Sherman Alexie

I have been on a little bit of a binge on reading an author named Sherman Alexie. I recently read Reservation Blues, and loved it. I am now reading Ten Little Indians, which is a collection of short stories like The Lone Ranger and Tonto get into a Fistfight in Heaven. I also recently bought The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

I love Alexie's writing for a number of reasons. First of all, as evidenced by a recent appearance on CSPAN, Alexie is just really darned funny. This comes through a lot in his writing.

Alexie is also really brilliant in how he does character development as well. When you listen to Sherman's characters, it isn't long until you feel like you know them. And if you are like me, you can easily identify them with people you know.

Another thing I love about his work is that most of it takes place in a place that I know and love, the Pacific Northwest. Having grown up in Oregon, went to high school in Alaska, and served a church for five years in Montana, I can picture the places and hear the voices he speaks about.

Personally, what I love the most about Alexie is that his protagonists are always outsiders. The are outsiders in the Indian world they belong to, and they feel like outsiders in the mainstream society of the United States. Whether is the the bookworm that loves poetry going to WSU, or the Urban Indian adopted off the reservation from Seattle, I feel a kinship with these folks because they are loners and outsiders like me. Whether it is black-native mixed political operative, or a miserable working mother who strives to escape her family and job through letting them assume she died in a terrorist attack, Alexie's characters seem to have a sense of not feeling completely at home anywhere, and yet becoming more and more at home in their own skin and their own identity.

I like this outsider motif because I also often feel like an outsider. And yet, I am becoming more and more comfortable in my own skin. In high school I was the athlete and the honor student at the same time, but never completely in either circle. I am an intellectual with a master's degree, yet was raised around loggers, mill workers, fishing guides. I love the country and rural america, but yet I do not have country boy blue collar skills.

Yet nowhere do I feel more like an outsider than in my calling. I serve churches as a pastor, and yet I am not a very churchy person. I believe that the Bible is the the Word of God and seek to live by it, yet I often feel discouraged as I see people trust in interpretations of Scripture from people like Tim Lahaye (Left Behind) or James Dobson (Focus on the Family). I don't fit as a liberal or conservative, a mainliner, emergent, or evangelical. The church in many ways is my home and my love, and yet I am perpetually an outsider to it. At the same time, my deep faith and my peculiar ethical commitments make me an outsider to the rest of the world as well. Alexie speaks to this journey, and teaches through his fiction about how you can live that journey with a unique joy and passion in the midst of the sense of grief and frustration one may have as an outsider.