Has Literature Canceled Itself? Sherman Alexie on reading, writing, and book banning.

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2024

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you were in middle school or high school in the last couple of decades, there’s a good chance you were assigned Sherman’s classic young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an epistolary novel with cartoon illustrations about a native teenage boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend a nearly all-white high school. The book is semi-autobiographical. Sherman grew up on that reservation in the 1970s and 80s and is a member of the Spokane Tribe. He is also arguably — or perhaps inarguably — the most significant native American writer of the last 30 years. Not only did The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian win the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other prizes, but his 2009 book War Dances won the 2010 Pen/Faulkner award for fiction, and his 1993 story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was adapted into the popular and highly acclaimed film Smoke Signals.

Best of all (for me, anyway), Sherman is teaching a class for the brand-new Unspeakeasy School Of Thought. It’s in a brand new genre: Writing Your Cancelation Story.

In this conversation, Sherman talks about his career, his 2018 “cancelation event” (or at least its aftermath) and offers his thoughts on the state of writing and publishing, not least of all the recent incident wherein editors at the journal Guernica retracted an essay when the Twitter mob and its own staffers deemed it harmful, even “genocidal.”

GUEST BIO

Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and filmmaker. He’s published two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was listed by the American Library Association as the Most Banned and Challenged Book from 2010 to 2019. He’s won the PEN-Faulkner and PEN-Malamud awards, and he wrote and co-produced the award-winning film Smoke Signals, which was based on his short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

Visit Sherman’s Substack.

Check out his upcoming course here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Megan. Before we get to the episode, I want to tell you about the latest development
0:04.5	for my project, The Unspeak Easy. It's called the Unspeak Easy School of Thought. As you probably
0:10.8	know, the Unspeakies' flagship offerings are in-person retreats and an online community for women.
0:17.1	Those aren't going anywhere. But beginning in April, we will be offering courses for everyone, with an emphasis on intellectual curiosity, artistry over identity, humor, and of course, nuance.
0:30.1	We're kicking things off with three writing courses, a fiction workshop taught by novelist Chaley Widger, a screenwriting workshop taught by Hollywood veteran Sam Wolfson,
0:39.7	and are you ready for this? A workshop in something I just declared a new genre, writing your
0:46.0	cancellation story. That's right. After having a number of students show up in my own workshops,
0:52.6	wrestling with how to tell stories of social or professional
0:56.3	exile in the most effective way possible, I thought that there should be a whole class in this
1:03.2	subject. And now there is. Best of all, it is being taught by legendary author Sherman Alexi.
1:10.0	Sherman's classic novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a part-time Indian, has sold millions
1:14.7	of copies worldwide and is taught in thousands of classrooms every year.
1:18.9	He also knows a thing or two about being canceled.
1:21.8	This is an incredible opportunity to study with amazing teachers.
1:26.0	So if you're interested, go to the unspeakeasy.com,
1:29.5	pull down the school of thought menu, and find out how to apply. Classes begin the week of April 15th.
1:35.6	They take place on Zoom, and the application deadline is April 1st. We'd love to hear from you.
1:44.5	All these so-called progressive writers have become incredibly reactionary and group
1:49.6	thought. And now I'm wondering if maybe there's all these 13, 14, and 15-year-olds who are
1:55.9	going to become writers who utterly rebel against what's happening now. Will they rise up and take back the small press world and they take back publishing?
2:08.0	And they rebel against the MFA and they rebel against AWP and they rebel against all the literary
2:16.7	mafias out there. And, you know, maybe there is a
	...

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