How did you go about finding the links between those many strands? NEA: You do such an excellent job of weaving together personal trauma with cultural trauma, and then linking them together with observations of the natural world. Jensen, who is Métis, recently spoke with us about Carry, and how she hopes the book will impact our personal and national psyche.
Part personal narrative and part national reckoning, the book is a meditation on the intersection of gun violence, violence against women, and America’s long history of violence against indigenous communities, drawing powerful connections between how the body and the land are treated-and mistreated-by our society. The result is Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, which was released in September by Penguin Random House. “ All of that, I think, propelled me to not think of this as just a few moments in my life, but rather as a book project,” Jensen said. Both episodes were separated by just a few months from the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed. That same summer, her nephew had his own encounter involving racial tensions and guns. There was the incident at the water protector camp near Standing Rock, where she was confronted by two men brandishing a gun. In 2016, national headlines about gun violence began to bleed uncomfortably into the personal experiences of NEA Creative Writing Fellow Toni Jensen.
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