What does your job entail?
I get around and speak to different groups. I spend two days a week out on the Cherokee reservation, and the people in the museum gave me office space for the days I’m out there. I thought that was just absolutely great.

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Are you teaching?
I’m not teaching yet; I told them I did not want to teach this first semester. I’m going to teach a survey of Cherokee literature. It will start with stories out of the oral traditions that have of course been published and probably jump from there into the 1820s when the Cherokees started the newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix. Slip from there into the 1920s and ’30s, when you get Will Rogers, John Oskison and Lynn Riggs, and work on up to contemporary literature. I will use a couple of my own books: Captain Dutch and Mountain Wind Song.

Which story/character do you like best?
I’m very fond of Cherokee Dragon, the story of Dragging Canoe. And I like Sequoyah and Captain Dutch. But I also like the novel Brass, a kind of a horror thing. It took a character from the old mythological stories, and he was a shape-shifter and passionate gamer, and at the end of the original story he is pinned to the ocean floor and under the water. For my story I had the Army Corps of Engineers tear out the pole pinning him, and he is loosed on the world.

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