SOURCE: Welch, James, and Joseph Bruchac. “I Just Kept My Eyes Open: An Interview with James Welch.” In Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, pp. 311-21. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1987.

In the following interview, Welch discusses the authors who have influenced his work, as well as the general state of Native American writing.

Born in 1940 in Browning, Montana, James Welch's first book was a collection of poems, Riding The Earthboy 40, published in 1971 by Sun. It quickly earned Welch a reputation as one of the strongest and most unsparingly honest voices among Native American writers, a reputation strengthened by his first novel Winter in the Blood, which was brought out in 1974 by Harper & Row, who reissued Riding the Earthboy 40 in 1976. Since then, with his second novel, The Death of Jim Loney, Welch has established himself as a writer whose tough, spare diction in his novels...