Tashia Hart, author of Native Love Jams
Genre Fiction Category, sponsored by Macalester College
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
One of the story seeds for Native Love Jams was a dream I had in 2018 about an island with encampments of spirits from different time periods of Earth. I wanted so badly to include more of their story in NLJ, but I also wanted to write a contemporary romance with the food sovereignty movement of Native America at its heart. I decided to build the world of Rainy Bay (where NLJ takes place) with the spirit island as a key location but include just a bread crumb of the supernatural/sci-fi nature of the island’s history in this first book. My current work, Melanie Mayhem, picks up that breadcrumb trail and quickly offers the reader a hearty loaf to gnaw on. (Yes, Melanie Mayhem is a paranormal sci-fi rom-com.)
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
In early 2020 I was invited to participate in the All My Relations Arts’ Native Author Program out of Minneapolis by program mentor author, Diane Wilson. I spent eighteen months receiving feedback from Diane and fellow writers in the group. I also received vital feedback from author Mona Susan Power who was brought in at the end of our author program to offer us individualized advice. Had it not been for that experience and the steady push to keep at the project, NLJ wouldn’t be what it is today. Native Love Jams might be self-published, but it was made possible with the help of an indispensable community of creative writers from across Minnesota.
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
Basil Johnston’s Moose Meat and Wild Rice is everything I wish my writing could be. Every sentence, paragraph, page, and short story, is an example of impeccably crafted, eloquently delivered storytelling with the kind of wit that can make you laugh hard enough you choke on your own teeth. The voice and style of the writing is so uniquely identifiably Johnston’s. It’s one of the books that made me fall in love with language all over again and want to pick up a dictionary and read it from cover to cover.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
I didn’t graduate high school but earned my GED and studied biology at Bemidji State University. I chose biology because I love the natural world and wanted to write about it intelligently as well as write science fiction. Also, I was known as “bug girl” in elementary school as I love bugs and spiders and have always jumped at the opportunity to admire or rescue a cutie in a carapace.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
When I was six or seven, my mom would trek me and my brothers down hillside Duluth to the downtown branch of the Duluth Public Library. They have a great children’s area I would’ve happily spent all day in, flipping through the pages of a book of my choosing. To this day when I enter a library, my childlike curiosity and imagination feel encouraged, safe, empowered, and free. If that’s not something of value, I don’t know what is.
Tashia Hart is a writer and artist from the Red Lake Nation of Anishinnabe in northern Minnesota. Her work includes The Good Berry Cookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods, Gidjie and the Wolves, and Girl Unreserved.