Tyler Hill couldn’t find a children’s book about Native American kids who play lacrosse to read to his three children at bedtime. So he wrote one himself.
“Wormburner” follows the story of Canoe, a 10-year-old Native American boy whose life revolves around lacrosse. The title comes from a type of fast, targeted lacrosse shot in which the ball whips just above the ground’s surface.
“I wanted something that I could read to my own kids – something they would identify with and be proud to hear,” Hill said. A member of the Mohawk Nation, Hill has also written about Native Americans and lacrosse in short movie scripts; a nonfiction book about the sport is in the works.
Hill, who lives in North Syracuse, New York, and grew up nearby on the Onondaga Nation, is one of 14 authors from upstate New York participating in the Oñgwaga•ä’ Writers Workshop; “Oñgwaga•ä'” is Haudenosaunee for “our story.” Cornell’s Center for Cultural Humility is running the free virtual weekly workshop sessions through Oct. 24, to highlight the work of Native American writers and help them cultivate the skills to enhance and disseminate their projects. Each of the seven sessions is taught by Cornell staff, faculty members and graduate students, most in the Department of Literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Topics range from imagery and writing exercises to poetry, memoir and the publishing process. In the first session, Joanie Mackowski, associate professor of literatures in English (A&S), asked the authors to describe a scene without using descriptive words.
“That really opened things up for me,” said Hill, who transformed a dream about a beam of light in outer space into a poem. “Those things that you would never create without the help of the professors – I love that.”
In a recent session, Ernesto Quiñonez, associate professor of literatures in English (A&S), encouraged the students to “steal” from archetypal plots and characters and put their own literary fingerprints on them. Writers have always done that, he said, citing numerous movies, novels and poems.
For example: The plot of “Wuthering Heights” also appears in “The Great Gatsby,” which in turn was inspired by Petronius’ “Satyricon.” And Vladimir Nabokov, who was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell from 1948-59, drew closely from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” to create the title character of his 1955 novel, “Lolita,” Quiñonez said.
“When does stealing characters and plots go over the line of copyright infringement?” a participant asked.
“A lot of these plots are archetypes, so it’s very hard to say ‘Oh, that’s [F. Scott] Fitzgerald’s plot’ – boy meets girl, boy loses girl because he’s poor, boy makes a fortune and wins the girl,” Quiñonez replied. “It [the plot] also happens in ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’ It’s all over the place.”
Quiñonez encouraged the participants to refashion classic characters and plots with their own voices, tastes and experiences. “Take the characters that you love who are not Native Americans and turn them into Native Americans. Tweak your character, and there it is,” he said. “What about a Latin American ‘Notes from Underground’? A ‘Notes from Underground’ but Native American? That sounds interesting – let’s run with that.”
Writers try to get readers interested in their characters, Quiñonez added. “And the more that we put of ourselves in these characters, the more interesting, I believe, they will be.”
Katherine Zaslavsky, a doctoral candidate in the graduate field of sociology, is acting as a mentor to the participants. The writers are extremely talented, she said, both in conceptualizing their work and crafting it in their voices. “I do what I can to create an environment that allows them the freedom and resources to do what they do best: write what calls to them.”
