SOURCE: "You May Consider Speaking about Your Art …," in I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, pp. 56-63.

In the following essay, Cook-Lynn discusses the reasons she became a writer, her poetic themes, and her use of Indian myth and history in her poetry.

Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a writer.

I was born in the Government Hospital at Fort Thompson, South Dakota, in 1930, and when I was a "child of prairie hawks" (Seek the House of Relatives), I lived out on the Crow Creek (a tributary of the James and the Missouri) in what anthropologists like to call "an extended family." And I loved to read.

Reading, if it is not too obvious to say so, precedes writing, though I teach college students today who are examples...