Dear Festival Friends, 

In her book The Art of Memoir, the great Mary Karr writes, “In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”

We’re delighted to welcome to the Festival a writer who has perfected the self-inflicted face punch. Deborah Jackson Taffa’s memoir Whiskey Tender, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, is about growing up as a mixed-tribe Native American torn by the pressures of assimilation. In its aching honesty, the book is reminiscent of Karr’s work, something The Washington Post acknowledged in its review: “In its mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and its excavation of a particular place and time, Whiskey Tender recalls Mary Karr’s now-classic memoir The Liars’ Club. What sets Taffa’s memoir apart is its study of the political, racial and ancestral forces that shape a life.”

In Whiskey Tender, Taffa lays bare not just herself and her family but her entire culture. “Native memoirs are rare because there are rules on Indian reservations,” she writes. “Talking to outsiders is taboo.” To speak out was to invite scrutiny, interference, and judgment. But Taffa says to hell with that and lets rip. She writes of her father uprooting the family from their home on the Quechan (Yuma) reservation in southeastern California to live in Farmington, New Mexico, on the edge of the Navajo Nation, where they were outsiders twice over, fitting in neither with whites nor with the local tribal population. Taffa weaves her own story with the decades of government oppression that robbed Native Americans of their land and heritage. It’s a history that was largely overlooked in Taffa’s household as her parents worked to give their children a solid, middle-class upbringing. “I’d spent my whole life trying to succeed in the ways my parents thought would free me—working hard to impress my teachers, studying to get good grades—but I felt more trapped than ever,” she writes. “And the only moments when I felt anything close to uplifted were the moments when I got the chance to explore the very culture and the history that my parents wanted me to leave behind.”

While she was writing Whiskey Tender, Taffa won a PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, awarded to noteworthy works in progress. In addition to receiving a nomination for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the memoir was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal and was named a best book of the year by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Time, NPR, and Publishers Weekly. We’re inordinately proud of Whiskey Tender’s success because Taffa is a hometown treasure who has been a friend of the Festival since day one. As director of the MFA program in creative writing at the renowned Institute of American Indian Arts here in Santa Fe, she has been a guiding light for a generation of authors, including Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange, who joined us at last year’s Festival.

At the Festival next month, Taffa will be on stage with another hometown hero, Hampton Sides, author of The Wide Wide Sea, named one of the ten best books of 2024 by The New York Times.

They’re sure to have a memorable conversation, so get your tickets now!

IN OTHER NEWS

Our literary film series continues apace! Please join us at Violet Crown next Wednesday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. for Julian Brave NoiseCat’s award-winning documentary film, Sugarcane about an investigation into abuse and missing children that ignites a reckoning at the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Mark Bryant | Clare Hertel

Jenny Kimball | James McGrath Morris

Carmella Padilla | Jenna Scanlan

Mary Sloane | Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant