Interview: Ruby Hansen Murray

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:


JUAN: I’m curious to hear when you began to write, and what drew you to writing versus other art forms.

RUBY: I was a reader as a child. I’m not sure when the impulse to write started but it feels like it’s programmed in. I know that when I visited the Virgin Islands where my mom is from for the first time, and I was surrounded by her stories, I felt clear that I was a novelist. The several generations of stories that she had been telling me about this place that I hadn’t visited struck me. I always see people in a big context, which I think makes me a novelist, not a short story writer.

JUAN: Was there a moment when you really cared about writing, like as far as, well I really want to be serious at this—be good at it?

RUBY: Always. I’ve been committed to doing a good job and so I’ve written for many years. I took classes along the way, but I had a shift in seriousness when I went to Fishtrap, a conference in Oregon. I realized that the people getting MFAs were immersed in the work in a way that I wasn’t. The depth of my writing changed—or the speed at which I was improving was changed by deciding to get an MFA.

JUAN: Tell me about the projects that you were working on at Brush Creek.

RUBY: I’m in the Institute of American Indian Arts, as you know, working on creative nonfiction. I’ve been writing about my Mom and memories and what roles her stories played in my life. It seems I’m often writing about people who have moved from or been taken from their home and how they make sense of the world around them. Then, I switched to working on the Osage novel that I read parts to you all from.

JUAN: Speaking of the novel, what was the initial spark for it? Or was there a clear moment when—ah—here’s this story?

RUBY: It’s a story that I’ve always heard. A family story about a girl taken from the tribe when she was six years old. She was raised among the Cherokee people who had taken her--so that added nuances--before she was placed with missionaries. As I began to research her life, I looked at the perspectives of people who wrote about her.

JUAN: It’s a historical novel. How has your research for the novel shaped it so far?

RUBY: I’ve spoken to relatives about what they’ve heard. Elders like Leonard Maker told me the stories that came down in his family. All of these added to how I understand the story. So, when I began to read about the story from the perspective that missionaries and historians had written, I knew I wanted to write a version truer to the Native perspective. I was interested in the way that biases prevalent in a culture are expressed in scholarship. I’m thinking about the lens that historians from the 1930s through 1950s had, that you see in their articles in the Chronicles of Oklahoma. I began to read contemporary newspapers and letters, where really vibrant and disturbing details appear. For example, when they had to leave their homeland, the rich Creek leaders sent their families up river on flatboats. By the time they got to the mission near Russellville, they were in rugged shape. Newspapers from the time remarked on the rough shape the travelers were in. Washington Irving and European noblemen came through the area and wrote about what they saw. I’ve used those details. But there’s a balance in careful historical research and developing my character fully. I’m looking for the truth of her character as she sees the events around her, and I’m contextualizing her story, her history. I was thinking about the way you talk about your screenplay. I think of this as a coming of age story, but it’s also about the several communities at the mission and how they interacted. The Cherokee children and the missionaries functioned in several separate groups.

JUAN: I think you told us that the novel takes place during a summer when everything goes to hell for the protagonist. I’m just realizing now that I don’t know much about the protagonist. Could you tell me some general details to fill her in a little bit?

RUBY: She’s one of the Osage children taken in raids by the Cherokees and their allies from the family camp associated with annual buffalo hunting camp. She lived with them for a couple of years assuming she was adopted, and then was sold by her captor. She ended up rescued from the slave trader and was taken to Arkansas Post. From there, she was placed at the mission until her family could be found. Her expectation was that she would be able to go home, but that didn’t happen. I can’t find that any effort was made to take her home. There had been earlier prisoner exchanges, but she wasn’t part of that.

In developing her as a character, I’ve stepped away from the historical people to free my imagination. I think people are resilient. They’re survivors, and they’re adaptable, especially kids. I’ve thought about how an Osage would have felt in the school with tribal enemies like the Cherokees. The missionaries were voluminous correspondents and journal keepers and letter writers. They’re frank, and you also learn a lot reading between the lines about what the Osage or Cherokee experienced.

JUAN: Are some of those story details based on a family member who was raised at the mission?

RUBY: Yes. As much as I can find.

JUAN: Did she keep a journal or anything?

RUBY: Not that we have found. I would love to find a letter she wrote. Sometimes the students at the missions had to write to benefactors in the east. Wouldn’t that be cool?

JUAN: Yeah, that would be really, really neat.

RUBY: You know my husband has been engaged with my research, and he is most excited about finding her handwriting.

JUAN: Where would you go to try to find something like that?

RUBY: I would go to the Houghton Library at Harvard; they have a collection of the primary documents from the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. Another place to look would be the missionary families’ documents—some of those letters may be in historical societies in New England.

JUAN: That sounds like a total detective search. Has that for you been a phase of writing the novel, where you just do research? Or have you mixed that in and between writing?

RUBY: I have mixed it in between. Research can be very seductive. I do have a passion to get it right because it’s based on a family story. I really think there’s a balance in how much you need to know vs. the emotional truth of the story. I’d like to tell her entire life story, but it’s not a biography.

JUAN: That goes actually pretty well into my next question. What has been challenging about writing this novel?

RUBY: I’d like to spend more time in the area. I’ve been able to spend time at the mission, but I’d like to be there through all the seasons so I would know it intimately. I’m compelled to get the facts right, which can be paralyzing if you tend to be obsessive about these things. And the other challenge is that the story is based on historical folks. I’ve worked to learn the history and then create separate characters.

JUAN: And while you’ve been writing and drafting and researching the novel have there been certain things that have popped up for you that you just thought, all right, I’ve got to read this?

RUBY: I’ve read Laird Hunt, the editor of Denver Quarterly, who wrote Neverhome about a female soldier during the Civil War. His tone, his ability to capture the vernacular in an authentic way is really rich. He’s written several novels that get to the raw experience of those early times. I love Debra Earling’s book Perma Red because she’s telling a family story of her aunt. Her book is a touchstone for me. Caryl Phillips from Saint Kitts has written incredible things using slave diaries and plantation history.

JUAN: And my last question—and it’s just a weird one—but dead or alive, who would you like to meet?

RUBY: Oh, good question. [After mulling it over a twenty-minute plane ride from Laramie to Denver, Ruby’s response was]: I’d love to hear what Mary Magdalene or Mary the mother of Jesus would say. So many people have spoken of them for so many years.

JUAN: Ooh, Mary Magdalene is a hardcore, fantastic pick!