It Was Over There by That Place

by Diane Glancy

“I translate without original language,” writes Diane Glancy on the first page of It Was Over There by That Place. “I translate the traces of the process of original thought.” Communication, for all the good it does the writer, is a territory like any other. For the indigenous writer, wrenchingly so. Even still, communication does not sit in some idyllic frame; it is mutable, subject to change. This last bit is of keen interest to Glancy. To speak in this chapbook is to access memory, and to access memory is to challenge chronology, imagination, and its discontents. Glancy blurs the present, such that even the genre through which she writes is at odds with the page, and we are left with the glimmering world wrenched by territory and language. “I would be hurt. That was known,” she writes. “It was in the words the place carried.” It Was Over There by That Place is a meditation as much as a discourse. It is history captured in pencil shavings and inside the holes of a bowling ball. It renews itself through remembrance and review; it lilts and gleams with a rare fervor.

34 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 2019

About the author

(Helen) Diane Glancy is a Cherokee poet, author and playwright.

Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her Bachelor of Arts (English literature) from the University of Missouri in 1964, then later continued her education at the University of Central Oklahoma, earning her a Masters degree in English in 1983. In 1988, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

Glancy is an English professor and began teaching in 1989 at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, teaching Native American literature and creative writing courses. Glancy's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.

(from Wikipedia)