I write to improve the quality of ideas available to our society. In that endeavor, I have been lucky to find community with other thinkers, makers, readers and writers.
The Makah Museum, sustained by the Makah Cultural and Research Center, is a world class resource for tribal members and other peoples interested in the ancient, living culture of the Makah people. For their warmth, candor, wisdom and ready laughter, I am grateful to Makah tribal members Janine Ledford, Meredith Parker, Melissa Walsebot Peterson, Joseph and Mardell McGimpsey, Lila Parton and her children Duane Parton and Cheryl Sones, Keely Parker, Kirk Wachendorf and Edie Hottowe, among others.
For her advocacy and aesthetic, I thank Ria Julien of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. For bringing my novel into the world, I thank Red Hen Press, a nonprofit independent press. Kate Gale, Mark Cull, Tobi Harper, Natasha McClellan, Monica Fernandez, Nicolas Niño and Rebeccah Sanhueza are tireless on behalf of books that better our collective thought.
From 2018 through 2020, I served as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, a nonprofit writing center where I was given a space to work, a stage from which to perform, and students and mentees with whom I could share the lessons of this long journey. At Hugo House, writers are not only seen but recognized. For that, I thank Tree Swensen, Christine Texeira, Rob Arnold, Louise Kincaid, Nicole McCarthy, Katie Prince, Margot Kahn Case, John Peterman, Lily Frenette and the board of directors.
Libraries are the crown jewel of democracy. I thank Linda Johns, Lupine Miller, Andrea Gough and Stesha Brandon of the Seattle Public Library, where I teach writing, research and personal narrative in English and Spanish, and from whose stacks regularly emerge brilliant, borrowed books that sustain and inspire my own creative practice. For their writings about the Makah people, I thank contemporary historians Joshua Reid (Snohomish) and Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth), as well as Ruth Kirk, Richard Daugherty, Helma Swan (Makah), Linda Goodman, Erna Gunther, Alice Henson Ernst, Frances Densmore, Elizabeth Colson and the many Makah elders who gave their hours to that fraught work.
For their fellowships and aid of my development as a researcher and writer, I thank UC Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center, the Jack Straw Writing Program, Harvard College, and the University of Washington Graduate School, where I was a Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Scholar. Their support helped sustain me. So, too, the many weeks I’ve spent writing and learning in community at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, where I now teach.
For their attention and counsel, without which I would be not only bereft but hopeless, I thank my earliest readers Sam Ligon, Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz), Patricia Henley, Robert Lopez, Kate Lebo, Steve Yarbrough, Anca Szilágyi, Jean Ferruzola, Shawn Wong, Jonathan Evison, Jarret Middleton, Alfa Demmellash, Alex Forrester and Kristen Goessling. I thank Alfa for inspiring me to persist, Kristen for listening with wry kindness, Maggie Messitt for consolations and encouragements, and Patricia Gray for swimming before sunrise with a relentlessly positive attitude. Long may they guide me. For loaning their cabins so I could write in peace, I thank Neel Blair and Josie Clark (the finest neighbors one could hope to find), as well as Alex Loeb and Ethan Meginnes, and Todd and Mia Ellis.
To love a writer is no easy thing. I would like to conclude this litany of gratitude by thanking my family, which began as my abuela, grandparents, mom, dad and sister, and became my husband and our sons. I couldn’t have expected so much joy.