Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton curate this collection of lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island, including Billy-Ray Belcourt, Stephen Graham Jones, Terese Marie Mailhot, Deborah Miranda, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Organized into basket-weaving themes such as “coiling” and “plaiting,” the essays challenge form and offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that affect the study and practice of Native literary traditions in North America. “For Native writers, who have long operated within a literary sphere in which most depictions of Native lives are created by non-Natives, nonfiction allows for a revision of the dominant cultural narratives that romanticize Native lives and immobilize Native emotional responses: the essay is the work of feeling and thinking,” write the editors in the introduction. “It is the flux of a character, not a frozen image of one.”