Writing Holy Land A Note to the people of Bethel and the Delta Published in The Delta Discovery, 2007 by Sandy Kleven If you pick up the new issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, and go to page 221, you will find these words, “I will take you to a place I used to be. I will take you for no reason. I can tell you nothing. I have no story.  I don’t even want to go there myself.” This grim invitation opens a dramatic monolog called “Holy Land.”  I wrote it.  It’s about Bethel.  I want to tell you how I came to write it and why I waited eight years to publish it. Bethel has shaped my life in both profound and mundane ways.  Last time I moved away someone said, “Once a river rat, always a river rat.”  I’ve started to tell people that I never really leave. Bethel has left a mark on me. The drama continues, “So...how do we begin this story you refuse to hear?  Should we start this tale of winter here,  on this broad reach of river gone to ice”“ I type from memory.  I open the text to check it, not fully confident. When I left Bethel the first time, in 1987, stories were stirring, drums were drumming and my dreams kept waking me. I did not think I would ever go back to Bethel. When, in “Holy Land” I write, “This is our store. I see it in dreams,” I really mean it. I was living in Washington State and my dreams were haunted by the Alaska Commercial Company. “Holy Land” finally began to “speak” to me in 1996.  Once I began to write, the voice changed.  It wasn’t me, anymore.   It was someone talking to me.  The voice was confronting me and all of us “Gussaqs” who come to Bethel from Outside “bringing your brains in a briefcase with school papers for your wall to show us that someone thinks you’re smart.” The voice was mad and frustrated.  He was sad and disappointed.  He had a wry sense of humor.  He was forgiving and loving.  I liked him.  I don’t think he’s a real person, or the ghost of someone real, but he could be.  He should have a name.  I’d like to know what to call him.  He is a Yup”ik man about 45 years old, weary with life.  By the story’s end he seems powerful, somehow transformed by experience.  He says, “Wherever you go you will hear me calling. My spirit hand will lace through your entrails. I will squeeze and whisper “Do you remember me now?” He says “I will reach for those places touched by my stories when you stood shivering in dark rooms your heart as pliant as grass. I will reclaim the part of you that belong now to us.” He is describing what happens to many who come to Bethel from elsewhere.  We are shaped by the experience.  In a best-case scenario, we are made better people. This is what I was trying to capture in “Holy Land;” the way the region can transform the transplants. When it was finished in 1997, I didn’t have the nerve to send it off.  I questioned myself.   How could I pretend to speak for a Yup”ik Eskimo man?  I had to bring the piece before Bethel’s native people.     I moved back to Bethel in 1998.  I begin to read in to people individually or in small groups.  Their response helped me feel confident that the piece was authentic.   In the spring of 2004, at Just Desserts, a Bethel talent show, I read a large part of it for an audience of several hundred people.  The audience appeared to fully embrace the piece.  One person said, “It’s about time somebody said all that.”    Only then, eight years after Holy Land surfaced in my mind, could I submit it.  Alaska Quarterly Review accepted it right away. The editor Ron Spatz said that the piece had generated excitement.  It was published in June of 2005.  “Holy Land” is a stark piece of writing.  It is unflinching, as it faces hard facts, but the best part of “Holy Land” is the challenge leveled toward the pilgrims drawn to the Holy Land.   It asks for sacrifice.  You are welcome, all right.  More than that, you will never get away. And all that is asked of you is everything.   Since then, I published “Holy Land” as a book, in small runs of 100 copies.  Four hundred copies have sold, through my limited efforts, largely in Bethel.  So far, I have been the only one to bring up the question of writing in Alaska native persona.  I think this is because the writing is drawn from what I have heard said by the people of Bethel.  It is a writing of witness, in that way.  Still, the issue is a very serious one.  Had I failed to properly record what I heard, if I had been off target, it would have violated the integrity of the people.  That is why it had to be heard by the people I was depicting, to give me the assurance that, in their opinion, it was proper.  One response, years later, showed me a different impact of the piece.   A woman in a Yukon village wiped away tears, and said, “I didn’t think a white person could know how we felt.” I have written other pieces in persona because I hear native voices speaking.  I like the way these voices use English, cutting to the bone of meaning, while restrained emotion makes what is said shimmer with significance.   I restrain myself because when I put these words on paper, I am on holy ground.  My feet have to be bare and clean hands must delicately engage this sacred task.