Monday, 2:30 p.m.
Gordon Henry, a member of the White Earth ChippewaTribe in Minnesota, is a poet, novelist, and associate professor of English and American Studies at Michigan State University. His first novel was The Light People; he is at work on his second. His work has been variously anthologized. With George Cornell, he co-authored a middle-school text on the Ojibway. He believes story-telling is important because it has the power to change both the story-teller and the listener.
Things Henry read and said:
"After that I worked prayer into tobacco...."
"If you don't want me, then don't dance around me...."
"There was a time when there wasn't much fighting around here...."
"He's got theories about hotel cycles between the tourist season and not-season.... He's got a theory for the origin of everything except the origin of theories...."
"Together, given a deck of cards and a bottle of Fairbanks port, they can discern the truth...."
"Just tell him when he calls you love it when he calls...."
"AA twice a week, ay?"
"I'm trying to find you again. Could it be more complicated?"
"Your leaving remains the hand on the door of my arrival...."
"The day I understood how poor I was was the day I saw my grandmothers fighting...."
"It's not a good day to be an Indian, he said...."
"Some Indians cars only work in reverse, some only work in the morning, some only work to get you lost...."
"Careful when you drive it - the mirrors tell more than the view through the windshield...."
"... with some tears I'd been carrying for so long I forgot where I should have left them."
Someone wanted to put a poem of Henry's on a plaque in San Francisco; mistakenly, it was not a poem, but a part of a longer poem. "I did not say you've made a mistake...."
"You've left silence between yourself and the northern oriole singing...."
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