'I Release You, Fear'

Sugar Calling

The New York Times

Society & Culture, Books, Arts

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cheryl Strayed talks with the poet Joy Harjo about beauty, prophecies and listening to your spiritual council. Joy tells the story of being named the 23rd poet laureate of the United States, and opens up about leaving home to attend a Bureau of Indian Education boarding school in the 1960s. "For the first time, I was in a circle of relatives,” Joy says, “a circle of other students like me who were natives, who had been through a lot of the same stories.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm going to call Joy Hard Joe. Joy is a poet, musician, playwright, and author.
0:05.6	She's a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation and our current US Poet Laureate.
0:10.0	I first discovered Joy in my early 20s when I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota
0:16.1	and I was in this little bookstore near campus and I saw this book called She Had Some Horses.
0:21.8	I was drawn to it because I grew up having Horses too.
0:25.0	That book was one of Joy's beautiful poetry collections. When I read it I knew that I had found a writer I would follow anywhere, and I have through
0:36.2	her many books of poems and also her beautiful memoir, Crazy Brave.
0:41.9	She offers us insight and truth that feels like she's working in this place that's sort of
0:47.5	beyond knowing or beyond explanation.
0:50.9	And yet it rings the deepest bell of truth within me.
0:56.0	I'm gonna give joy a call. You're going to be. I'm going to
1:27.0	Hi Cheryl.
1:28.0	Hi Joy. How you doing?
1:30.0	I'm good.
1:31.0	It's so nice to talk to you.
1:32.0	Where are you right now? I'm good it's so nice to talk to you where are you right now I'm in Tulsa Oklahoma.
1:35.4	Uh-huh I have a Tulsa artist fellowship and they give you housing so my husband are
1:41.4	living in a two bedroom apartment here in the arts district downtown.
1:45.0	And we have land south of here, so he takes off every day there because we eventually want to build a house.
1:52.0	And I'm hold up here and I know how to be here.
1:57.2	I mean that's we writers.
1:59.2	It's the space I've always occupied primarily.
	...

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