012 - Debra Gwartney - I Am a Stranger Here Myself

A conversation with Debra Gwartney about her book I Am a Stranger Here Myself, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2019.

 

Debra Gwartney is a former journalist and current author and memoirst who teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. I Am a Stranger Here Myself was published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press and won the River Teeth Literary Nonfictin Prize. In this book Gwartney pairs the 19th century history of missionary Narcissa Whitman, who was killed in an 1847 massacre by Cayuse Indians, with her own life and complicated relationship with Salmon, Idaho and the West. It is part history and part memoir, and grapples with Western identity, belonging, and coming to peace with the tensions therein. 

Gwartney is also the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Mariner Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and Oregon Book Award, and coeditor of Home Ground: A Guide to the Americna Landscape (Trinity University Press, 2006).

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink
• Support provided by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University.
  
• Podcast Music was written and recorded by local Provo composer by Micah Dahl Anderson.
• Episodes are recorded via Skype or in person and amateurishly engineered and produced by Professor Rensink.
• To submit a book to be considered for a podcast episode, email writingwestwardpodcast@byu.edu.