Chelsea T. Hicks on the Stories and Wazhazhe Language in 'A Calm & Normal Heart'

Ursa Short Fiction

Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton dive into the short stories of the acclaimed new collection A Calm & Normal Heart, with its author, Chelsea T. Hicks.

Hicks is a member of the Osage Nation, and the collection, published in June 2022 by Unnamed Press, also incorporates her ancestral language of Wazhazhe ie (which translates to “Osage talk”). The collection opens with a poem in the orthography, along with the Latinized spelling and English translation.

Read the full episode transcript.

Support Future Episodes:

Become a Member in Apple Podcasts or at ursastory.com/join.

About Chelsea T. Hicks

Chelsea T. Hicks is a model, author and current Tulsa Artist Fellow. She is a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation 2021 LIFT Awardee and her writing has been published in McSweeney’s, Yellow Medicine Review, the LA Review of Books, Indian Country Today, The Believer, The Audacity, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a past Writing By Writers Fellow, a 2016 Wah-Zha-Zhi Woman Artist featured by the Osage Nation Museum, and a 2020 finalist for the Eliza So Fellowship for Native American women writers.

Her advocacy work has included recruiting with the Virginia Indian Pre-College Outreach Initiative (VIP-COI), Northern and Southern California Osage diaspora groups, and heritage language creative writing and revitalization workshops. She authored poetry for the sound art collection Onomatopoeias For Wrangell-St. Elias, funded by the Double Hoo Grant at the University of Virginia, where she was awarded the Peter & Phyllis Pruden scholarship for excellence in the English major as well as the University Achievement Award (2008-2012). The Ford Foundation awarded her a 2021 honorable mention for promotion of Indigenous-language creative writing. She is planning an Indigenous language creative writing Conference for November 2022 in Tulsa, funded by an Interchange art grant.

Episode Links and Reading List:

• A Calm & Normal Heart (2022)
• Of Wazhazhe Land and Language: The Ongoing Project of Ancestral Work (Lit Hub)
• Osage writing system and orthography
• There There, by Tommy Orange (2019)
• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (1978)
• Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty (2022)
• America Is Not the Heart, by Elaine Castillo (2019)
• Men We Reaped: A Memoir, by Jesmyn Ward (2014)
• Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (2019)
• Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz (2021)
• Nobody's Magic, by Destiny O. Birdsong (2022)
• You Don't Know Us Negroes, by Zora Neale Hurston

More from Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton:

• The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deesha Philyaw
• The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, by Dawnie Walton

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://ursastory.com/join