Deborah Miranda delivers a presentation, “Writing Prompts from the Ancestors: Using Archives to Create a Hybrid Memoir,” at the 2024 Sierra Writers Conference.

In-person event, Nevada County Campus, Grass Valley, Room N-12. CLICK HERE for a general admission ticket for all in-person events.

What happens when the archive you need to write your memoir is fragmented, full of incomplete or broken information, and riddled with family trauma? Treating these fragments as opportunities rather than roadblocks means experimenting with blurred genres, time-travel, and learning to view everything and everyone as a collaborator in your writing process. In this presentation, Deborah Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, illustrates the writing methods she learned while on her path toward creating a hybrid memoir of her own life, and the history of her people, the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area.

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California; she has Santa Ynez Chumash, English and French lineage. In addition to Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, she is the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things), and co-editor of the Lambda finalist Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature. Deborah’s current project is a collection of essays examining gender and survivance in California missions, based on the stories of Isabel Meadows, an Indigenous storyteller born in 1846, who left behind extensive documentation of Indigenous cultures and histories in and around Carmel Mission. She recently completed a poetry chapbook titled maxana chempapisi: Blood Writing, in which each poem explores the depth of meaning in individual Esselen words or phrases, and is working on a “coffee-table” book about the missions told from an Indigenous perspective, tentatively titled When Missions Walls Talk, which deconstructs the glossy coffee table books sold in mission gift shops that function as genocidal propaganda against the lives of California Indians. Currently, Deborah and wife Margo Solod live in Eugene, Oregon.