Introducing Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue, published in 1994, at the start of the program, California Book Club host John Freeman called the novel in stories “one of the most dazzling feats of narrative embroidery I have read in the last 50 years of my life. It has aged extraordinarily well.” He asked Sarris to talk about how he became a storyteller.
Sarris, who was adopted but also grew up in various foster homes, explained, “When you don’t know where you belong and you’re living and moving around in different homes, you’re paying attention very closely to where—if for no other reason—you might feel safe. So you’re paying attention to who’s related to who, what stories people are telling. And I guess I also just had a natural curiosity about things.” When he met Native healer and basket weaver Mabel McKay and went home with her adopted son, Marshall McKay, the late chairman of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation tribal council, Mabel took him aside. Sarris elaborated, “My relationship with her affected my life and influenced me more than anything, and she told me things and exposed me to ideas and experiences that were so otherworldly and different, and which we might call mind-blowing to a normal person…that later on…everything sort of paled.”
Sarris frequently drove her around, and during those drives, she would constantly tell him stories. He would ask her questions about the stories, but she would tell him not to ask, commenting, “Life will teach you about the story the way the story will teach you about life.” Sarris initially thought he’d become a businessman but then fell in love with literature instead. “Reading was like what I knew from the streets—stories, people’s stories, storytelling,” he said. “And I thought, I want to teach this, and hopefully, I want to write this.”
Freeman asked what the oldest story in Grand Avenue was. Sarris responded that the story in the book he wrote first was “Slaughterhouse”; he wrote it as an undergraduate at UCLA, during which time he tended bar and danced on tops of bars to help pay rent. One of his friends, another dancer, read the story and didn’t believe Sarris had written it. But the story meant a lot to Sarris because he remembered that at the real-life slaughterhouse, prostitution and trafficking of young girls were going on, and horses were being killed in the same place. “And I loved horses, and I felt for the young women, and it always haunted me,” he said.
Special guest Lisa See joined the conversation. She and Sarris had known each other through teaching at UCLA years ago; her mother, critic Carolyn See, had encouraged Sarris’s writing. She noted that Sarris is the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and is on the board of the UC Regents, and she asked him what it’s like to be in the room where it happens and at the table where things are being decided at an important level in our state. Sarris commented on how hard the Board of Regents works to make decisions about finances, hiring a president, hiring chancellors, determining their salaries, and dealing with lawsuits. He noted that there are 19 people on the board appointed by the governor and one student representative, and he’s the only one who is a professor and a writer.
See said that all of the women’s voices in Grand Avenue have such a truth to them and added that his forthcoming novel, The Last Human Bear (to be published in June), is told from the perspective of a woman. “And I wonder,” she asked, “how have you found…these women’s voices and made them feel truly authentic?”
Sarris acknowledged that there are so many issues about who can write about whom at the present. He explained that he was raised and influenced by women and their voices are in him. He wasn’t around many male examples growing up, and in many ways, he was afraid of men. “We’re reeds through which the stories come, and if the story is a voice and it’s a woman, do I shut it down? Do I shut her out? Or do I do my best to represent and write that voice? And the proof, I always tell my students, is in the pudding. Is it authentic? Does it sound real? Is it respectful? Is it honest?… I don’t think what we’re assigned at birth, or gender assigned at birth, determines what voice we can hear and what voices will come through that reed.”
When Freeman returned, he asked See and Sarris about what it’s like to carry stories forward, whether stories they’ve been told, storytelling as a practice, or stories from interviews: “At what point do you feel like the carrying becomes not a burden but a liberation? I wonder, Greg, if you could talk a little bit about that in the writing of Grand Avenue.”
Sarris responded that he felt “both vindicated and unloaded” at having gotten Grand Avenue out in the world. He explained that there’s so little written about California Indians, and when the book came out, he felt that it was a good thing and that he was now free. “I did something in my life that I was supposed to do. I did it, and it wasn’t for me. It was for those I loved and cared about. My people.”•
CBC members can enjoy 20 percent off if they preorder Greg Sarris’s forthcoming novel, The Last Human Bear, at this link and use the code ALTA20 at checkout.
Join us on March 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Janet Fitch will sit down with special guest Dylan Landis and host John Freeman to discuss White Oleander. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
