The War Within

For One Book, One Philadelphia author Sherman Alexie, writing is remembering.

by Lee Stabert


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Published: Jan 12, 2011

Even over the phone, you can tell Sherman Alexie laughs with his whole body. The author, who chatted with City Paper from his office in Seattle, has a jovial nature that belies the wistful, occasionally heartbreaking nature of his writing. A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian (his preferred terminology) who grew up on a reservation in Washington state, Alexie has been chosen as the focus of 2011's One Book, One Philadelphia project, a citywide book club aimed at building community through reading. The Free Library has selected both War Dances, an exquisite collection of poetry and short stories, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a young adult novel and winner of a 2007 National Book Award.

City Paper: In an appearance on the Colbert Report, you explained that you don't allow your books to be available digitally because it hurts local book communities. This project is trying to foster one. How did you get involved with One Book, One Philadelphia?

Sherman Alexie: They approached me. I've done it in a few cities, but Philadelphia is by far the largest. And the thing that excited me — and that I think is ironic and fun — is that the city where the U.S. was founded is all reading a book by an Indian. It's a hilarious take on colonialism. Me and the Liberty Bell — both cracked.

CP: Your work deals a lot with storytelling, and storytellers. In War Dances, the protagonists tend to be musicians, filmmakers and writers.

SA: It never even occurred to me that they were all storytellers, in one form or another, that way. As you were asking the question, I thought maybe it was some sort of nostalgia, in this digital age. I think maybe I was subconsciously calling back old ways of telling stories amid all this rapid change. The last two years, I've just been lonely about the way things used to be. ... War Dances is really structured like my very first book, The Business of Fancydancing, so I guess you could say it was an exercise in pitiful nostalgia.

CP: By constantly reinforcing the idea of storytelling as an act, you call attention to the fact that it's not objective. In this collection, the idea arises again and again that something can be factually false but emotionally true.

SA: I'm a literary writer, but I'm also an entertainer. Much in the same way you look at a TV or watch a stage performance, [as a writer] you can drop in and out of awareness of the frame. Just now — when I missed our phone call — I was utterly unaware that I was anything but a poet. I was in the world of the poem. [Alexie was late for our interview because he was writing a poem on the death of those birds in Arkansas.]

CP: There are a lot of repeated, bedrock stories and ideas in your writing. Are some of those repeated narrative structures autobiographical? Is that why you keep coming back to them?

SA: I wrote a line in a poem this morning that read, "Why does that rhubarb patch keep coming back to me?" ... I never feel like I've gotten there — that I've written the thing I need to write about it, or that I've arrived at a place where I fully understand the thing. So, you can think of my repetitions as me constantly interrogating my memory.

CP: War Dances is so dynamic in terms of the narrative structure — there's poetry, short stories, odd, short prose thoughts and even lists.

SA: Well, it's funny — True Diary... was so dang successful. It just dropped off The New York Times list after being there for three years. And part of me, certainly, while I enjoy the mainstream success, resists it. I think I wrote War Dances, and constructed it, with the idea of pushing back. I was writing a book that not only called back to my first books, but called back to what I really am: a small-press alternative writer who got lucky. And, once again, it's also nostalgia. When we were working on it, the editor and I, we thought of it as a mix tape. There's even an "Ode to Mix Tapes" poem in there. So, the whole idea was to create a variety of selections that told an overall story.

CP : This book is also really funny. I read it on a plane and disturbed the person next to me. I think your writing continues to get funnier.

SA: Part of it is probably because I've really turned my public appearances into theater in a sense — monologues. I really do focus on the comedic aspects during my talks. I think it's just a tool I've been honing on stage for years that's found its way into the fiction more and more.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

2011 One Book, One Philadelphia runs Jan. 19-March 17. For details, visit freelibrary.org.