Last month, during my residency at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, I was fortunate to meet several good-hearted and talented artists including Ruby Hansen Murray, my writing studio neighbor and the other fellow writer-on-the-snow-filled-premises.
Ruby is a writer and photographer living on Puget Island in the lower Columbia River estuary. A member of the Osage Nation, her work appears or is forthcoming in Wild in the Willamette, Yellow Medicine Review, American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry, Oregon Humanities Magazine and National Public Radio. On the artist residency front, she’s been knocking it out of the park, having been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Island Institute in Sitka, AK, Jentel, Playa and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She has studied at Warren Wilson College and the Institute of American Indian Arts along with Jamie Figueroa, who I met at a VONA workshop (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation), which Ruby has also attended.
On our road back home from Wyoming, in the lobby at the Laramie Regional Airport, the lone television—to our complete chagrin— was tuned to Fox News. 2016 Presidential candidate Donald Trump spewed his bullshit on a campaign stop with his defeated minion, Chris Christie, grinning and standing behind him. And so, Ruby and I retreated to the back of the lobby to sit down for this interview. After quietly sharing a cabin for three weeks, and after hearing her read a short excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The Heart Stays People, I wanted to find out more about her craft and the process she has embarked on to write this novel:
