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Claiming Breath (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1992).

The Closets of Heaven (Chax Press, 1999).

The Cold-and-Hunger Dance (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998).

Flutie (Moyer Bell, 1998).

Fuller Man (Moyer Bell, 1999).

The Only Piece of Furniture in the House (Moyer Bell, 1996).

Pushing the Bear (Harcourt, 1996).

The West Pole (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997).

She would say that you start with nothing. Then you poke a hole in it and step inside. Then it becomes something. That is where you begin.

In high school she stood in front of a class and refused to speak. It wasn't because she didn't have anything to say. Voices inside her were clamoring to get out. But that classroom was not the place. The teacher threatened to fail her.

She is Diane Glancy, novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, the daughter of a Cherokee father and a mother whose ancestors were German. She grew up in the white world, but could not assuage the voices of her Native American heritage. At the same time she heard the voice of her stern, goal-oriented German heritage, mainly expressed through her mother. Later there would be the voice of the academician and her Christian voice.

"I can tell several stories at once," she writes in The Cold-and-Hunger Dance. "Mixed-blood stories of academic life and the experience of Christianity. Nothing fitting with anything else. The word community has always meant being left out." Being a woman didn't help.

She eventually found the one voice that held the others together. Or the voice found her. It came through her writing. The result has been a body of work that defies literary conventions. Critics and marketers prefer writers who are easily categorized. This one is a Novelist, that one a Poet. Glancy not only writes in every familiar genre, she also crosses genres—mixing prose and poetry in the same book, for instance. She's Native American—but unlike many high-profile Native writers, she's also strongly Christian.

If she is hard to categorize, she has nevertheless found readers. Her work has earned her, among other prizes, an American Book Award, a Pushcart Award, and a North American Indian Prose Award. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has likewise built an academic career; as an associate professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, she teaches creative writing and Native American literature. She is poet laureate of the Five Civilized Tribes. She attends a Bible-believing born-again spirit-filled fundamentalist church.

"The Native believes that the voice is spiritual," she told me when we met in her office last fall. "What you speak actually makes things happen. You tell a story and you empower somebody with knowledge," she says, which might explain in part why she refused to speak that day in her high school classroom. "I had a voice. It carried the pain of my grandmother and father's side, the Cherokee side, the Trail of Tears, the heaviness, the grief, the loss, the disrespect. It was a burden that was there in the voice."

But that was only part of the reason for her self-imposed silence. She also felt the force of her mother's "determined with-it voice," as she calls it. "What are these words I dislike so much? Organization. Goals. Determination. Getting things done. I had two voices and they clashed. I had that storm within me and I was not willing to expose it before everyone. I refused to speak. It was a power I had."

Glancy's father, Lewis Hall, left his Cherokee heritage to assume the life of the white man. He grew up in Arkansas with his mother and sister. During the Depression, he moved to Kansas City to look for work and ended up in the stockyards, where he did well and moved up. Glancy remembers some of the first words he spoke to her: "We're going to live in this world. It's not a bad world."

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