Montana Novelist and Bitterroot Salish Tribe Member

Debra Magpie Earling

author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

in conversation with series host

Michael N. McGregor

6 p.m., Thursday, September 12

Cascadia Art Museum, 190 Sunset Ave, Edmonds, WA 98020

(To order tickets through the Cascadia’s website, click here)

Debra Magpie Earling is the author of two novels: Perma Red—the beautiful but heartrending story of a young woman’s struggles against harsh conditions and threatening men on the Flathead Indian Reservation—and The Lost Journals of Sacajawea—a first-person imagining of how this woman we’ve always seen through the writings of men might have viewed her hardships, relationships, and adventures herself.

Perma Red—which won the Spur Award for the best novel of the West—has been called one of “the great American novels,” and the New York Times praised the Lost Journals—winner of a Montana Book Award—for being both “formally inventive” and “historically eye-opening.”

The stories of how these two novels came to be written and published are compelling themselves, as is Earling’s own story. Born in Spokane and raised in Montana, she’s a member of the Bitterroot Salish Tribe and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation. Later in her life, she taught in both the Native American Studies and Creative Writing programs at the University of Montana, becoming the first Indigenous director of the latter. Long before that, though–just three years after dropping out of school at 15 and one year after earning her GED and marrying at 17–she became the first public defender in the Tribal Justice System on the Flathead Reservation.

Earling went on to receive both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts award. She is the epitome of a writer who had to struggle against every kind of adversity yet succeeded in making her voice heard.

You can purchase Earling’s books online at the Edmonds Bookshop.

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About the Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation Series

On the second Thursday of each month, host Michael N. McGregor will bring one Northwest writer in front of an enthusiastic audience for a brief reading, a discussion of the author’s work, and a question-and-answer session with engaged literature lovers.

The series is intended to showcase the wealth of writing talent in the Pacific Northwest. To that end, it will feature writers from different genres at different stages of their careers who may have been overlooked rather than those readers already know.

Writers who appear in the series will be featured on WritingtheNorthwest.com.

This is a unique chance to hear talented writers speak in-depth about what it means to be an author in the Northwest and why and how they create their works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The conversations will all take place in one of Cascadia’s beautiful galleries, with Northwest art lining the walls.

Cascadia Art Museum is the only museum dedicated to artists and their works from the Pacific Northwest. Focused on visual art and design from 1860 to 1970, it is committed to the belief that recognizing previously neglected artists who made significant contributions to the region’s cultural identity gives us a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of Northwest art history. The Writers-in-Conversation series signals the museum’s desire to highlight underappreciated Northwest artists in literature as well. The series is sponsored by the Edmonds Bookshop and Holman.