Ghost Stories: An Interview with Author Debra Magpie Earling

Debra Magpie Earling’s award-winning novel Perma Red is the 2024 Spokane Is Reading selection. Two events with Earling will take place on October 24th, both free and open to the public. Also, separate from Spokane Is Reading, she will teach a ghost stories workshop at the Central Library on October 25th.

Spokane Public Library’s Writing Education Specialist Sharma Shields recently conversed with Earling over email about her novel, and here is their exchange.

Perma Red was deservedly one of 45 debut novels listed in The Atlantic Monthly’s “Great American Novels” list, which featured major literary opuses from 1923 to 2023. What are your thoughts about Perma Red being honored in this way?

I was astonished and giddy! I laughed out loud at my good fortune. All those years of dogged and grimly-hopeful determination, all those rejections, all those back-to-the-drawing board moments, through fire and reclamation and out-of-print years to then have my work recognized alongside Hurston, Morrison, Faulkner, Hemingway, Silko, and Erdrich is unbelievable. Luck, timing, and love lit my path—also family, friends, and my first editor, Greg Michalson.

I get goosebumps every time I re-read the first paragraph of Perma Red. Your prose is immediately textured, magical, and transportive. How have you honed your craft over the years to cultivate this atmospheric voice?

Atmospheric writing marries word choice to the uncanny. Writing is a spooky craft. As writers, we wish to put the listener into the story we are telling. And when we write with power, words transform and transport readers to other times and other places. I love the voices and conversations between old friends and lovers and family members. I listen for the constraints and limitations of communication, the way people’s voices soar or rumble or whimper or whine. Language is everywhere—in and among trees, canyon sounds, birds, water, breath. Expression.

People might mistakenly call this novel a love story, but for me this is first and foremost Louise White Elk’s story, a story of survival. How did Louise come to you and how did you develop such a complex woman on the page?

I was relieved when Perma Red was recast. The original jacket cast the men as suitors and did not highlight a woman seeking all ways to survive under heart-breaking and brutal practices of governmental assimilation of Native people.

Louise is based on the life story of my Aunt Louise. I was always drawn to the stories my mother and aunts told me about Louise’s headstrong personality and dazzling charisma. Louise was a victim of boarding schools and government agents who attempted to break her connection to her people, and to herself.

Louise died when my mother was only 14 or 15 and she couldn’t remember where her sister had been buried, only that she had been buried out on Camas Prairie in 1947. I searched for her grave in old cemeteries on lost allotment lands. After the Allotment Act illegally divided the Flathead Reservation, many Indians sold off their allotments because they couldn’t feed their families. Large areas of land were sold for pennies. Cemeteries were fenced off but cattle broke down the fences, and do so even now. Graves are trampled. Disregarded.

As I searched for Louise I heard other stories about her. One farmer described her eyes and how they turned green in sunlight, how she was fearless and swam in the Flathead River where others wouldn’t swim. How she was funny and smart and never backed away from fun or trouble. How everyone, men and women, were irresistibly drawn to her. I found Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) papers of her struggles, of forced schooling, constant humiliations, and removal from the Flathead, and then back again to Indian boarding school at St. Ignatius. I read many incidents of arrests for truancy and how she was able to outsmart the police, both tribal and state. I read letters she’d written to the Agency Superintendent, just seven years old, letters where she begged to go home, and later begged for socks and underpants, and I read about her relief from being sent away to all white schools where kids made fun of her, the only Indian.

How did you approach writing about the land? Was it from visceral memory?

My parents traveled to Montana often to fence off my grandmother and great-grandmother’s land. It was miserable work in the fields of Perma, dusty fields and rattlers, relentless sun and miles of fence posts to dig. Misery sparks writing. I’d look off to the alkali-green Flathead River and wish I were back in Spokane. Montana wasn’t desirable to me then. Nothing happened. Streets rolled up way before dark. The movie theater in Hot Springs smelled like rotten eggs and creeping mold and had the audacity to play terrible movies like “That Darn Cat” and “Flubber.” Only my mother made the place magical with her stories. Perma was lit with her generous memory.

Can you talk about your Spokane roots and what impact they’ve had on your writing?

I was born in Spokane and I love all the stories and memories of my days there. My experiment with writing began in 7th grade at St. Paschal School in the Spokane Valley when Sister Bernard challenged us to write a ghost story. I had been reading dime store paperbacks all summer. I was fascinated with weird tales. I fashioned a tale about a woman who’d moved to the country, ignoring the history of her newly bought farm where a mean-spirited boy had been struck by lightning. We had to end the story at a critical point. I ended with the line, “I fell, and my screams pierced the cold black air around me.” I thought the line was original. Ha. But I never forgot the look on my classmates’ faces when I walked back to my desk.

In the 8th grade my best friend Susan died and I tried to hold on to her through writing. I wrote about the haunted railroad tracks Susan and I walked on our way to school, the lilac bushes where we hid from the nuns, the sound of squealing girls, the scent of snuffed candles, autumn leaves and blue snowstorms swirling at school windows, the deep wonder and consternation of Catholicism as translated by a nun who believed when you died, no matter your age, you would be 33 years old forever. Writing became the scent of lilacs, blacktop and jump ropes, my mother’s stories, my brother Dennis’s humor, the stuff of memory, and the desire to fasten life experience to the page—the impossible task! I felt I had to write certain stories, hard stories. Now I feel I’m entering the hallowed space where I get to write what I truly want to write, fantastical stories, even whimsical stories, ghost stories maybe, or not.