The line captured that sense of being tribal, being from a reservation—and the fact that you could never leave. I was the first person in my family ever to go to college, leaving the reservation, leaving my tribe, feeling excited about going but also feeling like I’d betrayed the tribe. And knowing that no matter where I ended up, or what I did, I would always be there. Some large part of me would always be there, on the reservation.

At the same time, I’d never seen myself in a work of literature. I loved books, always, but I didn’t know Indians wrote books or poems. And then to see myself so fully understood in one line of a poem, as though that one line of a poem written by someone else was my autobiography ... It was like understanding human language for the first time. It was like hearing the first words ever spoken by a human being, and understanding for the first time the immense communicative power of language.

I had never intellectualized this feeling that I’d had my entire life. And then, to hear the thing aloud. To see it in print. These are the kind of emotions that nobody puts words to, at least not where I’m from. So an intellectual and emotional awakening were fused in this one line. They came together and slapped me upside the head.

I’d written stuff before, but it was always modeled after greeting cards or the standard suspects: Joyce Kilmer, a Keats poem. The classics that every high school kid reads. But as soon as I saw that poem, I knew I could write about myself—my emotional state, the narrative of my emotional life. When I wrote before, I was always wearing a mask—I always adopted a pose. I was always putting on a white guy mask. And all of a sudden, I could actually use my real face.

Immediately, I started writing poems. The poems I wrote were about things that actually happened. I didn’t think an Indian’s life was important enough to write about until Louis gave me permission to do it. My first poem was called “Good Times," after a Lucille Clifton poem. My poem's original title was “In the HUD House,” but I changed it later. It’s in my first book, The Business of Fancydancing, and it’s probably the only one I still have memorized.

Bang. It was right there. It was waiting for me. People talk about “that moment when you just know”—I don’t think that many people actually have that moment. But I did. And from then on, there was never a Plan B.

I started publishing with the micro-presses, 26 years ago. I was published in journals that were photocopied and hand-stapled. With print runs of a hundred or less. With names like Tray Full of Lab Mice and Giants Play Well in the Drizzle. I was finding acceptance in those kinds of journals: None of the other Indian writers had really ever sent them anything. So when this Indian voice, which they’d never heard before, came in by mail—well, I got published quickly in those journals. The first five or six submissions I sent out were accepted. I ended up in the journals with Bukowski a lot. It was those kinds of places. There was a similar ring to our work—his was much rowdier, but it was the same notion of a desperate life.