Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Joy Harjo is one of the most revered poets in the United States, but she took a winding path to get there. The former U.S. poet laureate spoke with Rachel Martin about a pivotal decision in her childhood that put her on the creative path and how she views writing as a way to have second chances. This spring, Harjo is releasing a new version of her book, For A Girl Becoming. To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Rachel. Just a heads up. There's a story about domestic violence in this episode. What's the biggest risk you've ever taken? Recently, to me, this is the biggest risk. I sat in at the blue note in New York. And when you say sat in. I played a song. I played a song. To me, that was like bungee jumping from the bridge of the Royal Gorge. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wild Card. The game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life. Questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one question back on me.

My guest this week is poet Joy Harjo. Every poet kind of has their themes, and I realize mine is transformation. What happens, you know, in those transformative spaces. Joy Harjo is one of the most revered poets in the United States, and there are all kinds of reasons why that didn't have to happen. She actually studied pre-med in college. But as if to hedge her bets on that particular career choice, she began taking creative writing classes.

And in the end, the arts won out. Stability be damned. Joy grew up in Oklahoma as part of the Muskogee Creek Nation. But her stepfather forced Joy to suppress her creativity. She wasn't even allowed to sing in the house. That creative spirit could have died inside her. But when she was finally out on her own, she realized that making music and telling stories and writing poetry

wasn't just something she wanted to do. It was something she had to do. Since then, she's used her writing to capture the diverse experiences of native people in this country. And in 2019, she was named the first Native American U.S. poet laureate. And this spring, she's releasing a new version of her book for a girl becoming. Joy Harjo. Welcome to Wildcard. Hi.

I'm glad I could be here. I'm so glad you can be here, too. Thank you so much for being game to do this. It's intriguing. And so that interests me. All right. Let's go. First round.

Memories. One. Middle. Oh, you were already feeling something for the middle. You're already feeling it. Okay. Where would you go when you needed to escape as a teenager? As a kid, I would escape into the closet as a little kid.

And my drawings, they're probably still in that closet. or outside. You know, I would go out at times when everyone was asleep or the world was quiet. And I still like that. That's where I find things. That's where I find images and sounds and fresh ideas. That's how I discover, I guess you could say, a kind of peacefulness, but also a kind of depth that isn't always present when you're in the realm of chatter.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there something in particular that you felt that you needed to get away from when you were an adolescent? Or was it just adolescence? Yeah, I needed to get away from adolescents. I know I always feel for those kids when I've gone in and talked to them and vibe with them because, you know, I still understand that period, which is a time of, I think of adolescence as, being like a chrysalis moment. Like here you've got the caterpillar and eating leaves and experiencing the world as a caterpillar.

And then they build this chrysalis. And the chrysalis is where they essentially liquefy and then reform. So it's a time of chaotic form of, you know, I was this, but I'm going to be something else. And I would imagine in that chrysalis period the known parameters have fallen away. way, to some extent, to some extent. And then the butterfly emerges. And that's how I think of

adolescence, is being in that chrysalis, kind of being in that chrysalis stage. But in that stage is a lot of innate power, any time of transformation, you know, whether it's a transformation of a country, you know, transformation of a human being or of a butterfly, you know, a caterpillar are becoming a butterfly. There's a lot of power, creative power in that. But I'm fixated on that closet for some reason. What did the closet look like? I could go in and it had a door that shut, you know, with the door handle on it. So I could go in there and sit, I would sit on the wood floor. Yeah. Because, you know, I didn't have a chair in there, of course. And I could sit in there and have peace.

Yeah. And you know that people aren't going to come looking for you like, you know, they might look for. for you elsewhere, but, you know, we would, if my mother, and I know she wouldn't like me saying this because she's proud of me and what I've done, but if she saw us with books, she'd say, get up and do something. Oh, interesting. Yes, that we had to be doing something. Yeah.

Yeah, we needed to be doing something because there was always so much to be done in a household with all of those kids, so I understand that. but I wasn't in there to escape doing things because I contributed. I was there for my own peace of mind. Okay. Next three. One, two, or three. One.

One. What's a place that shaped you as much as any person did? That's interesting. That's like it's related. It's like falls right in line with the first one. What place shaped me? You know the places that shaped me, okay, a couple, there's places on the physical realm and places in the dreaming realm. Tell me about both.

And the physical realm was going to the lake. Like my father, I love the water. So we would go over to Fort Gibson Lake. My mom would cook fried chicken, mashed potatoes, all that really good stuff. But again, it was taking us out of the ordinary, in a way, taking us out of the ordinary. in a way, taking us out of the ordinary world to the water, the place of water. I think of my father. I think we all have predominant elements in our being.

And my father, I've always felt, was more water and my mother was more fire. And I love the, I feel like I'm both. I'm very much both. It makes sense to me what you said. It was taking you out of your regular life. Like regular life was busy. You had a bunch of siblings, that there was a lot of household work to do, just the work of being alive. And that was taking you out of that.

Yeah. So the other place is in my dreaming realm. And I've dreamed, even as a little kid, I would dream places that I didn't know the names. I would come back knowing names of places. And I still do that, that I didn't know. You know, there was no way. Maybe I was four years old or three years old, and I didn't know the name of those places, but I would come back knowing those places because I had gone there in the dreaming realm and experienced life in a very, very different way. It's been a long time, but do you remember a specific dream you had as a child that evoked that for you, a place you didn't know of and then you came back knowing it? Yes, I'm trying to remember it was in Egypt, and it was a long time ago, and it was like I was with different people and I was somebody else, but they made a kind of prison out of like Adobe, and you could see the prisoner's faces through the Adobe, and they had basically cemented them into this wall. It was really horrible way to deal with people.

Wow. You know, it was long before I even read about it. I didn't know there was in Egypt. I mean, I was a little kid. Yeah. I was a little kid in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But dreaming like that as a child, then did dreaming become something that was a little bit scary to you? Or did you look forward to it because it was going to transport you places? I liked going places, like going to the moon or flying, you know, like having that sense of flying somewhere.

I mean, it still happens. Yeah. You know, it still happens. and I don't really understand it, except that it's made me realize that we're in it deep, and there's so many layers to consciousness. Yeah. Thank you for that.

Okay, last one in this round. One, two, or three. Oh, this is only, this is just the first round. This is the first round, Joy. You've got to hydrate. I'm going to go in the middle again. What was a moment in your life when you could have chosen a different path?

There have been some major crossroads. My mother took me, I was about 15 or 16, when she took me to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office and told them that I was going to go to Shalako Indian school, which was a decent Indian school. I've been near the border of Oklahoma and Kansas. And actually my husband went up there and I would have met him earlier.

But as I was, we were going out, this was a major crossroads, as we were going out the door, the agent said, we have a new school. It's out in Santa Fe called the Institute of American Indian Arts. And it was then mostly a high school and it was for the arts. So I applied with art with drawings and got in. And so it was either that, if I had not gone there, if I had stayed there, it would have not,

it would have come to no good. Can you tell me why? Oh, it was, I had really kind of, I had lost any regard for myself because of what I had gone through at that point. I just felt almost worthless. I think part of it was, I watched what happened with my father,

Muskogee Creek Man, in the world, you know, being native in Oklahoma and the whole deep history there, there was a heartache there, I think, a deep heartache. And then there was the stepfather coming into our lives who, I've tried to understand him, but he really had no regard for our lives. He married, he was, his interest, of course, was my mother. And it seems like repressing her, repressing her, and in turn repressing us. and people don't do well under being oppressed, whether it's by a country or by a person. But when I wound up at that school with native students from all over and we were all artists and doing art,

I was in my realm. I was in my realm of creativity and people who, you know, I could talk in class there. I could not talk in class elsewhere. It's just that there was, I felt I was in my place. And before I had felt almost misplaced. Did that division become more stark, though, when you went to the art school? And then presumably you still came home to see your mom.

And did it feel worse knowing that there was this other life that you had access to now and his behaviors? were all the more egregious because you had something to compare it to? Well, I had something with my life with my dad. I mean, that wasn't a walk in a park because he was so good-looking, and women were always after him. And he, you know, that, it had his problems, but they were my parents and they loved each other.

And there was music. It was maybe healthy dysfunction. I don't know. You know, there was dysfunction, but it wasn't. There wasn't the mean-spiritedness and the cruelty. I mean, I came home one night, and my brothers and sister were huddled in my room because they had watched him make my mother play Russian roulette in front of them.

Oh, my God. And I got there, and they were terrified. And I was terrified for my mother. I felt like her guardian. So I felt a little guilty leaving, but at that point, by the time I left, she had kind of gone over to his side in a way, maybe to survive. I think to survive because I always knew that it was different because I always knew my parents loved me and that makes a difference. It makes a difference in your force field if you know that whatever happens that they love you. Yeah.

So I knew there was that and I had that to go on. but to deal with the other and to watch things go down. But I, you know, but I couldn't protect anybody. Yeah. I already learned that. I couldn't protect them. So, you know, sometimes I feel bad that I wasn't the magnanimous maternal, you know, staying there like the mother hen, but it's not me.

What a wonderful thing that you found that school. Yeah. It saved my life. I'm still part of it. I later taught there. But overall, it was amazing the late 60s, Santa Fe, New Mexico and art and being able to do art and be who you are. I want to push back from the game for a minute because I want to talk about the new version of your very, very beautiful book. It is called for a Girl Becoming.

You published this originally in 2009, right? Yes. And how do you describe the... story that's embedded in this? That book came out with my first granddaughter. Sorry. Yeah, my first grandchild, my first granddaughter, Krista. And for a girl becoming is kind of a children's book, but it goes beyond that.

It's a book for coming of age. It's a book for, and I seem to land on that period a lot. And I think it's because I went through so much during that coming of age period. Maybe I'm just working out trauma, but I want to be helpful. I think even in trauma, that's where you learn yourself. Yeah. Really, it's a challenge. That's where you learn yourself and who you are and what you're made of. So when this granddaughter hit that age, I wrote for a girl becoming the poem in there for her. What struck me about it is, as I was reading it, it gave me such a sense of security, like just thinking about how this young girl is born and brought into the

world and the illustrations are so gorgeous. But you're writing in the illustrations, leave you with the sense that this young new being is just, has been woven into this beautiful, beautiful tapestry of her family. And everybody's just going to be there for her. It just doesn't matter what hard things come and all the hard things will come. But it was just this precious feeling of safety that I got from reading this story through the whole thing. I thought, what a, beautiful gift to give a child that sense of safety, which feels all the more profound thinking about your own childhood and how unsafe you felt. Yeah, if you put it that way, that makes a lot of sense. But there's themes. Every poet kind of has their themes, and I realize mine is

transformation. One of them is healing and justice and transformation. What happens, you know, in those transformative spaces. So I have another book out at the same time called Washing My Mother's Body, because I didn't get to wash my mother's body when she died, and I wanted to, but I let that go because it was causing too much commotion. And this poem comes. I never got to wash my mother's body. And so poems teach you. And this poem taught me that I could do it in a poem. And in the poem, I do what I wasn't able to do in the physical,

but I went and washed her body in the poem. And it's sort of similar to a girl. These doorways of transformation that we walk through. And I feel like when I've walked through them, I haven't been the best. What I mean? I hit the walls, awkward, too many elbows. Not too many.

I'm glad I have it. I mean, do any of us walk through those doorways gracefully, those transformative moments? I feel like it's always awkward. Yeah. But I love that you share it, that in your poetry, you can do the things that you weren't able to do the first go around. It's a second chance. But I think it's not the poet, just for me, the poet, but I think that's something useful for anyone that you can sit in,

and, you know, you might do it through painting or the song or writing because we all have things we say we regret or people who go we can't talk to, and you can do it, you can sit and write it and talk to them. Thank you for that. The book is beautiful. We have more cards? Yes. Joy, do we have more cards?

Round two. Insights. Three new cards. One, two, or three? Three. We'll do three. Three. What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

Recently, I sat in, to me, this is the biggest risk. I sat in at the blue note in New York. Okay, so now, and when you say sat in, you, you, You mean you play. I played a song. I played a song. So we need the context of this. Yes, I did. And that terrifying.

You are a musician. You play the saxophone, right? Yeah, yeah. So that's, you played the saxophone at the blue note? I did. I have, I'm friends with Esperanza Spalding, and she was doing a two-week run at the Blue Note. She sold out, I think, every show.

Yeah. She's incredible. She's just, she's a, she's incredible and she's real. I mean, that's a thing about, I think what maybe is that she's, absolutely who she is. She's very generous and very humble and is a mute. She's in that space. And I played with her. We just, you know, improv. We're friends. Yeah. And, but this is different. Yeah. I mean, she said, oh, why don't you sit and do a song, you know, do a piece with, you know, with her guitar player who, you know, and the drummer. And so

I couldn't say no. I mean, I thought about it. No, I thought about it. I mean, I thought about it. I mean, I thought about saying, no, well, what would I feel like if I said, no, well, I would feel very disappointed. Yeah. Like, I should have done it, and I don't want any should haves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm sitting down there in one of the seats with my horn on my lap waiting to be called

up, and I'm thinking, what if my horn messes up? So then you have to have a lot. It's just like the most world famous jazz club. I know. I know. I love that club. I often go there. If I go to New York, that's where maybe that's where I should go to night.

But you got over your nerves, you got on stage, and you did it. Yeah, I sat there with my horror, and I got out there. But then the thing I've learned, because I used to have a horrible stage fright. It was bad enough when I was just doing poetry, and then I picked up horn when I was almost 40, and learned to play mostly on stage. But the thing I learned was that if I just listened to the music, And that's even if I'm just reading or even doing a wild card.

If I just listen to the music, I'm okay. But I did it. You did it, Joy. No, to me, that was like bungee jumping from the bridge at the Royal Gorge. I feel like playing the sax with Ezbra-Eldesvoldes-Baldesvolding is safer and probably a bigger high, frankly. Well, yeah. I mean, they're just wonderful musicians and just a beat. And the thing I was taught early on is to play with people better than you.

Yeah. That's how you grow. Yeah. Okay. Three more. One, two, three. Let's do the three again. Three.

Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad this one came up. Is the music you listen to happier or sadder than you are? I'm like, well, like, okay, there's several parts of me. I'm like, my mother used to write music, and she would write these really kind of sad ballads. However, she wrote a song that my sister just gave it to me. And it was, she typed it out. She didn't capitalize everything. And I love the way she wrote jazz, J-A-S-S. This was in the early 50s. It's called My Guy. We just recorded that song with Esperanza.

We just recorded it from my next album from Polkways. And it's so cool. It's my mother's song. So that's an up one. And I like that because it's so up. Yeah. And most of her songs were these really heartbreak ballads, sort of like Patsy Klein and crazy. And I love those scraping the bottom of your heart ballads. You know, Nat King Cole. You're in for the whole gambit.

You're in for the whole thing. All the emotions. Yeah, Nat King Cole. And then I like funk, my most played artist on my season. Is James Brown? I mean, can't go wrong. We're in the last round. This is the beliefs round.

Sort of touched on beliefs throughout the whole thing, though, but they're going to get more pointed. Well, it is pointed. I keep thinking a lot of the problems we have going on right now are because of belief systems. You know, how powerful. I keep thinking about how powerful and potent beliefs are. Let's get at it in specifics. The middle. The middle.

Number two. Okay, number two. Yes, this is the middle. Okay. here we go. How have your feelings about God changed over time? Tremendously. If I think about God before there were words, it has to do with the sunlight or the rainbows and sunlight or that kind of joy, a kind of resonance that goes through everything. And I think kids have that. And then I remember, you know, going to church and God being very much like an image of Jesus

or an illustration of an elderly white man. And that was the next implanted image of God. And then there were qualities given to this God or that they were always angry with you or that you would always be guilty in their presence. So that was the second version, which didn't really sit right with me because, you know, in our Muskogee tradition, and I think in men, you know, we were created by love. I remember my husband, sometimes will lay there and just talk for hours even now, and we're laying there talking, and I said, you know,

I think about why were we created with, you think about the human, the system, all of the systems in our body and the magnificence of it and how everything works together. And then all of it, the insects, the birds and all of this is going on. And I think, I can be overwhelmed and think, why? I mean, we all ask those questions. I mean, why, why these systems? Why? Why this driving? Why do we go through, you know, all the challenges?

Why evil? I mean, why all of this? And the way that I find a peace in it is kindness, is knowing that there's kindness, then it can all make sense that, okay, you know, all of this can go on, but the path of kindness will bring. You know, it brings a different kind of nourishment. Is that the third version of God then? Is that the present version for you? Probably, yes, yeah, I think that's more of the present where there's an, it's, again, an immense creator, an immense creativity, but it's imbued with what we call onagechka with a love that is so potent and powerful. It's powerful. It's not just, you know, it's not weak.

It's very powerful. And it connects everybody. And when I say everybody, I also mean the winds, the plants, the animals, the, each of us. So that's where I am now. That could change. Yeah. Okay. Three more cards. One, two, or three? Between two and three. I'll go with three. When do you feel connected to the people you've lost? Frequently. Yeah, it's, you know, it's funny. The older I get, then I talk a little bit more about things I usually wouldn't talk about. I think that's true for me too. In 2011, I helped my mother pass.

My mother's around all the time. But it was not long after that, and my cousin died. And they said, she died in a chair. She was just sitting there. And, you know, she had different health problems. It's my age, though. And this was about 10, 11, 12 years ago. And so I went to her funeral.

My sister and I went to her funeral. And I was amazed that she looked, she just looked, she looked almost like she was going to stand up and walk out of there. Well, a few years ago, I'm just laying there right before I go to sleep, and there she was. And we just talked. We just talked for a moment and said, hey, it wasn't freaky. I mean, I saw her like in my mind. It was like she was there.

And we just said, hey, how are you doing? I said, yeah, you know at your funeral, you just, you didn't even look like you were dead. We just talked for a moment, and then she was gone. She was just visiting. And then there's some people that you would really, like my father, my father doesn't come to me that much. One time I was sitting, I was going through something, and is living in New Mexico, and I'm sitting there real quiet.

That's when you can hear them. I was sitting there real quiet, and my father came and said, I'm so proud of you. And the other day, it was on a day, it was on his birthday, it was February 28th, and I was really wanting to hear from, I didn't hear anything. But that's, you know, I figure,

I get a sense that he's not around. My mother is around, though. I mean, people are different. Yeah. But they're always, you know, we do talk about our ancestors, at least in our culture. And I think, you know, we,

obviously, by the time you're a great, I'm a great-grandparent now. God. As you see things and you know things go on, you watch them reappear. You know, you watch things reappear in the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. And, you know, it goes on that there's a continuum and you start to see, you get insights into the whole thing. And so they're around. You know, some of them, some closer, some not.

But I feel like I stay in touch with that. Some people don't. Some people, it's not in their realm. You talk about belief systems. It's not in their realm of belief, even though somebody might be standing right by them wanting to talk to them. Yeah, or they find ways to do it, you know, and they find ways to do it. But, yeah, I think it's just part of living.

We end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory time machine, in which you travel to one moment from your past. It is not a moment that you want to change anything about. It's just a moment you would like to linger in a little longer. What moment do you choose? Now I'm going to cry, holding my daughter after she was born. Can you share any more details about that moment where you were, what she smelled like, what you're living?

looking at. Yeah, and then I think of my son too, you know. But I say my daughter because I lost her reason. Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. So often what I do, often when I do, I go back to when she was a baby. And that's, but I was so happy. And I know that she would rather me think of happiness.

Yeah. She would rather have me think of happiness. Yeah. She's made that clear. Yeah. And I was so happy. I mean, it's funny. It made no sense that I had a child at that time,

but her spirit came to me, and I was so, even though I was going through stuff, I don't need to go into that right now. But when she was born in the midst of all of this, you know, ruined her knee was going on and, you know, a lot of challenges, but it was just, I said yes, and I wanted her, and I welcomed her,

and I was just so happy. Joy Harjo, it has been such a pleasure to get to share this time with you. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was fun. Kind of. If you enjoyed this conversation, I think you should check out my episode with another poet, Hanif Abduraki. Like Joy, Hanif has this really thoughtful and deliberate way of speaking,

and the answers that he gave to the wildcard questions that I asked really take you on a journey. It's definitely worth a listen. This episode was produced by Lee Hale and edited by Dave Blanchard with help from Romel Wood. It was mastered by Patrick Murray. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni. Our theme music is by Ramteen Arablewee. You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. We're going to shovel the deck and be back with more next week.

Talk to you then.