wish I still had those shirts. People I'd just met would be staring at my chest for some time, a creeping feeling of unwell shadowing their faces, and they would ask, what's on your shirt. Being able to tell them was likely the highlight of any…

The hot flashes had been the penumbra of an advancing torment. The idea was floated many times that, if I wanted to, I could turn the ship around. I could simply chose to look away from the other worlds I was seeing. That a smart, young, white…

was excised like a human tumor from her life, we visited Bobbi-Jo at Dunkin Donuts, where she worked. She gave me a coffee and Pepper asked me to take Brick for a walk so they could spend ten minutes together. I took the coffee and the dog and…

A postindian is a person formerly referred to through the caricature of manifest manners as an Indian. The postindian is a presence. There is nothing to believe here. Postindian warriors can be honorable or dishonorable and anywhere in between…

The word manifest manners arose out of Vizenor's experience with educators at Park Rapids High School in northern Minnesota. It describes a curious kind of racialist way of approaching native people (students at first) with a deference toward…

Honor is about relation. It is about the creation of a more suitable world. It is the reification of values in conduct. Honor is not a title, it is a way of practicing being in relation with oneself and community. Honor is built by sharing stories…

The double other is a construct of the literature of dominance. Native persons are cast as characters, pronouns which describe opposite ends of savagism and salvation. Colonizers then seek to inhabit these imagined native others, and replace…

Narrative chance is the fourth of four postmodern conditons invigorating the critique and discourse of native and postindian lit. One of Vizenor's many dichotomies. Irony plays a major role in understanding how the colonizing mindset views civilization…

A presence is implied in an absence is implied in a presence. Beyond that circular comparison, Vizenor's absence and presence bear meaningful comparison to Silko's dichotomy between people who practice distinction and subtlety and those who minimize…

Manifest Manners is a book written through interpretation. It is a translation of reality into colonial English. Vizenor demonstrates trickster hermeneutics by employing definitions in multiple dimensions at once. To thoroughly diagram the web…

New Hampshire. New Hampshire and my family flat-out rejected them both. Of course, their being addicted to and eventually withdrawing from heroin didn't make explaining who they were easy. At my nephew's house, after I showed them his alcoholic…

flashes, which had matured into a neck breaking twitch. In the future an acupuncturist would label this chill on the left side of my neck, liver-wind which will feel on point for an alcoholic sobering up. So I had a hobby, stealing and re-installing…

A few years into the rift and I found myself walking on train tracks. I liked the peace. The only thing that ever came to interrupt my solitude was the train. I couldn't stay. I bounced back and forth between the end of the world, Cape Cod, and…

horrified credit union members gaped through the window still clutching their signed checks and between manicured or grease-stained nails. It was a strange time for credit unions. They didn't know if they still wanted to be credit unions or if…

classes and continuing to attend just frequently enough that the professors could feel like I was just there to personally insult them by not participating. And I had these headaches, and these hot flashes that were, mysterious. I really, like…

went through broke all that. To tell you that I cared when you left, that I've cared this whole eleven years that we haven't spoke, that would be a lie. It would be kinder to let the separation stand unbridged. To have my own silent moment of…

When I tried to get sober we moved in together again. Soon enough I was stealing weed from him and playing his XBOX in the basement all day instead of working. When he came home at night I wrote noise music upstairs. On my fourth birthday Mrs…

Before Mrs. Wilson's I had been to two other daycares. I remember the owner of one got kicked by a horse. She came in and showed us her thigh, a black bruise the size of a dinner plate. At another, a kind childcare worker gave me a Mickey and…

There was this television show called Nature. One episode showed a man raising a bear cub to a juvenile bear. When it came time to release the bear into the wild, the man set a weak bear trap, designed to hurt, but not critically injure. He called…

cleanse those holiday earworms right tf outta yer brain. guaranteed to make you forget everything currently on yer mind.