ENTERTAINMENT

N. Scott Momaday, considered the dean of American Indian writers, grew up steeped in language.

As a young Kiowa boy, the stories of his family and tribe flowed richly from storytellers, music and even art, infusing him with a strong self-identity and anchoring him to a sense of place.

"The oral tradition gave me the rhythm, the repetition and even the music that shaped my writing," Mr. Momaday says.

Now a poet, writer, painter and scholar, Mr. Momaday brought his culture alive through his literature. His first novel – House of Dawn, published 40 years ago – won a Pulitzer Prize. That success created a pathway for contemporary American Indian literature and paved the way for other American multicultural, multiethnic works.

And this week, Mr. Momaday is the keynote speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest. The University of North Texas conference meets Friday through Sunday in Grapevine.

"I invited Scott because he's singlehandedly responsibile for bringing Native American literature into the mainstream," said George Getschow, Mayborn conference writer-in-residence, via e-mail. "He comes out of an oral tradition of storytelling, one harnessed to reality. As Mr. Momaday puts it: 'Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true.' "

There is little difference between writing fiction and nonfiction, Mr. Momaday says. Crafting stories, whether they are based on real experiences or not, requires the writer to hone the same skills.

Born in Lawton, Okla., in 1934, Mr. Momaday grew up with a Kiowa father and a mother who was part Cherokee. The family lived on several Southwestern reservations, which exposed him to several tribes even as he had to cross back and forth from an American Indian world to white America.

His mother was a poet, and he shares her love of language: While an accomplished writer of many genres, he says he is a poet first.

"I regard poetry as the highest form of literature," he says, "the best possible way of expressing something in words. There is no waste at all in the poetic statement."

Poetry also provided a turning point in Mr. Momaday's life. After graduating from the University of New Mexico, he taught junior high and high school students on a reservation. A short time later he was awarded a poetry fellowship to Stanford University, where he was mentored by poet and critic Yvor Winters.

There, Mr. Momaday learned first the mechanics of writing poetry and then began to define his voice as a writer.

He considers 1969's The Way to Rainy Mountain the most important book in his canon. The autobiographical book reflects the strong oral tradition he grew up with, his tribal stories and personal memories of Kiowa life woven and preserved by the beauty and precision of his writing.

"Someone has said it is my spiritual autobiography," he says. "I think of it not as my voice, but the voice of my ancestors. It really explains the vitality of the oral tradition."

To help further preserve that culture, Mr. Momaday founded the Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit organization that is building an archive in southwestern Oklahoma at Rainy Mountain. The building will include room to gather and ways for children of all Indian tribes to connect to their culture.

Mr. Momaday says many Americans lack knowledge of their ancestry or fail to understand a sense of place.

"I think most Americans are culturally deprived in a way," he says. "I am constantly hearing people say to me, 'I envy you your knowledge of your ancestry because I don't have that.' That seems to me a sad thing."

The theater, he says, is the closest thing that Americans have to oral tradition. Mr. Momaday often encourages young writers to see plays and watch actors onstage engaged in active storytelling.

Writers, he says, are born with a certain temperament. The ability to write, he has said, is a gift from God. Writers don't choose to write as much as they must follow the impulse to do so. But even gifts must be nurtured, developed and shaped.

"Practice," is Mr. Momaday's simple advice. "It is crucial to put words down on paper. Make a beginning, start writing something and see how it develops. It's like longing to play at Carnegie Hall. Practice, practice, practice."

Karen Thomas is a freelance writer in Arlington.

Plan your life

The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest runs Friday through Sunday at the Hilton DFW Lakes, Grapevine. Today is the last day for registration, which costs $295, less for students and educators. Tickets for the N. Scott Momaday dinner and lecture, 6:15 p.m. Saturday, are $100. Register at www.TheMayborn.unt.edu, or call 940-565-4564 for information.