Joy Harjo is one of the most revered poets in the United States, but she took a winding path to get there. The former U.S. poet laureate spoke with Rachel Martin about a pivotal decision in her childhood that put her on the creative path and how she views writing as a way to have second chances. This spring, Harjo is releasing a new version of her book, For A Girl Becoming.To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcardLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Joy Harjo and what is her background?
Every poet has their themes, and I realize mine is transformation, what happens in those transformative spaces.
Joy Harjo is one of the most revered poets in the United States, and there are all kinds of reasons why that didn't have to happen. She actually studied pre-med in college. But as if to hedge her bets on that particular career choice, she began taking creative writing classes. And in the end, the arts won out. Stability be damned. Joy grew up in Oklahoma as part of the Muscogee Creek Nation.
But her stepfather forced Joy to suppress her creativity. She wasn't even allowed to sing in the house. That creative spirit could have died inside her. But when she was finally out on her own, she realized that making music and telling stories and writing poetry wasn't just something she wanted to do. It was something she had to do.
Since then, she's used her writing to capture the diverse experiences of Native people in this country. And in 2019, she was named the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate. And this spring, she's releasing a new version of her book, For a Girl Becoming. Joy Harjo, welcome to Wildcard. Hi. I'm glad I could be here. I'm so glad you could be here, too.
Thank you so much for being game to do this. It's intriguing, and so that interests me. All right. Let's go.
First round. Memories. One, two, or three. Oh, you're already feeling something for the middle. You're already feeling it. Okay. Where would you go when you needed to escape as a teenager?
As a kid, I would escape into the closet, as a little kid. And my drawings, they're probably still in that closet or outside. I would go out at times when everyone was asleep or the world was quiet. And I still like that. That's where I find things. That's where I find images and sounds and fresh ideas. That's how I discover, I guess you could say, a kind of peacefulness.
But also a kind of depth that isn't always present when you're in the realm of chatter.
Yeah. Is there something in particular that you felt that you needed to get away from when you were an adolescent? Or was it just adolescence?
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Chapter 2: What childhood experiences shaped Joy Harjo's creativity?
Yeah, I needed to get away from adolescence. I know I always feel for those kids when I've gone in and talked to them and vibed with them because, you know, I still understand that period, which is a time of, I think of adolescence as being like a chrysalis moment. Like here you've got the caterpillar and eating leaves and
experiencing the world as a caterpillar, and then they build this chrysalis. And the chrysalis is where they essentially liquefy and then reform. So it's a time of chaotic form of, you know, I was this, but I'm going to be something else. And I would imagine in that chrysalis period, the known parameters have fallen away to some extent, to some extent. And then the butterfly emerges.
And that's how I think of adolescence, is being in that chrysalis stage. But in that stage is a lot of innate power, any time of transformation, whether it's a transformation of a country, a transformation of a human being or of a butterfly, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. There's a lot of power, creative power in that. But I'm fixated on that closet for some reason.
What did the closet look like? I could go in and it had a door that shut, you know, with a door handle on it. So I could go in there and sit. I would sit on the wood floor because, you know, I didn't have a chair in there, of course. And I could sit in there and have peace. And you know that people aren't going to come looking for you like, you know, they might look for you elsewhere.
But, you know, we would, if my mother, and I know she wouldn't like me saying this because she's proud of me and what I've done. But if she saw us with books, she'd say, get up and do something.
Oh, interesting.
Yes, that we had to be doing something. Yeah, we needed to be doing something because there was always so much to be done in a household with all of those kids. So I understand that. But I wasn't in there to escape doing things because I contributed. I was there for my own peace of mind.
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Chapter 3: How did Joy Harjo’s adolescence influence her artistic journey?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, next three.
One, two, or three. One. One. What's a place that shaped you as much as any person did?
That's interesting. That's like it's related. It's like falls right in line with the first one. What place shaped me? You know the places that shaped me? Okay, a couple. There's places in the physical realm and places in the dreaming realm.
Tell me about both.
And the physical realm was going to the lake. Like my father, I loved the water. So we would go over to Fort Gibson Lake. My mom would cook fried chicken, mashed potatoes, all that really good stuff. But again, it was taking us out of the ordinary, in a way, taking us out of the ordinary world to the water, the place of water. I think of my father.
I think we all have predominant elements in our being. And my father, I've always felt, was more water and my mother was more fire. And I feel like I'm both. I'm very much both.
It makes sense to me what you said. It was taking you out of your regular life. Like regular life was busy. You had a bunch of siblings. There was a lot of household work to do. Just the work of being alive. And that was taking you out of that.
Yeah. So the other place is in my dreaming realm. And I've dreamed, even as a little kid, I would dream places that I didn't know the names. I would come back knowing names of places, and I still do that, that I didn't know. There was no way.
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Chapter 4: What role did the Institute of American Indian Arts play in Joy Harjo’s life?
Yeah.
You know, it still happens, and I don't really understand it, except that it's made me realize that we're in it deep, and there's so many layers to consciousness. Yeah. Thank you for that.
Okay, last one in this round. One, two, or three.
Oh, this is only, this is just the first round.
This is the first round, Joy. You got to hydrate.
I'm going to go in the middle again.
What was a moment in your life when you could have chosen a different path?
There have been some major crossroads. My mother took me, I was about 15 or 16, when she took me to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office and told them that I was going to go to Chilocco Indian School, which was a decent Indian school up near the border of Oklahoma and Kansas. And actually, my husband went there, and I would have met him earlier.
But as we were going out, this was a major crossroads. As we were going out the door, the agent said, we have a new school. It's out in Santa Fe called the Institute of American Indian Arts. And it was then mostly a high school, and it was for the arts. So I applied with art, with drawings, and got in. Wow.
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Chapter 5: How does Joy Harjo describe her book, For a Girl Becoming?
And I got there and they were terrified. And I was terrified for my mother. I felt like her guardian. So I felt a little guilty leaving. But at that point, by the time I left, she had kind of gone over to his side in a way, maybe to survive. I think to survive because I always knew that it was different because I always knew my parents loved me. And that makes a difference.
That makes a difference in your force field if you know that whatever happens, that they love you. So I knew there was that, and I had that to go on. But to deal with the other and to watch things go down, but I couldn't protect anybody. I already learned that. I couldn't protect them.
So sometimes I feel bad that I wasn't the magnanimous maternal, staying there like the mother hen, but it's not me.
What a wonderful thing that you found that school.
Chapter 6: What themes of transformation and healing are explored in Joy Harjo’s poetry?
Yeah, it was, it saved my life. I'm still part of it. I later taught there. But overall, it was, you know, amazing. The late 60s, Santa Fe, New Mexico and art and being able to do art and be who you are.
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Chapter 7: How does Joy Harjo use poetry to process trauma and regret?
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I want to push back from the game for a minute because I want to talk about the new version of your very, very beautiful book. It is called For a Girl Becoming. You published this originally in 2009, right? Yes. And how do you describe the story that's embedded in this book?
That book came out with my first granddaughter. Is that right? Yeah, my first grandchild, my first granddaughter, Krista. And For a Girl Becoming is kind of a children's book, but it goes beyond that. It's a book for coming of age. It's a book for—and I seem to land on that period a lot, and I think it's because I went through so much during that coming-of-age period.
Maybe I'm just working out trauma, but I want to be helpful. I think even in trauma, that's where you learn yourself. Really, it's a challenge. That's where you learn yourself and who you are and what you're made of. So when this granddaughter hit that age— I wrote for a girl becoming the poem in there for her.
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