Award-winning Cherokee author Andrea L. Rogers at The Station in Onchiota

Jul. 14—RAINBOW LAKE — Jones Pond in the Adirondacks is an alien environment for Andrea L. Rogers, a Texas-based author.

The Walter Award-winning YA horror writer is deep in a three-week writer-in-residence at Adirondack Swim and Trip Camp (ASTC) in Rainbow Lake.

The Adirondack Center for Writing and ASTC created the opportunity for time and space for a writer to work, recreate, and enjoy all things North Country.

Today at 12:45 p.m., Rogers will give a public reading from her widely acclaimed "Man Made Monsters," a collection of Cherokee-inspired horror stories, at the outdoor arts festival at The Station, in Onchiota.

In 2023, the book won the prestigious Walter Dean Myers award for Outstanding Children's Literature, which recognizes diverse authors whose works feature diverse main characters and address diversity in a meaningful way.

Two days into her residency here, Rogers learned the book also earned a Whippoorwill Award for Rural Young Adult Literature.

'IT'S COMPLICATED'

In Rainbow Lake, Rogers basks in Adirondack rural.

"At first actually when I got here, but I don't know why, I kept thinking I was in the Cascades," she said.

"I kept thinking I was in Seattle or Oregon, that area. Although it did smell like the first time I went to Colorado because of all the pines. It's really comforting, and I love the cabin. When I was a kid, I went to a Campfire Camp in Oklahoma. and so it has that sort of nostalgia.

"It's complicated. Obviously, the history of these away camps, at the same time white children were being encouraged to play Indian, Indians were in boarding schools and having their hair cut and not allowed to speak their language.

"So it's complicated, but one thing it does it did bring home to me is how communities can be built. How you can create your own family, your own community with people that you care about and you just see them every summer.

"How important it is for people to spend time away. How important an interruption is so that you can sort of consider how you are living your life and what your priorities are."

There are things around Jones Pond that bump the night that may well fuel Rogers' werewolves and vampires realms.

During her residency, Rogers will revise her a new novel called "The Art Thieves."

'HAPPY PLACE'

When Rogers was a kid, she spent a lot of time in libraries and that was her happy place. "Librarians who would get to know me would set aside books for me," she said.

"I loved ghost stories, and I loved scary stories. There's this one compilation from Readers Digest called 'Strange Stories, Amazing Facts.' My neighbor had a copy of that. That's where you have your aliens and your werewolves and your unexplained stuff, and Bermuda Triangle, all these things that are out in the world to worry about."

Recently, Rogers saw someone post on Instagram that they really thought the Bermuda Triangle would be a lot more of a problem for them.

"There are all these things that you can worry about that were probably never going to be your problem," she said.

"The real-life stuff is the stuff that you don't really want to think about I guess when you're a kid maybe, or you don't know how to think about it."

'THE OUTSIDERS'

Rogers grew up in Tulsa, Okla., also the home of writer S. E. Hinton, who as a teen, wrote "The Outsiders."

"Even in second grade, my dad and I were talking about how I wanted to have a book by the time I was out of high school," Rogers said.

"That was the plan, and that was a long time ago. What I was always looking for was Native people in these stories. 'The Outsiders' takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have friends who are a little older than me who were probably in high school with S.E. Hinton.

"They are Cherokee or they are Creek, and yet none of those people really show up in those books. It seemed like we were missing from humanity. We were missing from the general population, and I knew for a fact that we were there."

MONSTER KIN

Rogers and her father watched "Plenty Scary Movies" on KTUL-TV Channel 8.

"That was fun," she said.

"He would always tell me that we were related by marriage to Lon Chaney. When you know that you are related to this monster, how can you not think about what it would be like to have a werewolf or Frankenstein creature in your family?

"And so I wanted to tell stories where we got to be in there, and we got to be the center and we didn't die. That was unlike everything that I read about Native people before that."

SCHOOL DAYS

Rogers' school, Booker T. Washington, was one of the earliest Black high schools and a magnet school in Tulsa.

The school had a demographic split of 50 percent white and 50 percent other demographics.

"I think Booker T. Washington was having their prom on the night of the Tulsa race massacre," she said.

Her family lived on the North side, and her mother filled out applications for her children to attend magnet schools.

Rogers' Native and white friends were equally as poor, though she had one Black friend who was middle class.

"We all came from different parts of town," she said.

"I think it was good for me. You did get to see the big class divide in Tulsa. A lot of the none-other students were quite well off. There was a big difference in sort of the way we were treated by counselors and what they assumed we would be able to do, where we go to college.

"I got like no attention from the college counseling stuff. My grades were fine. They should've been good enough for something, but I didn't get any attention whereas the none-other kids did."

SPIRAL NOTEBOOK FANFICTION

During her glory days, Rogers spent all her time writing fanfiction about Duran Duran and Def Leppard for her friends.

"It was good practice, but it wasn't publishable," she said.

"It would be now with the kids today on like (online writing site) Wattpad," she said.

"They can write about all these things, and they have a zillion readers that are waiting for their next chapter. I was just writing for my friends in my little spiral notebooks and they were passing it around."

RIGHT WRONG CHOICES

Rogers would later get certified to teach art, and she and her husband bought a house in Fort Worth because she thought it would be easy to get a teaching job.

"And, I was wrong," she said.

"Many of my life choices come about because I was wrong. I got did get a job at an all-girls public school in Fort Worth. I taught communications, speech and intro to AV, a program called Project Lead The Way, which was introduction to engineering design."

All the while, she was writing. In college, she had conducted extensive research on a serial killer in Tulsa and was writing a "based-on" detective novel that she didn't finish.

"I was a really good starter," she said.

"At some point, I got really good at starting things. So, I started many things."

IAIA

Rogers listened to a podcast that mentioned a low-residency writing program at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rogers completed the program while teaching full-time.

"It was great," she said.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Also in the meantime, I had been in a little writers group, and I had been going to SCBWI (Society for Children Book Writers and Illustrators) in Texas."

Rogers attended one of the society's conferences and was trying everything to get published.

"At some point, I was reading Debbie Reese's blog on American Indians and children's literature," she said.

"Because prior to that, I had a middle-grade book that I was working on. Before that it was like write the Great American Novel, and you'll get a National Book Award."

When Rogers went to get books for her children, it was clear there were still no books with Natives centered in them.

"We were still absent," she said.

"Cynthia Leitich Smith had written a few contemporary books — 'Indian Shoes' and 'Rain Is Not My Indian Name' and 'Jingle Dancers,'" she said.

"And that is all there was for my kids out there, and I thought this is ridiculous. I was kind of working at it at all different ways. IAIA really helped me with craft. It really helped me understand how writers do what they do and how to dissect work and understand what it is I like and what I want to say and the best way to say it."

It was during that time she discovered Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfoot author who writes experimental, horror, crime and science fiction.

He did a workshop at IAIA, and she read everything he wrote.

BEYOND CRAFT

"That is something I do tell Native writers, not to be in a hurry," she said.

"Our stuff is real, and there is a real difference between an Indigenous viewpoint and a Western viewpoint. A Western viewpoint is hierarchical. Most Indigenous cultural values, you're not supposed to exploit the planet. You're supposed to take care of it. You're not at the top. You're part of it. That kind of hierarchy is built into language. It's built into our systems. So, Indigenous writing is different, I think, in that way."

Rogers quotes Chippewa author Angeline Boulley: "I write to preserve my culture. I edit to protect my culture."

"I love that because our stuff is real," she said.

"We can't simply put Cherokee words into a book and call that Indigenous."

PUBLISHING BREAKTHROUGH

Rogers attended Kweli, which means "truth" in Swahili, founded by Laura Pegram, an author/educator/visual artists/jazz vocalist.

"She started a journal called Kweli," she said.

"It was originally focused on the African Diaspora and including writing of people descendants of African Diaspora people, so the Caribbean or anywhere she could find them."

In 2014, Walter Dean Myers, wrote an opinion piece, "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" in the New York Times while his son, Christopher, penned "The Apartheid of Children's Literature."

Kweli launched a conference with space at the table for BIPOC writers.

The first year, Rogers skyped in for a panel with Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo and Kim Rogers of Wichita and Affiliated Tribes to talk about cultural appropriation.

"D.J. Older was on the same panel as us," she said.

"There is a writer Michael Twitty, and I loved his work. One thing he said was the way that your ancestors survived their oppression is basically your cultural inheritance.

"That was really important to me and sort of answered my question about who should be writing whose stories.

"If your ancestors didn't have skin in the game, then was it your right to steal someone else's space?

"So that really helped me think about it and feel like: One, I have a right to tell stories that belong to us. That it was really important, and kids needed to be able to see themselves in their stories."

TRAIL OF TEARS

Next, Rogers attended a Kweli conference in person, as did Cherokee author Traci Sorell.

Sorrell had just recently written a book called "We are Grateful: Otsaliheliga."

A few years after the conference, the book came out and won the 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Award-Picture Book Honor, and the audiobook won the 2020 Odyssey Honor Award.

During the same year, Sorell's "At the Mountain's Base" won the 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Award-Picture Book Honor and "Indian No More" won the 2020 American Indian Youth Literature-Middle School Book Winner.

"Traci was really busy, and then Capstone reached out to Traci about doing a story about the Trail of Tears," Rogers said.

"Traci was like 'I have too much on my plate,' so she reached out to me and asked would I be interested in doing this? and I was like, 'Ugh. Why can't they tell any stories about us after 1839? Why do we always exist in the past?'"

But at the same time, Rogers looked around and all the stories written about the event set into motion by the Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson, in 1830 that forcibly displaced the "Five Civilized Tribes" — Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee.

U.S. Army Gen. Winfield Scott and his soldiers forced the removal of 16,542 Cherokee and their 1,592 enslaved Blacks to walk more than 5,000 miles to Indian Territory.

"At the same time I looked around and saw that all the stories written about the Trail of Tears was not written by people whose ancestors had been on the Trail of Tears," she said.

"I thought, well, it was an important story for Cherokee kids to know and even Cherokee adults who didn't know how everything that went down. I thought I knew it because I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and when I started researching it I found out how much I didn't know."

Rogers didn't know about the internment camps, the cholera epidemic that killed Natives before departure, and the duration of the trek across nine states.

"There were all kinds of things I didn't know. So, I wrote 'Mary and the Trial of Trails' for Capstone. It was part of their Girl Survive series. It came out during COVID."

KWELI FACTOR

Looking back on her literary journey, Rogers emphasized the importance of Pegram and Reese's impact on Indigenous literature.

"When I look at the pictures of the Indigenous cadre at Kweli, several of us are getting published. Brian Young was there a couple of years later. Dawn Quigley. Stacy Wells. Kim Rogers. Traci Sorell. Charlene Willing McManis. (McManis) was there at the first Kweli that Traci was at, and she had written 'Indian No More.' When she was dying of cancer, she reached to Traci to ask her to help her finish it.

"Kweli has been super important for Indigenous writers as well as the voices from the African diaspora. Because we're all from a diaspora, too, a Cherokee diaspora. There are like 400,000 of us all over the world."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell