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Essay by Gabriel Moseley •

I had the great pleasure of meeting Deborah Jackson Taffa at the Vermont Studio Center in October 2023, where she was the Visiting Writer. It was stick season—the dismal threshold between the time of fiery foliage and the onset of snow—but for me, it was a season of stories. Getting the chance to work alongside a dedicated community of writers and visual artists meant a lot to me—as did the opportunity to hear Jackson Taffa read from Whiskey Tender, to meet with her one-on-one, and to hear her lecture on craft. This encounter has deeply affected my approach to storytelling. 

In her lecture, Jackson Taffa pointed out that far too often, without even realizing it, writers tend to write with even pacing and tone. While consistency can have its place, she said, this sort of unintentionally plodding prose fails to capture the potential drama, insight, and beauty that might have been gained by slowing down and expanding the most critical moments. She urged us to inhabit these moments, to make readers feel them deeply. She called this concept “The Power of Once.”

The concept may sound quite simple, and in many ways it is, but simple can be important; it can be the difference between a reader setting a story aside forever and a reader underlining every word of a passage, enthralled, and eagerly turning pages to find out what happens next. 

The idea of highlighting certain moments above others is a significant one in the realm of craft discussions. Janet Burroway has an insightful exploration of scene versus summary in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. For pacing, I often recommend Gary Provost’s fantastic lesson, “This Sentence Has Five Words.” I also really enjoy Barry Lane’s revision strategy of “Explod[ing] a Moment” (while intended for a younger audience, the advice holds true for us all—plus he gives a dramatic portrayal of vengeful milk pouring). 

But to me, Jackson Taffa’s emphasis struck a different chord. Perhaps a deeper one. 

While Jackson Taffa similarly urged writers to slow down and expand sensory details to highlight the most important scenes, her approach goes beyond these techniques. It has more to do with the manner in which you approach storytelling itself. 

The concept reminded me of the Japanese idiom, ichigo ichie. 

One encounter, one chance. 

The origins of the phrase are rooted in the traditions of the Japanese tea ceremony. As quoted in The Book of Ichigo Ichie: The Art of Making the Most of Every Moment, the Japanese Way, Ii Naosuke wrote in 1858: “Each tea ceremony should be treated with great attention because it is ichigo ichie, which is to say, a unique encounter in time…. If we consider the extraordinary nature of every moment, we realize that each encounter is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.”  

You only have one chance, so act accordingly—give the encounter your full attention and full presence. So too, in storytelling of any kind. 

The Power of Once is not just an abstract concept that Jackson Taffa recommends in craft talks—it’s one she manifests on every page, both in the way she immerses the reader in the lived experience of these critical moments and in the selection of which moments to enter so vividly. 

I could very well draw passages from any chapter to explore this idea, but “First Funeral” cuts particularly deep. As always, Jackson Taffa begins the chapter with a fantastic opening: “Sister Benedict said we’d be attending the funeral of a prominent Realtor. That’s how she said it, like he was an appendage to his career.” Gripping, clear, funny, and memorable. We learn that their third-grade class is meant to sing at the funeral of this “prominent Realtor.” The other students have many questions about what funerals entail. But instead of answering the questions, Sister Benedict shares a harrowing story about the death of her twelve-year-old sister, who died after her “pajamas caught fire while she was trying to curl her hair using metal tongs heated with a gas burner.”

This story, told in gruesome detail (once again, quite memorably), has a devastating effect on the entire class—all except Jackson Taffa.  

Suddenly Sister rapped her knuckles against her desk. Her voice rose like it did when she preached from the Old Testament. “There is nothing simpler than death, no reason to hide it from children, and you will open your mouths wide when you sing at the funeral. Do you hear me? You will not cry.” 

To my left, Nicole swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, while on my other side, a boy blinked back tears. They were trying their best to do as Sister had commanded, but they were struggling. Meanwhile, my own eyes were dry as dust. 

So much drama, so much strangeness, so much tension. It is not just a moment of strong emotion—it captures surprise, change, and, perhaps, transgression—which are often attributes of the moments that Jackson Taffa chooses to expand and dramatize. This section also sets up the one to follow so very well.  

Finished with her story now, Sister Benedict sat at her desk, but after a moment she looked up again and noticed me. More than noticing, she scrutinized me like she did when we studied the Bible. I saw her take in my tearless cheeks, and at first, I felt proud to have kept my composure while my classmates fell to pieces all around, but then something shifted in her expression and I had to wonder whether pride was, in fact, what I should have been feeling. Her suspicious eyes seemed to ask what kind of girl didn’t cry when faced with her story. 

Suddenly, with Nicole sniffling beside me, I became convinced that I’d made a mistake. I was sure that, by failing to cry, I’d let Sister see the Native side of me, the howling, dry desert I often felt moving inside my chest. I wasn’t like the other children, that’s what her gaze seemed to recognize. I came from a place that was not unfamiliar with death. 

This shift in understanding, this dawning recognition of Sister Benedict’s brutal judgment, is not merely described—we are cast into this moment. We feel it. Jackson Taffa does not step back to editorialize—we feel the reverberations of what she felt in this moment, through the haunting, visceral, poetic description of the “howling, dry desert I often felt moving inside my chest.” We feel this shift from pride at her stoicism to a new, sickening insight into how Sister Benedict perceives not only Jackson Taffa, but Native Americans as a whole. And the last line hits so very hard. 

Which, in turn, sets up the crescendo at the end of the chapter. I will not spoil what leads up to this moment—the way spirituality is contrasted with the dogma of organized religion and so much more. I will simply share this moment, this last encounter of the chapter, and let you feel it for yourself. 

I thought of the gourd rattles and the midnight criers. I thought of how the bodies looked in the dark. I thought of my own small body, already aged, frail and dying itself. I looked at Sister, who was trying to elicit shame, and I refused to cry. I remembered the fiery sun and smoking barren desert we had crossed on our way back inside the Cry House. I could hear the bird clan singing in my mind, and I felt strong.

I turned away from Sister Benedict and felt her talon-hands shoving me back toward my desk. I leaned backward into her push, dragging my feet as she urged me along. I wanted to howl and howl loudly, but I shoved it all down, deep in my body. I felt the rumble and tremor, but I refused to let it rise to the surface. I refused to let it rise because the howling was beautiful. I had seen that it was beautiful, and Sister did not understand—and Sister did not deserve to see. 

To me, this scene is a perfect representation of a point that Jackson Taffa makes in the interview that follows below, when asked about language and lyricism: “The language itself is more important to the portrait than the event itself. Writing is an incantation by which we purchase another body. We enter into readers’ physicality, perhaps even beyond our death, to make them feel what we want them to feel with the vibration of our telling.”

To me, The Power of Once, as Jackson Taffa manifests so compellingly, is precisely this incantation, this poetic, visceral breaking of the boundaries between self and other, such that we feel the moment physically. We are there. We feel it.   

Throughout Whiskey Tender, the moments of greatest emotional impact are explored in depth, with tenderness, grit, or both, but always with startling intensity, an element of movement or change, and lyrical, entrancing prose. 

We feel the vibration of Jackson Taffa’s telling through the force of her language and through the care and attention with which she approaches every encounter with the reader. Every moment matters. Every word. This style of storytelling is at the heart of what makes Whiskey Tender such a profound experience—one that I will never forget. 

 

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Gabriel Moseley: Your memoir is a stunningly beautiful, important book. Could you speak a little about the story behind Whiskey Tender? What most inspired you to share this story?

Deborah Jackson Taffa: Being Native American with access to ancient traditions and earth rituals has been the greatest gift of my life. At the same time, growing up was confusing. Understanding my place in a country that has an identity built on propaganda was difficult. As a child, I was sold a version of American history that purposefully excluded the stories, successes, and contributions of my people. Native Americans serve as the United States’ guilty conscience, but that conscience is too often a blind spot rather than a reckoning. Seeing this cognitive dissonance in the country, I wanted my memoir to correct the mainstream story. Many misassumptions have endured into the present day, and I kept reminding myself that I didn’t want my grandkids to encounter the same barbs I did growing up. In this way, my memoir was meant to be a source of relief for Indigenous children.

As my family’s personal struggles began to take shape on the page, I realized that the stories could only be told in context—in relation to governmental policies—if I wanted them to relieve, rather than create pressure, for Indigenous futures. I had to reveal the extraordinary societal and governmental pressures my parents and elders had fought in a collective, nationwide struggle. Americans are mostly ignorant about the termination policies enacted prior to Nixon, the effects of atomic bomb testing in New Mexico’s rural communities, the forced assimilation via Indian boarding schools and the Indian Relocation Act, and the role that the Peonage Act played in freeing Indigenous slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation. I realized I could reveal my family’s struggles ethically (without it becoming a trauma narrative) if I wrote our story in context, illustrating the way governmental policies interfered with our lives and shaped our efforts to pursue the American dream.

 

GM: The idea of storytelling plays a crucial role in Whiskey Tender. In the opening chapter, “Animas,” you write, “Tell me your favorite childhood memory, and I’ll tell you who you are” (a line I love!). Later, as you explore your parents’ marriage, you reveal their ability to reshape events through storytelling: 

Mom’s protestations never fooled me. She loved the memory of stolen roses, as well as Dad’s claim that her beauty swayed the cops, but what made her light up especially was the way he called her his lucky charm.

This is how my parents twisted bad things around, seeing the appearance of events in fun house mirrors, stretching memories tall and pretty when they really were goofy and squat. They knew a story could be told in various ways, and this is how they chose to shape theirs—and how they would teach me to shape mine as well—by molding their wedding day car accident into their first blessing as a couple. 

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the inherent power and complexity of storytelling. How did you navigate sharing both your own perspective and those of your family? Did the act of writing this story alter your own understanding of yourself and those around you? 

DJT: I think we all have a default lens. It’s a version of our story that often casts us as a victim or blames other people for the personal ways in which we fail to achieve our goals. Storytelling often begins in protection mode. Our ego intervenes to blind us to our own positionality and responsibility in the story. The further we dive into the act of self-reflection, the more we see ourselves clearly. Writing Whiskey Tender allowed me to forgive my family, my neighbors and teachers, and most importantly, myself. My understanding increased by writing this book. I repaired my relationship with my history: the racism, the fear, and the anger of my youth. I came to appreciate those struggles and see the memoir as an act of reclamation. It led me to a greater appreciation of my culture. Native people have a great deal to offer. Being Indigenous has been my greatest wound and my greatest gift.

 

GM: Whiskey Tender is structured as a chronological coming-of-age story—a journey of discovery, which follows your life from childhood to the end of high school. But each chapter is also self-contained, with its own narrative arc and thematic focus. I understand that several of these chapters began as separate essays, but I was particularly struck by the way you wove the different strands of each one together across the whole book, so that every chapter deepened, expanded, and illuminated what came before. Could you talk a little about how you developed the structure for Whiskey Tender? Any tips for creating strong narrative arcs within chapters? 

DJT: I was training in the art of the essay at the University of Iowa, where I received my MFA. There, the memoir is often looked down upon for the way it is driven by plot rather than deep insights that would serve greater complexity. Having made a distinction from action narratives that coalesce around clichés, I wanted to write something that had philosophical heft. For this reason, the book first found a solid frame as a series of essays. Each of the essays was a standalone piece. There was no narrative arc. At this stage, the book was structured to explore a different type of violence in each essay: domestic, police, environmental, church, sexual, et cetera. It almost sold at this stage, but immediately after I received the offer, I started to have doubts. I spoke with my agent, and together, we wondered if the book might become structurally more complex, by which I mean we thought it might have a narrative arc that allowed for each “chapter” to also work as a standalone “essay.” I refused the offer of publication right before the pandemic and spent the next two years revising the frame. 

 

GM: While a deeply personal and intimate story, Whiskey Tender also integrates so much vital historical information. As Tommy Orange says, “We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this…. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently.” How did you weave in so much historical information in such a seamless, engaging way? How did you strike this balance between critical insight and such tenderness? 

DJT: I was living on the Yuma Reservation with my husband and kids in my late twenties. My husband was employed at the casino, and I got involved with the tribe. I taught yoga to the elders and solicited votes for my Uncle Mike’s first term as tribal president. Every step of the way, I spoke to community members: elders, distant relatives, various cousins, and the tribe’s medicine man. We cremated two of my grandfathers’ sisters in my time there, and I sat with them on their porches before they walked on, transcribing their stories. Once I arrived in Iowa City for my MFA, I had access to a radio lab, and I used it to record approximately thirteen hours of interviews with my parents. County libraries, the Arizona Historical Society, and our tribal museum were places I walked through to think and take notes. I spent hours bent over old photos at my parents and my aunt’s house, all of which filled in missing pieces, and gave me critical insight.  

The book’s tenderness (and structure) are a result of trauma and love. Trauma pushed me to write; love led me to do so with compassion. I tried to understand rather than ascribe blame. To write historic and personal stories in tandem is simple only in theory. Weaving the two elements together without tonal shifts from storytelling to academic speech was challenging craft-wise. I didn’t want to employ white space to shift from personal anecdotes to historic information because that’s not the way we experienced governmental meddling in our lives. If I could weave and make the two threads integral to one another, it would give the reader a mimetic understanding of how inseparable the political and personal are in Indian country.

 

GM: I’m far from alone in appreciating the beauty and lyricism of your prose, but I practically underlined the entire book! In an interview with Santa Fe Magazine, while discussing your role as a teacher and director of the Institute of American Indian Arts, you share some insight into teaching successful writing: “A large part of learning how to write is learning how to cut and arrange, cut and arrange. You have to find that magic that lifts writing off the page and makes it good.” I would love to hear your advice on how to find this type of magic at a sentence level. How do you write so lyrically? Do you read (and/or write) a lot of poetry?  

DJT: I don’t know that I can say this better than Elena Ferrante: “Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.” I couldn’t agree more. We write by ear. The more we write, the more we recognize how the tone of what we are saying, as well as the word choice on the page, plays into the meaning. The language itself is more important to the portrait than the event itself. Writing is an incantation by which we purchase another body. We enter into readers’ physicality, perhaps even beyond our death, to make them feel what we want them to feel with the vibration of our telling. 

 

GM: I had the great pleasure of attending your craft talk at the Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 2023, in which you spoke about the way different eras have different narrative responsibilities, the perils (and cowardice) of irony, and the need for a new sincerity in art. Could you speak about this shift from postmodern fragmentation/irony to sincerity? Who are the new literary rebels?

DJT: I think hipster writing that employs sarcasm, cynicism, and a certain fatalistic worldview is a very outdated form of writing. The world is on the brink. Genocide, climate destruction, the rise of fascism—now is the time to take risks. If we aren’t risking sentimentality, I don’t know that we are risking anything on the page. Writers must dare to care. (The structure of my book was deeply influenced by David Foster Wallace’s call for a “new sincerity.”) Generationally, we live in a time with very high stakes. I don’t need you to be a smart-ass wit (how clever) for three hundred pages; I need to know where you stand, and what you stand for. This is, of course, subjective, and I feel the need to clarify that I am not talking about didactic writing. I think it’s important to bury our black-and-white stances (if we, in fact, have them) with descriptive writing, irresolvable questions, and lyric passages. We don’t want to condescend to our readers. We want them to face the conundrum for themselves. 

 

GM: In this same craft talk, you also shared a wonderful writing prompt. As I recall it, you encouraged writers to explore the ways that they are unexpectedly out of step with their communities. Could you speak a little about the idea of locating a threshold—a liminal space—from which to write? 

DJT: At the time, I was speaking about how authors often stand in-between (in some way or another). Perhaps our gender or history is hidden, even though we seem basic and/or same-same as everyone else. I think our identity, our wounds, and our positionality arise with great strength in those times and places where we feel out of step, especially if the disjuncture is hidden or occurs in a way that isn’t immediately obvious to others. I think of myself, for example, as standing between two rooms. I have my father’s thoroughly Indigenous identity, and my mother’s Chicana identity. I have my own life as a high desert woman, set against my children’s identity as half European. Those are very rich topics and identities for me to mine because they are unsettled, intersectional concerns involving my identity. They are large and influential in my life without being easily “answered.” The definition for threshold is interesting to note here. At least one definition reads, “the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur.” For me that intensity is generative. It creates stories. 

 

GM: By maintaining such close focus on your childhood, Whiskey Tender captures all the best elements of a bildungsroman. We get to experience your journey in such a compelling, visceral, and intimate way. But to keep this focus on your childhood, you also necessarily had to leave out so many stories of your life. I was delighted to hear that you received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for a two-book memoir series, correct? Would you be willing to share a little about this next book? 

DJT: If you read the end of Whiskey Tender, including the epilogue, you will see that my life went way off track after I left Farmington, New Mexico. The continuation of the story will further challenge stereotypes about Native people in that the setting will be international. I have forty thousand messy words written so far. It will circle around themes involving education, biracial relationships, and immigration, as well as travel. Thank you!

 

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GABRIEL MOSELEY is a writer from Seattle, Washington. His short story “A Man Stands Tall” was awarded The Masters Review Anthology Prize, selected by Roxane Gay. He received the General Motors’ Future Fiction Scholarship to attend Aspen Summer Words and was chosen for the 2024 Jack Straw Writers Program. He was named as a finalist for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction and as a semifinalist for L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest in 2025. He has been selected for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Under the Volcano, the Centrum Artist Residency, and the Seattle Public Library’s Writers’ Room Residency. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work appears in The Masters Review, Nordic Kultur Magazine, and Book XI. Find Gabriel on Instagram @gabrielmoseley_.

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DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA  is director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, as well as a longlisted title for a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. The memoir was named a Top Ten Book of 2024 by The Atlantic and TIME Magazine, as well as a top book of 2024 at NPR, ELLE, Esquire, Audible, and Publishers Weekly. Jackson Taffa is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, and has received fellowships from Tin House, University of Iowa, MacDowell, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Ellen Meloy Fund, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is editor emeritus of River Styx Literary Magazine and an enrolled citizen of the Kwatsaan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her nonfiction MFA in Iowa City. Find Deborah on Instagram @deborahtaffa.