Going Off the Path with Adrian Jawort
Adrian Jawort
Earlier this year, a publishing project in Montana received a fair amount of attention: Adrian Jawort, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe who grew up in the Billings area, launched an anthology called Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century Montana American Indian Writers, Vol. 1. The extensive title, with the implicit promise of more Native writing to come, suggested equally ambitious plans. So did the website of Off the Path LLC, Jawort’s publishing company, which promises: “The Off the Path anthology is not afraid to be daring, bold, and go to where your head and heart craves to go—even if they didn’t know it yet.”
As you’ll see from this Q&A, Jawort—and the writers he’s championing—intends to follow through. We talked about how the first anthology came about, what’s missing from contemporary literature about life on the reservation, and the role of technology allowing this group of friends and colleagues to build a true grass-roots publishing company.
Walk me through the genesis of the idea behind the anthology. What was the moment where you and your partners decided, hey, we have to do this?
Cinnamon Spear
The idea had been something I’d contemplated for the last couple of years, but then I really started thinking about it seriously after I read a young Northern Cheyenne woman writer Cinnamon Spear’s work last October and I was blown away by the skill level well beyond her twenty-six years. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Dartmouth. A couple of weeks after I met Ms. Spear, as a journalist I covered a meeting in Billings about the proposed banning in the school district curriculum of the Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. After seeing dozens of people speak out passionately in favor of keeping the book in the curriculum and how important it was to both Natives and non-Natives personally, I knew there was a potential audience for more Native lit—especially if it could be from a Montana Indian point of view and by younger authors.
What was the response when you started soliciting pieces for the project?
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
Well, Cinnamon Spear has been very enthusiastic about it since day one, and has been a staunch supporter throughout. She deserves a lot of credit. I knew a couple of writers personally, but I also reached out to tribal colleges and universities and the like via my journalism contacts. One name that came up repeatedly was Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, a Blackfeet writer from Browning, Montana. Turns out he’d gone to the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, which would in itself be a pretty big deal for any Montana writer, and he just so happens to be Native. Anyway, the stories selected ended up being pretty bleak yet beautifully written. For Vol. 2 I’ve vetted out a unique crop of dedicated writers and the response from them so far has been basically, “It’s so cool you’re doing this and it’s much needed! I’d love to contribute something!”
Why Off the Path? What ideas did you want to push across with this project?
Foremost, I wanted to bring this literature by younger Montana American Indian writers directly to the intended audience: Natives and Montanans, and then ripple out from there. A lot of these stories could easily be picked up by a respected literary journal, but your average reader would likely never come across it. And I’m publishing not just one story in a magazine or journal, but an entire wide-ranging book that I’m taking directly to Indian reservations, tribal colleges, universities, local bookstores, and wherever else I need to go to find an audience that relates to it.
It’s also different in that a lot of people open the book perhaps expecting something typical and almost clichéd and formulaic about Native Americans, but this is very edgy and atypical. We do touch on plaguing real issues like suicide, abuse , alcoholism, and poverty that Natives out west deal with on a seemingly extreme level and a lot of it is biographical, but it’s still very original fiction. Off the Path has basically created a life force of its own and a lot of that stemmed from positive reactions to it. People just coming up and thanking me sincerely with tears in their eyes saying how they related so personally to this story or that story, or telling me how important this collection is for Natives. With future volumes in the works, we hope to continue feeding those reactions.
How much of a factor were digital publishing and print-on-demand technology in your decision to launch this publication?
The faster production and lower costs of getting books these days out were certainly huge factors. I’ve studied the publishing industry closely for years and there has been rapid and major changes lately like ebooks that big publishing houses have been slow to grasp because nothing much changed with the status quo for decades but the names, and they were the proverbial gatekeepers and that was that. Prior, novels and books traditionally would take about a year to 18 months to get published after acceptance, and that was after they got a hold of you months later, and often that was only after you were fortunate enough to land an agent. As a freelance journalist who is used to getting paid only after something is printed, that kind of wait would drive me nuts! Not that I’m getting rich or anything off of this first volume because I share the profits with other writers and throw a lot of my own personal money into it, but now it’s easier to merely take all if those middlemen out and speed up the process and do things like hire your own freelance editors or cover designers if need be, et cetera. With diligent work, I was able to get out a high quality, handsomely printed product that does justice to the content within. And although ebooks are free to make, a print book has seemed to be by far the preferred reading medium of Montanans at least.
But to make us a legitimate and dedicated independent press as opposed to merely self-published, I went through all the proper channels to get an LLC business license and did seemingly trivial but important details like purchase my own ISBN bar code numbers for the books. Your average book store won’t carry your book if you don’t have things like that covered, for instance.
What are your plans from here? Your website lays out a pretty ambitious vision statement.
I suppose it is! But why wait for someone else to give us permission to go forward, you know? Right now I’m just about booked up with Off the Path Vol. 2 writers, and I hope to have that out by the end of the year. That one will have a couple of returning Montana writers, but I’ve also expanded into areas like the southwest and South Dakota and elsewhere. I’m particularly excited that I have a 30-year-old indigenous Maori woman writer named Kim M. Harris from New Zealand who currently resides in Australia. Maori and Aboriginals have historically faced a lot of the negative affects of colonialization that mirror the Natives in North America, from attempted genocides to forcing children to go to boarding schools, yet they’re strong survivors and have kept their culture alive in spite of the West’s best attempts to eradicate it. I was actually going use Vol. 3 to get other countries involved, but again, why wait? Kim M. Harris was ready and eager to write for us, and so we were eager to publish her.
We also hope to eventually have a female Native writer anthology edited by Cinnamon Spear out next year, and another Off the Path contributor, Eric Leland Bigman Brien, convinced me a poetry anthology was something we should do and that will be out this later year. Plus, it will be a good way to be more inclusive to the general Native writing community who may be sitting on some good verses and get them to feel more like, “Off the Pass Press LLC is our press as well!”
And last but not least, I’ve also got a novel coming out this fall. I put that on hold as it’s vastly different than Off the Path and I didn’t want it to detract too much from it. It’s wild and sure to offend!
There’s been plenty of western writing about the reservations. What was missing from that narrative that you wanted to address?
Our own specific voices as told by younger Natives themselves. Although we Natives have, respectfully, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich and older writers representing us on the best seller lists, their experiences don’t mirror our own, and I wanted to showcase rising talent, hence the “21st Century” aspect of the title. Reservations and tribes may be similar in many ways in that we can always relate on some base level, but to note Natives as one singular conglomerate and say “Alexie speaks for all us!” is to negate all of those factors like language and cultural beliefs unique to individual tribes, and would be like claiming England and Germany and France are all alike just because they’re mostly white people. Alexie grew up with the Spokane Tribe in Washington state, but we have Montana-related experiences, and of course we all have vastly different writing styles.
How can people support this effort and get a copy of the book?
That evil Amazon.com. Jokes! But seriously I must touch on the now controversial Amazon.com subject because while those six- and seven-figure authors have been railing against Amazon—”Don’t buy from them! Only buy from local bookstores!”—many indie publishers have cringed when that’s said, because that’s a lifeline for us to be easily and readily available to those readers not from around here. Although we’d like to be in every bookstore like those bestselling authors already are, we simply aren’t yet, although we’re always reaching out and hoping to be carried in most Montana campuses and area bookstores. In the meanwhile, Off the Path is at places like The University of Montana and Fact in Fiction bookstore in Missoula; Elk River Books in Livingston, and Barjon’s Books in Billings as well as a few other places.
And of course one can also go to the website and there’s direct contact information on there to get a hold of me to receive an autographed copy.
