College relationships sometimes go up in flames. In the case of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s short story, “Featherweight,” the breakup is particularly incendiary: “Allie cast me from her room, first striking me in the face with an open hand and then throwing a lighter at me that exploded against the wall as I left.” With a realism that’s both raw and mythic, HolyWhiteMountain hurls us into the heart of a timeless drama; he tells the story of two fiery lovers whose ancestors are sworn enemies.

When I asked the former Stegner Fellow and Iowa graduate about this story, he talked to me about the arduous editorial process. After The New Yorker accepted the story for publication, he found himself scrutinizing every single word. Growing up, he never imagined someone like him would publish in the magazine. “Has The New Yorker ever been sold on my reservation?” he wondered aloud. “Seems very doubtful.”

—Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: How many rounds of revision did “Featherweight” go through?

HolyWhiteMountain: I wrote the first version in spring of my first year at the Stegner. April of 2019, I think. But I had been thinking about this story for probably seven years before I drafted it. I knew I wanted to write a story about two characters like this, this particular kind of relationship. The original opening line was, “She came as fire. I left in flames.” I had totally forgotten about that until I was preparing for this interview, trying to figure out what to send you. It’s wild, there’s so much in the original that didn’t make it into the final. But I still feel it’s the same story. Anyway, I was struggling to put anything on paper for so long and then I had my Stegner reading coming up and decided I wanted to read something new. So I said fuck it, and drafted it in just two days. I revised it again last fall before sending it to my agent. Then we went through the whole New Yorker process, which is really intense.

Guernica: What’s that look like, editing with them?

HolyWhiteMountain: It looks like a lot of red on the page. [Laughs] I heard George Saunders, a few years ago, talk about how he’s been publishing for so long in all these different places and still The New Yorker totally marks his stories up in red whenever they accept one. It’s just what they do. There are a lot of small house style things. There are more commas than I would normally write with. But the editor was easy to work with. If there was something I strongly wanted to keep, I could keep it.

I felt so much pressure because I knew it was going to be in The New Yorker. At first, I was like, “This isn’t going to feel like that big of a deal to me.” Then it was like, “No, actually this feels like a really big deal.” It made me read my own sentences so closely and regard them in a way I had never done before. I had to sit with the story intensely and think about how all the parts were or weren’t cohering. How everything had to be justified by everything else. I felt like the guy in 2001: A Space Odyssey, at the end when he’s going through all the colored surreal landscapes, journeying into the cosmic abyss or whatever. Yeah, that’s how it felt.

Guernica: Comparing the two drafts above, I’m struck by how different they are. The detail of the obsessive phone calls is pretty much all that remains.

HolyWhiteMountain: That particular detail was really important to me. It feels like a defining experience of a breakup, doesn’t it? All those phone calls and texts. You don’t need to say anything about that moment. It tells you exactly where the relationship is, and where it’s going.

Guernica: One of the things I love about your story—and this paragraph too—is how deftly you move back and forth between the individual and the collective. This is a story of a breakup between two people, yes, but it’s also a much larger story of two peoples. You write: “I knew I could love her, because she was familiarly broken. She was from another tribe, people my people used to kill, so I knew it was okay to ask for her number.”

HolyWhiteMountain: I can only partially take credit for the brutal humor. One of my good friends who’s a Northern Cheyenne read the story and was like, “Man, there’s some lines in there that are extremely Blackfeet.” Blackfeet humor is so dark. That’s the sort of humor I grew up with.

I started writing this way when I was around 21 or 22, just after I read Sherman Alexie’s short stories. They were huge for me, because I realized I could write about what I knew. I’d never read a Native writer in my life. Didn’t even know they existed. I was coming from a very limited rural experience, growing up in Montana. Up until that point, I’d been basically imitating Hemingway and Carver, just trying to do what they could do. None of them wrote about the world I knew, my part of Indian country. Now, a big part of what I’m trying to do is to capture that world in a way that feels right to me, not like it’s written specifically for non-Indians. It’s a problem for Native art.

Guernica: How so?

HolyWhiteMountain: A lot of Native artists feel they have to orient themselves almost exclusively towards non-Indians, and I don’t want to do that. I want to speak in a way that reflects what I’m actually talking about. I realized at a certain point that one of the main differences between my experience and the experience of many white writers I read is that there doesn’t seem to be a sense of the collective in their writing. Whereas, for me, I need to write about the collective, the group, what it feels like to be part of that. So how can I write in that way without being merely anthropological or explanatory? There’s a particular way that people from Indian country talk to each other about being from Indian country. I want readers to hear what it’s like to be on the inside of that experience.

Guernica: To me, the voice feels really rich and varied. I love how you blend very colloquial phrases (“One moment we’re one way, the next we’re another”) with more archaic constructions (“Thus it is…”).

HolyWhiteMountain: The moment you start using a more formal language, it immediately changes the reader’s experience. I like using vernacular and then, all of a sudden, including something formal. It heightens the drama. I think fiction needs that in some way.

Guernica: Another striking aspect of the story’s voice is its masculinity. Much of the language feels very gendered.

HolyWhiteMountain: Yes, and I’ve heard other readers say that too. Again, that hypermasculinity is connected to Blackfeetness. We were a warrior culture. Certain attitudes are still around. It’s still in people. And not just men, but women too. I think one of the things that’s shocking to folks when they come to Blackfeet country is just how much power and force women have. It’s part of what distinguishes us.

One of the most common conversations among Indian people is about differences between tribes, which is something that almost never occurs on the public stage. We really are the original diversity. And that diversity is so broad, it’s almost incomprehensible to a single mind. This is why I think it’s so important for Native writers and artists to exist, and for us to express that diversity. It’s more than just having artists from different tribes. It’s also having those artists be honest enough to talk in a way that belongs only to them, so they’re not just speaking to the white man about themselves. And really, all good fiction feels like it’s talking to itself. Like it’s a writer in conversation with themselves, and the reader is listening in.

Guernica: You said in an interview that “fiction has to be about more than explaining something to the uninitiated. It has to be about more than your personal politics lest the work become mere propaganda. It also has to hit the deep human things that are common to all people.”

HolyWhiteMountain: America is always saying to Native people, “Explain yourself to us.” It’s such a common demand that I think a lot of Native people are responding to it without even really thinking about what gets lost as a result. Lately there’s an even more specific demand, which is not just “Explain yourself,” but “Explain yourself in such a way that we know exactly what your politics are.” In order to be “valid” Native art, it must be explicitly political in a way that matches this moment in time. I’m leery of responding to those demands. And part of why I’m leery is because, when I was younger, I was doing that. I was trying to write like that. Then, when I got to Iowa, I realized that I didn’t like that approach. I didn’t like thinking that characters needed to behave a certain way on the page. It didn’t feel honest, because that’s not how real people think and act on the ground.

What I’m most interested in is the psychology of characters. And psychology is something that’s bizarrely absent from Native art. It speaks to how powerful the demand is to see yourself from an external viewpoint rather than from your own interiority. Most Native people are so accustomed to looking at themselves from the outside, from the colonizer’s gaze, that they don’t necessarily realize they’re doing it. That’s how pernicious the process of colonization really is. It gets the colonized to think of themselves through someone else’s eyes.

Guernica: Are you conscious of all this when writing?

HolyWhiteMountain: In my first drafts I usually have a lot of explanation. Too much explanation. Then, as I revise, I bring the story down out of the arena of ideas and more into the world of the characters, if that makes sense.

Guernica: When a reader finishes one of your stories, do you want them to feel more informed or more moved? I realize they’re not mutually exclusive, but…

HolyWhiteMountain: I am 99 percent interested in the reader being moved and 1 percent interested in them being informed. It might even be less than 1 percent. I tell my students this too. There’s a set of demands that’s been placed on fiction because we’re living in an extremely political moment, which is fine. It is what it is and there are reasons for that. Now, I know there are plenty of people who would disagree with me about this, but if you’re producing a piece of art to make a singular political point, that’s propaganda. Period. Whether it’s liberal or it’s conservative. That is the definition of propaganda. And that’s not how the best fiction works. Fiction can’t be reduced to a single point, and that’s why people are still debating the meaning of Moby Dick.

I think fiction is fundamentally about having an aesthetic experience as a reader and having that experience be something that moves you in some meaningful way. This is what I tell my students. If you want to be informative, go write an essay. I honestly mean that. Write an essay. The death of fiction is being didactic. Nobody wants to hear a lecture when they’re reading fiction. But with essays, it’s different.

Guernica: I was actually wondering if we could discuss some of your essays. For example, your piece about Standing Rock.

HolyWhiteMountain: Can I first say one more thing about fiction?

Guernica: Of course.

HolyWhiteMountain: If you want to get politics into your fiction, the politics need to belong to the characters, not to you. That’s how you move out of the arena of propaganda and fully into the arena of fiction.

In terms of Standing Rock and my personal politics, I can express it very simply. I want full restoration of sovereignty to the tribes of the United States and the return of sacred sites. That’s my politics, basically. It took me years and years and years to figure out what I was looking at, and how I felt politically, and so on and so forth. I’m not interested in writing fiction that is merely trying to convince people that that’s what should happen. There’s a reason that political platforms are so simple. That’s how politics works.

Guernica: In “Featherweight,” Allie is very politically engaged.

HolyWhiteMountain: Right, and she gets totally burned out. In my experience, Native people that get involved politically hit burnout really fast. I’m haunted by this. Haunted. Some of the most brilliant thinkers I know in Indian country, many of them dropped out. Not just out of college. They dropped out of life, in a way. Being that kind of thinker, and having that kind of mind, and being a Native person, it’s so difficult and intense and overwhelming. They check out. I’ve seen it happen over and over. One of my friends from another reservation in Montana told me that she’s haunted by it too, that many of the smartest Indians aren’t participating in politics anymore. I needed to get all that into a character, so that became Allie. Not that she’s a container for an idea, more just that I needed people to see that someone like her exists. And frankly, it’s far more Native women than men who are engaged politically. Whenever you see Native political movements, they’re almost always started by women. Same with Standing Rock. When I was there, it was women running everything. And when I was at the protest rally at the Capitol building, it was almost all women who were talking. There were these twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls who were talking on the bullhorn, all the way up to elderly women who were praying in Lakota and talking. It’s so common to see that in Indian country. That’s just how things work. I had to get that kind of character on the page.

Guernica: Have readers from the Blackfeet community responded to your story?

HolyWhiteMountain: My cousin. He’s a pretty serious reader and he was proud of me. Some people at home read it and got a little angry, but I feel that’s a failure on their part to understand how fiction works. There’s a tendency to conflate the writer with the material, and that definitely happens as much in Indian country as anywhere else. People just assumed the narrator was me.

But the more important thing to me is that the publication of the story might be helpful someday to younger Native people. They might read the story and see that possibilities are open to them, the kind I didn’t see as a kid. I grew up thinking The New Yorker was just for other people. So maybe it will be different for them. It won’t seem so totally unattainable.

Guernica: I hope you’re right.

HolyWhiteMountain: You know what’s funny? When the issue came out, I went to Barnes & Noble and I bought it off the rack. I really wanted the experience of buying the physical The New Yorker and seeing my story in it. I went and did it. And then, as I was reading through it, I had the strangest experience. I had no feeling left for the material. I realized then that, for the reader to get the full feeling of the story, you as the writer have to reach a point where you don’t feel anything for it anymore. It no longer belongs to you. It’s weird, losing that intense connection to your own writing. I’d never heard anybody explain that to me, that you give all feeling over to the reader. But that’s how I understand it now.

To read more interviews from our Back Draft archive, click here.