AuTHor Thursday: To the Local Poets

April is National Poetry Month.

Here on AuTHor Thursday, we have featured a few local poets. Thus, today, I invite you back to those local poet features.


Denise Lajimodiere
She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa, a poet, and Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership at North Dakota State University. Her poetry collection is entitled Dragonfly Dance.

Madelyn Camrud
She asks some excellent poetic questions:

Finally, I want to ask some questions. Doesn’t being a poet have as much to do with how you view the world as with it does with writing poetry? Isn’t it possible you’ve always been a poet though you might not have written poems?  Do you think you’re too busy to write poems? Isn’t poetry a place to go early mornings, at bedtime, and on Sundays?  Will there ever be enough time to live the introspective life you crave? Meanwhile, isn’t it enough to look in and out the windows of your life, to look forward and backward in your mind? Symphonic music in the background, birds, trees, and flowers in season, aren’t those lovely human faces and hearts, family and a few close friends, all you need to write poems?

Cindy Nichols
Her poems have appeared in a variety of national journals, including The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Cimarron Review, and Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics.

Heidi Czerwiec
She is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota, where she is the poetry editor of North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of two recent poetry collections – Self-Portrait as Bettie Page and A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster – and the forthcoming lyric essay sequence Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle, and the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets.

AuTHor Thursday: Denise Lajimodiere

Meet Denise Lajimodiere.

She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Pembina Chippewa, a poet, and Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership at North Dakota State University.

In the introduction to Denise's poetry collection entitled Dragonfly Dance, Louise Erdrich writes:

If healing is partly the resurrection and acknowledgement of pain, then Denise Lajimodiere is a healer through her poetry. If healing is partly laughter, then Denise's poetry can laugh through tears. If healing is a mysterious process, Denise shows that it also begins in everyday kindness.

Some of her poetry has recently been included in North Dakota is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets edited by Heidi Czerwiec.

Denise has brought her writing expertise to the Red River Valley Writing Project in her role as Writer in Residence. She participated in a writing workshop with Native students at the Circle of Nations Boarding School in Wahpeton. Also, this past summer, she was part of the Turtle Mountain Teen Art and Writing Workshop. This workshop was recently featured on the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards blog.

Denise graciously shared some insight into her writing world, answering the following questions for the RRVWP blog.

Why do you write?
I can't not write. I have to write, it's like an itch in the back of my brain that can only be soothed by writing. I keep journals in my purse; I keep a dream diary by my bedside to always jot down thoughts and observations that are seeds to poems.

What genres do you write? Which is your favorite? Why?

Poetry is the only genre I write in. I love the challenge of editing out every superfluous word, of making the poem tight and having inner rhyme and chime, assonance, consonance, yet have deep meaning and be beautiful to hear when read out loud. 

Who encouraged you to be a writer?
 My Junior high school creative writing teacher, Mrs. Avshlomov, took me aside and said, ‘you can be a writer.’ At that time, mid 60s there were no Native writers that I knew of and I thought, ‘poor Mrs. A, she doesn’t know that Indians can’t write.’ I immediately stopped writing for nearly ten years, just kept notes on scraps of paper and put them in a shoebox. In 1984 I held a book in my hands titled Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich. I was stunned to see that not only can Indians write but someone from my own tribe had written an award winning novel!  I started writing poetry again from those shoebox scraps. Louise and Heid Erdrich began doing writing workshops on the Turtle Mountain reservation where I was living. I gave Louise my poems. The next day she took me out by an oak tree by a lake, looked me in the eyes and said ‘You are a writer.’ This time I believed it and have been writing ever since. I have now completed my second poetry book manuscript; it's ready to send to out to publishing houses. 

              

What are you currently reading?

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. By Charles C. Mann. A stunning historical book of life before and after Columbus for the Indigenous people of the ‘Americas.’

Denise, miigwich (thank you) for sharing your writing insights with the RRVWP blog.

Turtle Mountain Teen Art and Writing Workshop

Turtle Mountain teens at the Open Mic night on July 31^st, with National Student Poet Weston Clark (holding guitar).

This past summer, the Red River Valley Writing Project extended its scope to working with teens. We partnered with Turtle Mountain Community Schools and the National Student Poets Program to hold a week-long workshop for fifteen teen artists and writers on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, near the Canadian border. National Student Poet Weston Clark assisted with this project and led an engaging praise poetry workshop. Students had choice in which workshops to attend. Offerings included the following: puppetmaking (Sheyanna Ashes and Sam Poitra), slam poetry (Hannabah Blue), flash fiction (Lise Erdrich), oral narratives/dramatic script (Caitlin Johnson), hip hop (Mic Jordan), digital art (Jacob Laducer), chalk drawing (Kathy Nadeau), printmaking (Laura Youngbird), journalism (Caitlin Johnson), memoir (Denise Lajimodiere), and photography (Caitlin Johnson). Time was scheduled for students to engage in a deep revision process. 

Our philosophical approach to this workshop was an Indigenized version of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP). We drew on the cultural strengths of the region by seeking out Native American writers and artists to lead workshops for students. Ten Native artists and writers modeled the values of the Ojibwe community: love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility, and truth. Another approach was to recruit workshop leaders from the group that presented at our Circle of Nations workshop last fall. By drawing from regional expertise, we contributed to building leadership capacity in local teachers while simultaneously building bridges between Native schools. This “teachers-teaching-teachers” model is a hallmark of the National Writing Project, and we are applying it intentionally and strategically for the benefit of Native American students. For example,