Here’s a pretty nifty review in the Boulder Daily Camera

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/may/30/broken-arapaho/

AND

if you want to hear a streaming interview with me on KCFR’s Colorado Matters, click here.

AND

if you want to hear me read in person, come to the Boulder Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. on Monday (tomorrow) evening.

THERE IS ONE CORRECTION I WANT TO MAKE, SINCE IT HAS BEEN REPORTED TWICE NOW THAT I DON’T BELIEVE THAT STAN CAN CURE CANCER. THAT’S NOT THE WHOLE STORY. I KNOW SOME NORTHERN ARAPAHO PEOPLE ON THE RESERVATION WHO CREDIT HIM WITH HAVING CURED THEIR CANCER. I BELIEVE THEM. AND I HAVE A WHITE FRIEND WHO WENT TO THE RESERVATION FOR HEALING, AND SHE’S STILL GOT HER CANCER. THE DETAILS ARE HERE IN A Q&A I DID WITH CAROLINE LEAVITTVILLE FOR HER BLOG EARLY IN MAY:

I have to ask: while in a sweat lodge, you witnessed a cancer coming out of a woman’s body. How is that woman now?

This woman, a good friend of mine who happens to be white, was suffering from a particularly virulent strain of breast cancer that had spread to her bones. She was near the end of the year the white medical doctors had predicted she had left to live and arrived on the reservation gulping Oxycodone (a powerful narcotic pain reliever). After the sweat lodge I refer to in the book, Stanford said we’d gotten the cancer out, but if she continued with chemotherapy, she would die. She felt better than ever after the sweat (sweats, actually — she, me, and about a dozen friends made two trips to Stanford’s in which she did four sweat lodges each and a third trip where we did one sweat before we were stopped by torrential rains), and then went home to Kansas. Cultural conditioning being the unstoppable thing it is, she went back on chemo. Awhile later tumors were found in her brain. She is still on chemotherapy. Her sight is starting to go. But she has lived two years past her predicted survival date and is still dancing at parties and being generally delightful. And she’s not on Oxycodone — she makes do with a couple of Aleves a week. And her doctors think she’s a marvel.

What happens in Stanford’s sweat lodge is unknowable to me, but I do think the attitude of the person there for healing is very important. It’s not a magic wand he can wave over just anyone and BAM, heal them. But it’s a healing method friends of mine on the reservation take very seriously, and it works for them. I know that for me the sweat lodge is a hugely mentally healing process.

For my whole interview with Caroline, click here.

THANKS TO SARAH KARIKO (www.sarahkariko.com) for letting me use the above gorgeous photo of Stanford in the corral, with Pinta

I had a really enjoyable interview with PJ Nutting of the Boulder Weekly on Sunday, and it hit the stands yesterday. If you want to read the whole very nice thing, you can find it here:
http://www.boulderweekly.com/20090528/artsculture.html

But the part that made me happiest to read was this, because I’ve never written this:

“Really embedded in (the economic and physical difficulties of life on the reservation) is a spirit of surrender, and we don’t have it. I always thought I did. I thought I was easy-going and nice, but up there I realized what an absolute control freak I am. I was constantly knocked off balance. They live in an unpredictable world…(they) can’t just throw money at a problem and make it go away. They didn’t have a sense of entitlement to a certain outcome. They just have to go with the flow in a really constant way, and it makes you develop some faith. The car broke, the dog died, there’s no dinner — it didn’t take much for me to go into a total tailspin. I’m so used to having my needs met like that.

But here’s a man who’s a quadriplegic and who just keeps giving. His health is always in flux, and violence always happens or is about to happen. But he’s so surrendered to his own fate, and in that surrender, he gives every calorie of energy toward helping people in a place where so much help is needed. The man is amazing. I don’t want to say Christ consciousness, but I’ll say it. I’ve never met anyone remotely like him.”

My office chair, kindly holding a few things for me

Okay, so I’ve had four readings, and all of them were wonderful. The Tattered Cover/Colfax one was extremely well-attended, which i attribute to the fact that my sister and mother collectively know every living being in East Denver, and they were all there. But, gosh. My senior prom date was there (that’d be you, Steve Epstein), the parents of all three of my high school best girlfriends were there, my very own dear sister Greta flew in from San Francisco. It was fantastic! It was pretty much standing-room only, and I found to my extreme happiness that I LIKED answering questions about race, power, class — all things I thought I’d sprint away from as fast as my little pink feet could carry me.

After this incredible high came the days after — my sister flew back to SFO, the house looked like its been hit by a bomb (see picture), our beloved cat of 15 years died. God. That was so hard. He’s still laid out in state on our (secondary) kitchen table, on dry ice, surrounded by candles and flowers. This is what happens when you’re married to a Tibetan Buddhist, who believe it takes three days for the soul to get its bearings, pack up, and actually leave the body. It’s actually really nice to have Sandy around for a few more days. He was a sweet, courtly, adorable cat — definitely the most mellow member of our household — and I cry about him pretty much every other hour.

Then, two days ago, Stanford’s sister Arilda called to tell me Stan’s back in the hospital. He went on Tuesday, in an ambulance, with bad stomach pain. This dealt a death blow to any lingering exuberance I might have had about the early readings, and the fact that our book is being carried by COSTCO! and all the great feedback we’ve both gotten…

Gain and loss, the Buddhists say. The wheel never stops turning. And, as Stan so gently told the mare in his corral the first day I knew him: “I can’t save you.”

So I’m balanced, if walking around the house between my getting-all-gorgeous garden and exploded office and dead cat is balance, if hearing good news about the book and bad news about Stanford’s pain level is balance.

Thanks Paonia! And Hotchkiss! and all my old pals and neighbors…

What's not to love? I never don't love this place.

My baby book, after a mere seven years of gestation, was born today, May 12. My first reading will be in less than two hours!!! It’ll happen in Hotchkiss, Colorado, just down the road from Paonia, where I spent 12 of the happiest years of my life. I wanted my first reading to be here

o, paonia!

 because in many ways this still feels like home. Stanford really wanted to come, too,  because he’s met at least a dozen of my friends from these parts, some of who traveled up to Wyoming several times to help out around the ranch, sweat, and generally hang out. But last week he had to go in for surgery to keep up the fight against the bedsores that are the bane of every quadriplegic. I just hung up a bunch of photos from his place and we’re about to start setting out chairs. Okay, it’s almost rock n roll time. Toodles for now.

I’m told I shouldn’t only mutter what’s new to myself as I shuffle around the house. I’m told I should put what’s new on THIS BLOG. So, lots of new and nice things are happening around the book, whose formal birthday is just two days away. Check ‘em out!

Interview with the Author: “Broken” by Lisa Jones

by Sharon Glassman, Huffington Post (this includes an audio interview)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-glassman/interview-with-the-author_b_199426.html

“Healing the broken spurs new live, love” from The Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_12320531

“Got Warriors?”
from High Country News

http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.7/got-warriors

“The Gentler” from Spirit magazine

http://www.spiritmag.com/features/article/the_gentler/

excerpt from Broken, from New West
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_excerpt_from_lisa_jones_broken/C39/L39/