my inheritance more clearly. I labored over the transitions from history to personal story and back, trying to make it seamless, engaging, and educational. I wanted to make a cupcake out of tofu — an entertaining story with “good for the democracy” content.

The memoir explores various themes, including the costs of “climbing through the ranks” in the US and the need for resistance for an Indigenous person like yourself (193). Why did you want to explore this theme?  

Because forced assimilation via governmental policies left me in an intellectual quandary. Not surprisingly,  historic ethnocide resulted in rebellious attitudes amongst my uncles and elders. These attitudes played out as drinking and criminality in some cases, and depression in others. It was common for Native people in my generation to disidentify with academia and/or the goal of a professional career.

Tribes are communal. We value socialism, yet we live in a competitive and capitalistic world. The tension between assimilation and resistance felt both ubiquitous and confusing as a teen.

I couldn’t stop asking, what types of rebellion mattered? What did it mean to earn money in an ethical way? When was rebellion self-harming, too reactionary? If I was reacting to oppression, was I really free of the oppressor’s shaping? By the time I was in high school, I could see that Native people sometimes get trapped in response mode, rebelling or submitting due to fear.

I wanted to live an authentic life, to build my experiences around what I wanted to do, rather than on what society told me I had to do. I guess I don’t see the book as prescriptive about the need for resistance. Rather, I hope it contains a message about our right to individual choices. If the pressure to preserve tradition sits in opposition with “being a player in the game,” and our communal values seem to exist in opposition to the American Dream, then each tribal citizen has the right to decide how they want to balance their own assimilation and resistance.

We shouldn’t judge each other. We should support each other, knowing each of us is trying to find a way to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

The memoir mostly follows chronological order based on recollection. Did you consult personal journals, family picture albums, or memorabilia as part of your writing process? Did you interview family members along the way? How did you get into the mindset to write the memoir and develop scenes to be true to life?

Yes, yes, and yes. The book began with unorganized scribbling and research. I used the microfiche reader at the Arizona Historical Society to find articles about my tribe, great-grandparents, and other elders. There were no personal journals, but I dug through picture albums at family reunions. We were living on the reservation when I started the book, and I knew I was about to lose all my grandfathers’ sisters, so I interviewed all of them. Years later, I interviewed my parents in the radio lab at the University of Iowa. It wasn’t a struggle to get into the mindset. I wrote from internal pressure. It was a necessary process of discovery, imperative for my survival. 

The linear chronology was a tough decision. It wasn’t natural for me. But I loved David Foster Wallace’s seminal essay, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. I was taken by his argument that postmodern strategies—nonlinear structures, moral relativism, irony, and cynicism—had been co-opted by marketing executives. I liked his call for a new sincerity, for writers who “backed away from ironic watching, [and had] the childish gall to actually endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.” This is how I moved from wanting everything to be dense, tricky, and complicated to simplifying my language. By the final editing phase, I was obsessed with “windexing” the thematic content and scenes to communicate more clearly.

As the director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, you are a professor as well as a writer. Are there ways that you approach the teaching of creative writing at that institution that might differ from non-Indigenous approaches at other institutions in the US?

We don’t always use the gag rule in workshop; I don’t like it when the writer being workshopped can’t speak, although I also recognize the need to take notes when they start to say “but.” The refutations made in the face of constructive criticism are often exactly what the story, poem, or essay needs.

Another difference, we encourage our students to co-create and personalize their syllabus each semester. I believe their mentorship should be tailored to their own needs. This means they decide on a reading list with the help of their mentors. Other than that, I’ve tried to build a culture of mutual support. When I first took the job as director of the MFA CW program, I remembered how difficult my own MFA experience was in Iowa City. It was a highly competitive and sometimes petty environment. Instead, at the IAIA, it’s imperative that we be community oriented.

If we want to change the literary landscape and diversify the publishing industry, we must encourage each other. We’ve dealt with enough prejudice and misunderstanding in the world at large. Our space must feel like one that is safe to express and nurture dreams. I know this can sound very kumbaya. But it’s been relatively easy to create this culture because we all have the same aim. We are trying to change the literary landscape; to flood the field with the diversity of Native Nations and Indigenous peoples for our children and grandchildren. Plus, I have personally found that the success of one person in our community lessens the weight and burden of representation. If I help the Indigenous Toni Morrison launch her career, I get to share in that success.

By caring for my community, it’s easy to quiet any nascent jealousies I might feel. It’s hard to create art in isolation. It’s important to be a good literary citizen. I have a friend who is a non-Native art museum curator in St. Louis. He told me that art movements (dadaism, futurism, the situationists) are no more. Gallery spaces have been replaced with exhibits set up by decade rather than by idea or style. I thought this was sad. And then he said he saw the IAIA as an exception.  In his mind, the large body of work—paintings, sculpture, writing, installation work—emerging from the IAIA in Santa Fe is an art movement.  

What kind of writing by Indigenous authors would you like to see published more often? Do you have any advice for non-Indigenous editors reviewing the work of Indigenous authors today?

More diversity is needed. I’m the first published author from one of my two tribes: the Kwatsaan/Yuma Nation. Our people finally have a story, and it was an honor and a grand responsibility to write it. But there are other Indigenous Nations still waiting for their story to be told! It’s important for Americans to know how diverse we are as Indigenous people.

It’s important for us to gain sovereignty in our stories, from romance novels to historic accounts and middle-class narratives. We still have a great deal to write. There are many regions still to cover, and lots of new things to say. For the non-Indigenous editors trying to do right by our communities: ask questions, be curious, come to our work with an open mind and culture humility.

Remember that there is something to learn from Indigenous people. Avoid making assumptions and know that there are many types of intelligence in the world. The publishing world has been lopsided. It values grammar over street smarts, urban savvy over earth wisdom. But there is much to be learned from both worlds.  

Deborah Jackson Taffa can be found on various social media sites as @deborahtaffa. 

https://deborahtaffa.com/

More about Moriah Hampton:

Moriah Hampton, an instructor in the University at Albany's Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI), holds a PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo.

Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in The Coachella Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Ponder Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the southeast, she is of Scottish and English descent and a Cherokee Nation citizen. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, inspired by contemporary fabulist fictions.