DEBORAH TAFFA is the director of the MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She’s a citizen of the Yuma Kwaa-Tsaan Nation and a descendant of Laguna Pueblo. During her tenure, the program has seen crazy success, with an outsized number of Native authors being signed by major book publishers. What is her secret?
You teach a creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
I’m from Santa Fe, so working at IAIA is like a homecoming for me. My mission here is to jump start writing careers. And it’s working.
How do you teach creative writing? That seems sort of impossible.
Yeah, for sure. I always tell people that storytelling is one of the most natural things that we do. Imagine that tomorrow, you lost the people with whom you felt the closest in the world, they were all gone. Now you have to create new relationships with new people at a deep level of intimacy. There would be certain stories from your life that if they understood, they could say they knew who you were. We know how to tell those stories!
So while storytelling is very natural, finding an order for your information that makes sense is not easy. We don’t think linearly, our brains have a jumble of impressions and memories. And you can’t include everything. A large part of learning how to write is learning how to cut and arrange, cut and arrange. You have to find that magic that lifts writing off the page and makes it good.
But as a teacher, can I create a writer? No. You have to have the passion to sit down and stick with it. There has to be intense internal pressure of something you want to say. You have to have something, a driving force, that makes you go back. It can’t be something that comes from the encouragement of others. It’s really hard. Very, very hard.
One thing that writers don’t talk about very much is self-care. It’s so demanding – you can write for two or three hours and be completely shot for the rest of the day. Because you have been confronting a lot of emotional content that most of us in our daily lives try to avoid. It’s just too much heavy lifting.
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