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As she writes in Claiming Breath, a genre-crossing book of short prose pieces with a flavor of poetry:

He left his heritage to follow this world & I remember the vacuum it made in him. Our heritage doesn't die—It leaves an open gash in need of stitches. Riding in the back seat of our '49 Ford, I watched his black hair—his hands on the wheel. I remember feeling the universe there with us—& at the same time, I remember the hole in our heads where our heritage had once been.

Glancy herself was born dark, like her father. Her mother's people were blond and blue-eyed. "I was a stranger in that group," she says. Her mother, Edith Wood Hall, eschewed the Native heritage of her husband, and her daughter's dark skin strained their relationship. Nor could her mother understand the young girl's mystical inclinations—hearing the voices of her Cherokee ancestors.

At school the young Glancy felt doubly disenfranchised. When she and her classmates studied the Indians they made teepees and feathered war bonnets. But, Indian though she was, she had never seen a war bonnet. And the Cherokee hadn't lived in teepees. They were farmers, not migratory like the Plains Indians. She was Indian in a white culture and a Cherokee in Plains Indian territory. "We were Indian, but not the kind that hunted buffalo."

Her first dynamic encounter with Christianity came as a young girl, when she visited a vbs program sponsored by a local Baptist church. The teacher showed the class a picture of Jesus holding a black sheep. The little Indian girl understood that picture meant that Jesus loved everybody, even the dark ones.

She graduated from high school in 1959 and entered the University of Missouri the following fall. She finished her undergraduate studies five years later, in 1964, the same year she got married in defiance of all the voices.

The next 19 years were a crucible of struggle. Her husband, an Irishman, succumbed to alcoholism and Glancy was left to raise her two children on her own. Her marriage was like "trying to drive a loaded 18-wheeler up a sandy incline," she writes in The Cold-and-Hunger Dance. "There was a voice saying, 'hold on, it will connect and go somewhere.'" The voices found release during those hard years. That was when she started writing.

The two novels she wrote during her marriage, The Only Piece of Furniture in the House and Fuller Man, were both rejected by publishers and filed away. (It would be 25 years before they would see the light of day.) Also during that time she completed a collection of short stories and finished her master's degree at Central Oklahoma University in 1983. Her marriage ended that year. "We were in Oklahoma when we divorced and I left him without any money. I had two children. I had nothing."

She had been working for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma, living hand-to-mouth, for several years when she met poet Gerald Stern at a writer's conference. He helped her get an Equal Opportunity Fellowship to attend the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, from which she received her MFA in 1988. That year Macalester College called her and asked her to join their faculty. She has been there ever since.

Voices, lost and recovered, give life to the three books closest to Glancy's heart: Flutie, Pushing the Bear, and The Closets of Heaven. Thirteen-year-old Flutie Moses, half-white, half-Indian, feels trapped in her provincial, dysfunctional, and seemingly interminable existence in rural Oklahoma. She can't speak to strangers or in public. Her older brother Franklin ends up in jail for stealing car parts (even from his father); her white mother vents her despair over a stifling marriage by putting the pedal to the metal on the back roads of Oklahoma (for which she also does jail time); and her father, a mechanic and a Cherokee, is like a ghost who has lost his story.

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