The journal
Essays on adapting Modoc oral tradition to literary form, the documented record of the American West, and the craft behind the work.
My books carry massacres. Two ways to get them wrong are sanitizing the killing into paperwork and dwelling on the body for effect. What I do instead.
Read the essay →The archive of the Modoc War is partial and partisan. What goes into the gaps is reclamation from composite accounts, elder testimony, and the land itself.
Read the essay →Writing historical fiction from an archive built by the people who wanted your ancestors gone — reading the record for who held the pen, and writing toward the people it was made to erase.
Read the essay →Why naming the real river, lake, and species (the Lost River, the c'waam, Giiwas) matters more than generic nature when you write from a specific place and people.
Read the essay →The research behind two ecology games about Klamath Basin salmon and the endangered c'waam and koptu suckers, and why a teaching game has to get the place right.
Read the essay →H.L. Delaney on his research method, working between military records, trial transcripts, ethnographic collections, and living oral tradition to write Modoc history from inside Modoc memory.
Read the essay →H.L. Delaney on the common ground running beneath his body of work: the Klamath Basin, the weight of inheritance, and what it means to return to a place through writing.
Read the essay →H.L. Delaney, an enrolled Klamath Tribes member with Modoc ancestry, on gathering twelve Maklak origin stories into one cycle in The Spirals of Kemush.
Read the essay →H.L. Delaney on writing a Captain Jack novel about the Modoc War with honor-first intent and a duty to primary sources.
Read the essay →On the reasons and obligations behind adapting Modoc origin myths as an enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes, and what literary form makes possible that oral tradition alone cannot.
Read the essay →What happens to a story that was never meant to be read? Working with Modoc oral tradition, the documented record of the Modoc War, and what the page costs you.
Read the essay →