Culture continued from page 16 has already earned anticipatory raves from Buzzfeed, was named an Indie Next pick, and is included on Barnes & Noble’s Best Horror of 2022 list. “It’s bananas,” Wurth says. “I have two publicists, two marketers; it’s madness. Indie presses have always been good to me, but this sort of thing is all new.” Wurth describes White Horse — with no small bit of relish — as “coming back to my nerd roots. I missed elves and dragons. And especially ghosts and demons. The book is just more satisfying for me when the ghost isn’t just a metaphor.” Another impetus for the novel is more personal. “Part of my family is from northern Mexico,” she explains. “They were Apache, and they came into Texas because the president at the time was pushing them out. And the other part of my family is of Black descent, Chicka- saw and Cherokee from the Southeast. White people and Indians in that area owned slaves, and so my ancestors were like, ‘No, thank you, goodbye,’ and they also went to Texas. A lot of urban Indian communities formed around these multi-tribal urban centers. “So my family was doing the Native Amer- ican Church and Pow Wow and all these sorts of things,” Wurth continues, “and meanwhile, my grandmother — who was in fi fth grade at the time, fourteen years old — was put into an arranged marriage. This would have been 1927. There was no recording for urban In- dians, no enrollment possible. If you weren’t on a reservation, you didn’t exist.” It was in this environment that Wurth says her family tried to engage in what they saw as traditional marriages, specifi cally to marry off Wurth’s young grandmother to another Native. “He was terrible,” Wurth says. “And abusive. She left him for someone else, but her life was still incredibly hard. The story was that my grandmother had suicided. But then later, a cop looked at her police report and decided that, no, it looks to me like her husband murdered her.” But because of the continued from page 16 knew that wasn’t for me. That there were some things better left untouched. He said, well, it’s just, Idaho Springs is full of white trash, sorry. You’re cool though. I had closed my eyes then, and when I opened them, he was looking at me like he’d just handed me something beautiful, like a dime bag or roses. Do I look like trash to you? I asked. He stammered. Shit, I wasn’t even white. I lit a smoke and squinted up at him, Jaime babbling nervously in the back- ground, my hand fl uttering behind me, trying to shut her up. His friend told me I looked like a hot piece of ass. I am a hot piece of ass, I said. He laughed his donkey laugh. You laugh like a donkey, I said. His mouth clapped shut, then a minute later, opened again with you trash bitch. I smiled, and his friend told us both to cool it, cool it. He said that’s not what I meant. And that there was good shit at 18 government’s lack of record-keeping for the Native population, “she wouldn’t be listed as a missing and murdered Indigenous woman, but yes, she is. Of course she is.” Wurth says there’s still no resolution to her grandmother’s case, but the kernels of that story can be traced through White Horse: a dis- appeared mother, controlling husbands, the confl ict of family and society and government agency. Fear and truth, items of magic, ghosts that want to tell their story, as all ghosts do. “I pride myself on creating more and more imaginative, non-autobiographical narrative, but in the end, Kari [White Horse’s main character] is a working-class Indian who’s self-educated. I might be a middle-class Indian with a Ph.D., but Kari and I have a lot in common. We’re both Gen X, we’re both cynical, we both probably take a joke a little too far sometimes,” Wurth laughs. “So I can’t deny that I have some things in common with my main character. I wouldn’t want to.” White Horse wasn’t always a novel — it began as a collection of short stories called White Horse Love. “It revolved around rela- tionships that were in some way connected to the White Horse Lounge over the years,” Wurth explains. “A lot of it was historical. But at a certain point, I started to write a science-fi ction novel. Slowly, as I started paying attention to not only what I was told to admire, but also what I was more naturally drawn to, I realized that I loved horror. In that, I was able to marry my love for specula- tive fi ction with dark realism in such a way that was still fun. I kept chopping away at it, and eventually what I had was this novel. I ended up only keeping the main character and her mother from that original draft.” What has remained in the transition from short-story collection to White Horse as novel is the sense of Denver history that pervades its ghostly tale. The bar and Lakeside are the most prominent, but scenes in the book also take place in the much-lamented, now-defunct Tattered Cover that once ruled over Cherry Creek North, and the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, itself famous for its own spirits. There’s his place, that we should just forget about what he said. I told him I couldn’t forget. But that he should remember that trash rejected him. He shrugged, knowing it was over. I grabbed Jaime’s hand, and pulled. She was angry with me, told me to calm down Kari, said, the guy said they hadn’t meant it, that we should go home with them and have some fun. I told her dead-eyed that she’d be going home with them on her own then, and then stalked towards the exit, smoking as I did. A few minutes later, she was beside me, pouting. I started walking, my thumb out. I told her to have some fucking dignity. She was silent. We found a ride, a truck that was going west. It dropped us off at the outskirts of the city, the place where the grasslands began to meet the mountains. And eventually, we found a ride going all the way to the Springs. But it took a while, our thumbs out in the dark, not far from the mountains where a boy had been killed by a lioness, also a locally mandatory mention of Casa Bo- nita, and even Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs gets a nod. Wurth says those choices were deliberate. “A lot of it has to do with nostalgia,” she says. “You attach to certain places and you don’t always know why. But it’s also just what was spooky. That’s what I was going for. Celebrity Sports Center is just not spooky.” Wurth is careful to say that she doesn’t consider this book to be a Native American novel, nor does she want to be known as only a Native American author. “Not everything I write has to be an education,” she says. “That’s no fun. I just want to be a writer and tell a good story and also be Native American. Someone once called me an activist, and that made me nervous, because there are people who’ve literally put their bodies on the line. That’s real activism, and to me, it’s extremely dis- respectful to accept that label for what I do.” Instead, Wurth wants the book to be read for its connection to people, place, time and history. “Human loneliness is a big part of the book,” she says. “The capacity that we all have to bury the things that have hurt us, even when we’re smart, even when we’re capable of confrontation.” It’s these small truths that Wurth teases out of the narrative of White Horse. The sort of thing that makes sense, that feels familiar, that we recognize on some level. The sort of thing someone might talk about sitting at a bar on West Alameda at any time in the past nine decades, three beers in but still alert enough to know to keep an eye on who comes through the door, who takes a seat next to you, and maybe, just maybe, that shadow in the corner by the jukebox that might have just blinked. Erika T. Wurth will launch her new novel, White Horse, at Tattered Cover Colfax at 6 p.m. Thurs- day, November 3; tickets (which include a copy of the book and a spot in the autograph line) are available now. Wurth will also appear at the Boulder Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, November 16, for a live recording in association with the KGNU Radio Book Club. Learn more at boulderbookstore.net. worried for her cubs when he went jogging past, too close. I didn’t speak to her the whole way, just smoked and smoked, glad I’d pulled the pack off the table before I’d left. When we got back, she told me that we should just forget about it, go back to my place, stay drunk. She had some tequila in her bag that she’d lifted from a liquor store. We walked down the empty streets, next to the beat-up Victorians, the shacks; the shadows long, the kids asleep who went to sleep, the others, like us, just maybe get- ting started. There was something sad and small and yet, almost otherworldly about Idaho Springs, like there were secrets in the cold, rocky ground that might spring up at any time. And take you down with them into the dark. Excerpted from White Horse: A Novel. Copy- right ©2022 by Erika T. Wurth. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Mac- millan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. NOVEMBER 3-9, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com
Westword flipbook 11-03-22
| Title Name |
Pages |
Delete |
Url |
| Empty |
Search Text Block
Page #page_num
#doc_title
Hi $receivername|$receiveremail,
$sendername|$senderemail wrote these comments for you:
$message
$sendername|$senderemail would like for you to view the following digital edition.
Please click on the page below to be directed to the digital edition:
$thumbnail$pagenum
$link$pagenum
Your form submission was a success. You will be contacted by Washington Gas with follow-up information regarding your request.
This process might take longer please wait
