Raven visits with Antoinette Nora Claypoole as they talk about her new book ” Ghost Rider Roads.”
In 1981, Antoinette Nora Claypoole moved from Pittsburgh, Pa. to the coast of Oregon. Born in Rochester, N.Y., as a young girl shetraveled the world. With her “army officer” parents. From Taiwan during the first wave of Americans living there in the late, 1950’s. To Sandia Base, New Mexico during Pres. Kennedy’s visit to her grade school. When she arrived as a “hippy chick”, in Oregon, she met the American Indian Movement (AIM), at a time “Indians were still being arrested in small towns”.
Working with/for Indians in AIM has informed Antoinette’s writing life and art. Her first book, Who Would Unbraid Her Hair: the legend of annie mae (1999, dist. Clear Light Books, Santa Fe, N.M.) chronicled American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash’s life, murder and legacy. The book was placed in “permanent collection” at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. Antoinette’s poems and literary non-fiction can be found in various places: sandstone dwellings and random literary journals. Taos, New Mexico is a one of Antoinette’s special homebases, while Ashland, Oregon is her literary birthplace and has been her home since the town had dusty roads and horses riding through it.
The fellowship award from Oregon Literary Arts (Creative Non-Fiction) which Antoinette received for her upcoming work on reviving the lost works of Louise Bryant (1885-1936) reflects her ongoing commitment to unsilencing, truth. Wild Embers, her small renegade literary press, has a vow. To publish stories before they are lost. Or forgotten. Ghost Rider Roads: American Indian Movement 1971-2011 collected/by Antoinette Nora Claypoole released in Jan. 2012 is Embers recent tribute to reviving lost histories.
Antoinette Nora Claypoole
www.wildembers.com
from new book about old AIM
Ghost Rider Roads (release date Jan. 2012):
“This is a memory keeper book.
For all the reasons visionaries plant victory gardens and poets learn to hitchhike. This book emerges. A tapestry of landscape. Threads of a weave which began with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and extend into and beyond all humans pressing up against uncertainty.
Through the years defined here, via these writings, reading the entries here, the reader can feel what American Indian history of the second half of the 20th century looked like. And discover not only history, but reality, right now, which like a painted desert, sprawls through Indian Country.”
–Antoinette Nora Claypoole, from the Foreword to Ghost Rider Roads
Make No Bones About It 