On Writing a Memoir in Essays About “Our America,” With Toni Jensen, Author of Carry

AUTHOR TONI JENSEN has published widely, including a short story collection From the Hilltop and a memoir-in-essays called Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, just out from Ballantine. She’s the recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Gary Wilson Short Fiction Award. She teaches in the programs in creative writing, and translation at the University of Arkansas, and in the low residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Listen in and read along as we discuss her work, writing a memoir in essays and this common ground she refers to as “our America.” 

Marion: Well, to start off, I want to ask you this, I know nothing about not being able to find myself in the literature, in which I was given in school and at home as a child. I grew up in the well-documented territory and time of John Cheever and John Updike. I’m middle-class, white, grew up in suburban America, and so I never had to go looking for myself. But, you tell the story of reading Louise Erdrich, and that in her stories was the first reference you ever read to being Metis. You are Metis. First, perhaps you can define that for people, and then speak a bit about that moment reading Erdrich, and what happens when you finally see yourself on the page?

Toni: Sure. Being Metis is an identity predominantly in Canada, but also in the Northern parts of the U.S. It’s a mixture of an indigenous tribe with French trappers and traders generally, and sometimes Irish or Scots Irish. And so in my case, Alberta, but in many other cases, the middle of the United States or the middle of Canada, so that’s what’s broadly considered Metis territory. And growing up in the States instead of growing up in Canada, in particular, I think had I grown up in Canada, there would have been a few models for sure, for looking and finding that word and myself. But what it meant to me to get the first reference of it, I mean, I was in my twenties, so I wasn’t a teenager even. It took until my twenties, I was done with undergraduate even before I saw that word in print, in a book other than a history book, in a work of literature.

And even in history books in the States, in rural Iowa where I grew up, you didn’t see the word Metis very commonly. So, it meant the world to see someone who’s such an astonishing writer, so artful, and lyrical and funny as Louise Erdrich is, to see that word coming in her stories and coming through her stories. And also how she wrote her stories, how they were not necessarily always chronological, and they had large intergenerational cast of characters from all sorts of backgrounds. Anishinaabe and German American, and there are beet farmers, and there are working class people, and I felt for the first time, I was seeing the way that I grew up represented on the page.

Marion: Oh, it must’ve been an extraordinary feeling. So, let’s just set this up a little bit for people, I write and I teach memoir, and perhaps the request I get most often from students is for some instruction on how to construct a book-length memoir structured from individual essays. So, let’s just begin there and remind people that, that’s what I said in the opener. Your new book, Carry is written in essays. Let’s talk about writing a memoir in essays. So, what came first here for you? A piece, an idea, a universal theme, the desire to write a book. Can you just take us back to how this book started for you?

Toni: I think it started for me with the first few essays that are in the book, except for chapter two. Chapter two, I was asked by my editor, Elana Seplow-Jolley, dig deeper, and go further back to childhood and situate us for chapter two. But the other ones, “Women in the Fracklands,” “The Invented Histories of Domestic Birds,” “Give and Go,” those came first. And then, the “Carry,” the title essay. And so, I had these essays, some that dealt with childhood, most that dealt with childhood moments and contemporary moments. In 2016, the shooting at Pulse nightclub and in such close proximity to what happened at Standing Rock, and then having the shooter, Omar Mateen at the Pulse nightclub shooting also be an employee, a former employee of G4S Security who brought the dogs to Standing Rock and sicked the dogs on unarmed people.

And so having that link be made for me at the same time that my nephew had a gun held to his head in suburban Colorado, the same time I had a gun held on me when I went to the Bakken, and to the Standing Rock protest. It didn’t happen at Standing Rock, that was a peaceful protest, but it happened off the reservation land. It happened in greater North Dakota. And so, having all of those things happen in close proximity, made it feel urgent to write everything down. It all started with a document. I would wake up… It’s in the book how I would wake up at 3:14 or 4:14 AM, and I would just write because everyone in my house was asleep, and I was trying to be quiet and I didn’t know what else to do with myself. And, I wasn’t fully alert enough to do work for teaching, and so I would just write down bits and pieces of experience and those little fragments became those first essays.

And then at some point, I realized it could be a book, that there were enough experiences throughout my life unfortunately, that I had a book length experience with gun violence, versus just a few essays. And, since four or five were done and they all were stylistically kind of a piece, or similar enough to be made of a piece, then it seemed like it would make sense to have the whole book crafted in a similar fashion, so the essays would become chapters. And then, we would work, once they were done to make sure they were in the right order to form some sort of arc.

Marion: And it does, it forms a beautiful arc. as I said, I’ve worked with memoirs and I define memoir is what you know after something you’ve been through, and this demands that there be an argument driving each essay, or each piece or some overarching argument. And, you seem to know a great many things, not the least of which is that our America has a gun violence problem that is directly driven by unfettered access to guns, that we have a sexual violence problem, and a problem with how our America tells and lives its original story, and much, much more.

So, as you were working these essays, and as you were seeing the connection between the Pulse club shooting in 2016, and the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protest also in the same year, talk about the confidence that it takes to say these are connected. Establishing that through line, establishing that argument for a whole book, you touched on it earlier, but sometimes it must get a little worrisome. You must say, “Is there really a connection here?” And, I think writers want to know how you push through when you see a connection that we don’t yet see, but that you want us to see. What’s the process of keeping that confidence up of that narrative drive?

Toni: That’s a really good question. For me, the confidence comes from the viewpoint that the country was founded on armed land theft, and once you see the world in that way, it’s hard not to see all the connections going back to the founding of the country, to the forcible taking of land from indigenous people, and from the forcible removal then of those people. And so, once you see that, then the other connections really seem small in a way, and seem manageable.

Marion: Yes.

Toni: So, it doesn’t seem like a leap to trace that. I do remember the moment that I saw Omar Mateen’s name next to G4S. And I thought, “Wait, wait, that’s Standing Rock, those are the people with the dogs,” and that was a big moment. I felt like this really is all very connected. The same one I saw on the news, the hospital where they were taking survivors, and then some people of course, who didn’t make it after the Pulse shooting.

And, a wing of that hospital was where I had, had been on my doctor’s visits with the doctor who’s in that city, beautiful essay, who I really, really liked. He was a very fun and interesting doctor, a good doctor. And so, then you can’t unsee that, once you see it. And so, I think it’s just a matter of how you view the world. If you’re looking for connections and possibilities, or if you’re closed down and insistent upon a rigid narrative, the one that we’re fed every day, the consumer narrative, the Republican versus Democrat narrative. I mean the more simple than narrative, the more we’re served it. And, I’m interested in narratives that show the overlap, that showed the connections.

Marion: Well, you do it perfectly. And, I think one of the ways you do this is you use this deeply provocative and yet simple phrase throughout the book, you refer to the country as, quote, “Our America.” And, I felt such community reading that phrase, such sisterhood, quite honestly. So, talk about coming up with that simple, but provocative phrase. To me, it seems to disallow any othering of you or anyone and establish a real earned authority. What was your intent with that phrase, “Our America?”

Toni: My intent was to have everyone be in this boat with me and with all readers of the book and all people affected by gun violence, which really is all of us. It’s still surprising to me the recent shooting, for example, the grocery store shooting in Boulder this past week, a very nice man was interviewed. And, he was saying basically that, “Boulder…” That what a lot of people say after a thing like that comes to their town, “That Boulder such a nice place, and now like the nice bubble has burst,” or something along those lines. And my heart broke for him. I mean, that’s where my sister and her family live is Boulder. And, Stephen Graham Jones, who was my professor, who’s a dear friend, and Ramona Ausubel, another writer who’s a dear friend, like I was texting everyone and making sure everyone was fine.

I understand how nice the community Boulder is, but it’s everywhere. And, that there are people in America who don’t know that yet, who feel like that boat is going down some other river. It’s shocking to me that they don’t understand that it’s one boat and we’re all in it. And, we all know someone who’s committed gun violence, and we all know someone who has been affected by gun violence. And, it’s just an irrefutable sort of thing. Or we will soon, if we don’t already, and that it’s terrible. But, it needs to be a collective conversation. It can’t be, “Oh, that’s the Democrats again talking about gun violence, or, oh, there are the Republicans over there obstructing gun legislation or supporting the NRA,” or whatever. I know plenty of Democrats who are NRA members, and I know plenty of Republicans who want what the Moms Demand Action folks call gun sense laws.

Like it isn’t really that simple when you bother to talk to people across a broad spectrum. So yeah, so that this, our America that repeats over and over in the book, I was very consciously trying to bring everyone into the boat with me. And, I was also trying to show that indigenous people were not often included and women are not often included, unless we willfully insert ourselves into the gun violence conversation. And yet, indigenous people per capita are more likely to be shot by police than any other demographic. And, we are hugely affected by domestic violence as well. And so, these are indigenous issues. These are women’s issues. And so, yeah, I was being very strategic and purposeful with how I use that phrase repeatedly. I didn’t want myself to be… I didn’t want to be put outside of the boat, that this is a boat for white men who legislate, and I didn’t want to put anyone else out of the boat either, the white men who legislate are in the boat too.

Marion: It’s a big boat. And in using that phrase, you also make the point of our collective chickening out when it comes to accepting how we tell the tale of whiteness and wealth. And in other hands that, it might sound other than accusatory, as you just said, except you always include yourself. And you say things like, quote, “I’m an American, perhaps after all complicit, and conflicted and worried.” And then you go on to say, “I am interested both in the naming of things and in the quantifying of them, I am interested in how contrary are natures, mine included. So, just a little bit more about the power of the first-person presence, clearly it keeps you in the boat. Was it hard to keep yourself in the story all the time, when sometimes you must feel like you’ve been so marginalized, as you just said? Indigenous peoples are not included in the conversation, women are not included in the conversation, but each time you kept yourself in the boat. And, I wanted to just have you reflect on that as a writer on that device, it makes such a difference to the reader.

Toni: I think it was easier to keep putting myself in the boat, because I had chosen to write this book, than it was to put people I love in the boat to tell the stories of family members or former students, people I’m close with, people I love, and that was harder to keep including them, but I didn’t want to make it seem like I was the only one narratively in this boat, to have the statistics be all very separate, and have the stories be all very personal is a way that I’ve seen gun violence stories told many times.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Toni: And, I wanted to include family and friends, and this broad network of people who I know personally all over the country, because I have the privilege of having lived all over the country and all these different kinds of places. And so, I felt like it was important to emphasize that their stories were included, that this is a broad spectrum of people, a broad cross section of the country. It’s everywhere, its urban areas, its rural areas, it’s the North, it’s the South, it’s the Intermountain West, it’s the Coast, it’s everywhere. And so, by including their stories, I was able to demonstrate that, but that comes at a cost too. Then you’re sharing the terrible stories of people you care for. And, that’s harder for me than putting myself in the boat.

Marion: Yeah. And, getting back to that phrase that I quoted a minute ago, complicit, conflicted and worried. I know that many writers might stop and not write if they knew themselves to be any one of those three things. I think many people think that we’re supposed to have all the answers to life’s big and small questions before we type the first word of what we’re going to say. But, you write from conflicted, and complicit and worried. How did you give yourself permission to do so?

Toni: I didn’t want to write a book where I was presenting myself as a victim, or a hero, or the person with all the answers, because I’m not really any of those things. And so, what do I have to offer then? I asked myself that continuously, what do I have to offer here? I have my attention to language, I have my research, I have my stories. And I have my willingness to admit, this is a problem that we all have to solve together. It’s not a problem for which I have any biggest downing answers, I did all this research. And, the main takeaway that I came back with was that unfettered access to guns, the more guns, the more gun violence, which is a thing, literally anyone who studies gun violence already knows, but it’s still not a thing we talk very much about. So, I felt like I had to put myself and all the complexity of myself, and I do have questions still.

I grew up in a house with guns. I grew up in a community where everyone owns guns, pretty much. And, I grew up with a mother who really didn’t like having those guns in the house. And so, I grew up in a conflicted place eating birds, let’s say, that were shocked by those guns. And, my dad had a gun collection back then, his old guns, historic guns. And, some of them are really beautiful, to not acknowledge that, to act as if that isn’t so. I don’t think it serves the narrative, I don’t think it will reach as many people if I’m not showing that I’m a part of gun culture, that we’re all a part of gun culture, whether we want to think we are or not.

Marion: And, you do it expertly with the language, you have a device in your memoir, in these essays where you have a good hard look at a series of words, their etymology and how we use them. I’m not sure which of the… Well, I think I am sure which of these is my favorite and it’s the word chicken. And, I love what you do here. You reveal the simplest and most complicated of twists. That word chicken in your essay, and how you had no idea the word could be verbed, chickened and chickening to lose one’s nerve. And then, you turned to us and pretty much speak directly about all of us chickening out when it comes to guns. It’s pretty great. So, let’s talk about this device and how you chose to go there. The story about chicken and chickening sounds like you just had this aha moment, but you take it throughout the book. So give us the, well, hello, sorry, chicken and the egg of the chickening story. The chickening word use.

Toni: Yeah. That piece, because it’s about something that happened here, where I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Carla Tyson, who’s one of the Tyson chicken heiresses, it just seemed like that would be one of the Webster’s words. So the later essay is, I had the real true pleasure when I would come into it of being more strategic and thinking a little more deeply, the words bubbled up more organically, which Webster’s words I chose in the earlier essays. But then later, I was always thinking, “Where would I go?” And, chicken seemed like an obvious way and maybe too obvious.

But then, when I saw all of the additional definitions, I thought, “Oh no, no, it’s good.” Because as you say, chickening out, we’re all chickening out collectively from really making meaningful gun legislation change, for example. And we just continue on, we have the same conversation this week after the shootings in Atlanta and after the shooting in Boulder. And oh, whoops, people are going to do something, things are going to change and then they don’t. And so, we’re still chickening out this week after two mass shootings. And so, it just seemed like it really fit, given that she is sometimes called the chicken princess.

Marion: Yes. So with all the hardcore reporting, the etymology, the candor and the first person work in this book, I think with all of that, and it’s very the such a strong series of essays, but I think the most impact to the reader comes in your subtlety. Here’s my favorite example, when you report how you stopped growing for a few years, and then at 22, you shot up. A doctor questioned that it’s not what we normally do of course. You write, quote, “At 22, I’d been out of my parents’ home for almost four years, it took my body for years to be sure it wouldn’t have to go back.”

Whew, witnessing such language on our screens at the end of our pens or at our fingertips, we might have a variety of reactions after we write such a sentence or two. What was yours when you saw it took my body for years to be sure it wouldn’t have to go back?

Toni: That was a line that I felt like I got just right and I didn’t… Many of the lines and sentences, I started as a poet, so I still think of them as lines. Many of the lines took a long time for me to be happy with them, but that one came out pretty easily and well. And I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly how it felt.” It’s the body, and so could there possibly have been other factors? Sure. And, I debated, including other possibilities, but in the end, no one can say for sure, but that was the doctor’s best guess and that is my best guess. So even though I was worried a little bit about how that might impact readers, my mom in particular, I still felt like it’s important to put that out there. This book is written in part for girls like I was, growing up in houses like I grew up in, feeling not particularly safe all of the time, not particularly valued.

And then, in some other ways being tremendously safe and valued. And so, that kind of experience isn’t written about, it’s usually all negative or it’s all positive. And, I feel like exploring the possibilities of that. And, what time away from that kind of an experience or that kind of a household, what it can do, not just for our brain or our heart, which is pretty well-documented, but for a physical body. I just I think that’s underexplored territory and that it’s interesting.

Marion: Well, it’s fascinating, as is the response I had intellectually to reading, as you remind us that despite being native, in this hour, America, we are all of us visitors. You say we are all of us invaders, though some more than others. And, I wondered about the very story of America. I started to think about the original tail or the tail that we were told in school and, or our America is the way you look at it, either way you tell it. And as you did that, you brought me along to reconsider and wonder, are we ever going to be able to course correct our telling of this tale? And, I genuinely believe this book is part of that process or intended to be part of that process. Was that a feeling you had when you sat down to write, like maybe I can help get this right, this story of our America,

Toni: I felt like it was important to shift the conversation for sure.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Toni: Whether or not, I think it will have that sort of an effect, I really try not to think about that because then I’m imagining specific readers or people who have the power to make that sort of change, and I don’t often envision them as my readers. And so then, I’m in this quagmire where it’s all readers, readers versus words, words. And so, I actively don’t think along those lines when I’m writing, but yes, of course, I would love that for the book to be part of the conversation, and that helps shift the way we view land, and possession, and commerce, and guns and how all that’s wrapped up together and has been since always in this country, since the very conception of the country. Religion too, we would have to throw religion in, I suppose. I don’t do that as often in the book, but it’s part of the foundation of the country too, of course, and so it should be part of the conversation.

Marion: Absolutely, it should. And, one of the more difficult things to do as a memoirist is to write in real-time, reporting as you go and writing about it. And as you talked about before, when you saw the connection between the Pulse shooting in Orlando and the Standing Rock Pipeline protests, it was right in the moment. And, most of this book feels like it’s got immediacy and responses. So, we’ve got this intent to be part of a conversation, but you’ve also got the sense of immediacy. So, what does the immediacy allow for in that reflection? Say when writing short stories or writing short essays, what does immediacy do is what I’m trying to ask for the story? It seems really percolated for me. But for you, did you find that there was a benefit to immediacy that for instance, writing short stories doesn’t have, or poetry doesn’t have if you’re not responding to something that just happened? Is immediacy a good thing, do you think in essay writing?

Toni: I think it can be. I was really glad that some of the essays are mostly about past things, so that not all of them had that sense of immediacy. It started to feel a little haunting when I was writing contagion, for example, the second to last chapter, and I’m writing about contagion theory. And, I’m beginning to feel like I’m part of a sort of contagion almost at that point, where I write about gun violence and seriously, then another person from my life calls and says, “I was in lockdown, there was an active shooter on our campus, or I went to work today and we were in lockdown because up on the third floor, this was happening.” And so, I write about having a loose connection to someone in the Virginia Beach workplace shooting who knew the shooter, because it was a workplace shooting.

And so then, I have that connection with the shooter. If I’m going to call the connection, the loose connection to someone in the workplace, then obviously then I have the connection to the shooter. And so, it started to feel a little close when I was literally one night working on the contagion theory essay, and someone took their gun here in Fayetteville and shot a police officer. And the thought was that, that person was on the way to the square for our Christmas lighting of the light ceremony. And, there were lots of people, lots and lots of people there and including my daughter, and that felt really very close, really, very immediate, like too close, too immediate.

For the most part, writing about things in close proximity to having them happen, worked fine. But, that one… Also, I was on book deadline for that one too. It was one of the last essays completed, that felt really, really too close, too timely. So, there were times where I was uncomfortable, but I do think it gives an energy also. I was looking for a narrative three-line for that piece, and boy, then I had one. And so, narratively, yes, it’s good for the piece, but personally or emotionally, it can sometimes be very, very hard.

Marion: Yes. There’s an awful lot of cortisol invited into the body when we try to write like that. And, it seems to really benefit the pieces. And yet, you have this ability, and as we wrap this up, I want to ask you about this essay entitled Pass, where you seem to be coming to terms, literally to terms with, as you say in the last line of this piece, “How your own passing is a complicated crossing.” Can you speak a little bit as we wrap this up about the process of self discovery as you write these?

Toni: Sure, absolutely. In Pass in particular, that experience that happened with my student here who had allegations thrown her way, racist, sexist, all sorts of problems with teaching in the classroom, and having undergraduates see her only as a woman of color and not as someone who could educate them. That’s an experience that I haven’t had to the degree that she has. And, it’s because I’m white-passing. And, I feel like indigenous writers, a lot of times we skim over that. There are some writers, good exceptions, but for the most part, it’s an uncomfortable topic because we’re not a racial identity. Being Metis is not a racial identity, it’s a tribal identity. It’s an identity that’s cultural. And so, indigenous people look a wide variety of ways and that’s important. And so, I think part of why we don’t talk enough about being white-passing, then in our writing, a good many of us is because we want to make it clear that we’re affiliated with, or a part of, or of the descent from some sort of tribe and that’s good, that’s progress.

Not relying on the phenotype, of course is progress. But also, if you live in America and you’re ignoring the privilege that you walk around with because you’re white-passing, the opportunities it affords you, how comfortable white people are around you, versus how uncomfortable they would be if you look like maybe your father, for example, or your grandmother, whoever it is in your family, who they would more readily identify as indigenous, then you’re not doing yourself or your community or your writing any good service, you’re doing it a disservice, that’s my feeling. We have to have these complex conversations, because otherwise we’re letting ourselves off the hook and we’re patting ourselves on the back for progress that really isn’t happening. It’s important to acknowledge the disparity there and to try to find a way forward and make spaces where the disparity is less and less until it doesn’t exist.

Marion: Well, I can’t thank you enough for contributing to this conversation. I found the book to be a perfect example of exactly what everybody should be reading right now. So, congratulations on a terrific collection. And so far, a wonderful series of writings. Thank you, Toni. Thank you so much for coming along today.

Toni: Thank you.

Marion: The writer is Toni Jensen. You can see more of her at toni jensen dot com. The new book is called Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, just out from Ballantine. You’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me. And, thanks for listening.

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