Rilla Askew

My maternal and paternal great-great-grandparents migrated from Mississippi and Kentucky into Indian Territory in the late 1800's; they settled in the valleys of the Choctaw Nation two decades before Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state. I was born there, in the Sans Bois mountains, and though I didn't grow up there, it's the place to which I perpetually return, in my life and in my fiction. It's a harsh, beautiful landscape, gorgeous to look at, filled with living things that can hurt you: rattlesnakes and copperheads, stinging scorpions, ticks, chiggers, cottonmouths, snapping turtles, briars and brambles and thorn trees. The harshness of the mountains has shaped the people I come from, given voice and form - a kind of simultaneous ruthlessness and cry for mercy - to my work. Their language is rich in idiom, steeped in Southern cadence and the King James version of the Bible. They're storytellers. From this land and these people my work takes its biblical themes.

I grew up in the little city of Bartlesville at the edge of the tallgrass prairie country in northeastern Oklahoma, where the earth is dominated by sky and wind: a gentler landscape than the mountains we moved from when I was three. An oil company town, Bartlesville had, in the years I lived there, good schools, clean streets, one of the highest per capita incomes in the nation, and a kind of secret race-and-class-determined poverty in certain sections of the city that seemed to me harder than the rural poverty of southeastern Oklahoma. In Bartlesville I received my education in the magic of books, the borders of race, the forces of money, oil, societal opinion. Growing up in a company town accounts for the timbre of social conscience in my work, my interest in exploring the American story of class and race.

In my twenties I lived on the banks of the Illinois River near Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. Tahlequah is in the Cookson Hills of eastern Oklahoma, a woody, vine-clotted, tick-ridden land of clear waters and flinty hills, thick with blackgum, dogwood, redbud: beautiful, mysterious, spirit-filled. As a child I'd always been told we were part Cherokee on my father's side, part Choctaw on my mother's (or "Black Dutch" as some preferred to call it) - bloodlines never traced, so far as I know - but it was my years in Tahlequah that gave me my first deep connection to Indian people, a force and source integrated throughout my fiction.

Though my work is set in Oklahoma, I'm not a regional writer. America is my subject, Oklahoma the canvas. As a novelist, what I'm interested in is demythologizing, deromanticizing America's master narrative, the halftruth comfort stories we tell ourselves. Oklahoma's brief, violent history is a microcosm of all that's taken place on the North American continent for the past five hundred years - turned inside out, foreshortened, intensified. From the tragedy of the Trail of Tears to the frenzy of the white land runs, from the hope in the all-black towns that sprang up in Oklahoma when it was still the free "Injun Territory" toward which Huck Finn sets out at the end of his adventures to the ultimate devastation of the Tulsa race riot in 1921, the drama of the three races has dominated Oklahoma's story - as it has dominated America's story.

In some ways I see myself not as a teller of tales but a re-teller, a balladeer, telling again the story of how we came to be here and what we've wrought. When I began to find my way into a novel about the Tulsa riot, I kept going farther back in our history. I wanted to understand how the racial attitudes that led to such a conflagration could have been carried into the state. I returned to old stories handed down in my family, how two brothers named Askew loaded up their families in wagons and left Kentucky in the middle of the night, headed for Indian Territory. In re-imagining my own family's story, I drew closer not only to painful attitudes about race but to the very sources of violence within us, to questions of guilt and repentance, which I continue to wrestle with in my work.

My new novel, Harpsong, is set during the Great Depression, another mythic era in Oklahoma's past. It's a story that also has its seeds in historical event, although not among the famous Dust Bowl refugees who took the Mother Road to California. It's about what happened in Oklahoma among the ones who stayed home.