In James, Percival Everett’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the character James writes, “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.” By doing so, James accomplishes a historic act in a world that prohibits enslaved people from writing down their stories. In Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen does the same, but I argue that she reaches this bar and exceeds it in profound and important ways. James is a fictional character who teaches us how sacred the act of writing is. It is so sacred that in the story, an enslaved character is lynched for stealing a pencil.
But Paschen is not fictional. She is an Osage author who is writing her story into being with the skill and talent of a master writer who has studied the craft her whole life for the singular reason of writing herself and her people into the present. Her work is a reminder of the attempt to erase a people and their language, and it is thrilling evidence that they failed because her story and the story of her people are told with such care, love, joy, and power, employing English and, in important places, the Osage language.