The Ties That Bind: A Conversation with Author Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee)

We’re marking Thanksgiving week by posting an interview I did earlier this year for the issue of American Artscape that focused exclusively on Native-Americans artists.  I spoke with author and NEA Literature Fellow Kelli Jo Ford (Cherokee) whose award-winning novel Crooked Hallelujah --a semi-autobiographical novel of linked short stories--takes us through the complicated lives of four generations of Cherokee women. Crooked Hallelujah, which is Ford’s debut novel, is not about “being Cherokee”; it is about these particular Cherokee women, how they fail, succeed, and survive. It’s an important distinction. They are not on the page to give us a history lesson but their experiences of intergenerational poverty, trauma, the scars of forced assimilation, and an unforgiving church are informed by that often unspoken history. Ford talks about writing Crooked Hallelujah, the importance of geographic place that resonates throughout the book, and the limitations and the fierceness of the love these women share. She also discusses her own upbringing on the reservation raised by generations of Cherokee women, living off the reservation as an adult, and her pushing against her own fiction as necessarily needing to contain cultural or historical explainers of what it means to be Cherokee.  We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at  artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us on Apple Podcasts. And check out latest issue of American Artscape which just posted— Original Threads: Equity and Access in the Arts for Hispanic/Latinx Communities.