Cynthia Sylvester’s debut collection, The Half-White Album, is gaining recognition and winning prizes throughout the Southwest, where she and her characters live, and beyond. Her book includes short stories, poems, flash pieces, and more, all carried along by cover songs played by a band called The Covers. That might sound like a lot for one book, but in fact the various texts work like the instruments in a band, in support of a single unforgettable song. We’re so pleased to have had the chance to talk to Cynthia about her work in this latest Spotlight interview.
How did you decide on the structure for The Half-White Album?
As a “working” writer, I, like many writers, write when I can and for as long as time allows. These pieces were written over a ten-year period. Initially, I had them structured into two separate collections: a traditional short-form collection and a chapbook of the shorter pieces and poetry. But neither really worked. I was trying to force them into something they weren’t. It was nearing the end of the pandemic. Colorado campsites opened up, and my sister invited us to go camping. We have a tent, and the high mountains are cold, and not even more than a few Cowboy Margaritas could keep me fully asleep. I woke in a dream, and in the dream, I was walking toward a bookshelf. There were two books: one with no title and one by an author I love, Elizabeth Strout. I pulled that one out and remember thinking I’d been wanting to read it. It was called It’s All One Story.
I woke, and said, “It’s all one story!” I went home and pulled out the stories that were not regional and placed the pieces in the structure of a ceremony, threaded with the storyline of mother and daughter. After that, I removed the structure and replaced it with ten concerts led by a cover band. Each chapter is a concert or show, but each chapter speaks to a specific aspect of the characters or the writer that needs to be addressed and brought into the light to be seen and healed.
Your characters, who are mostly Native American, sometimes refer to others as “good Indians” or “bad Indians.” What does it mean to be a “good Indian” in the context of this collection?
It is based on stereotypes of native people. The “good” and the “bad” are seeing a native person through the gaze of Western culture. It is difficult to be raised within a predominate culture—i.e., urban America—where stereotypes of native people are not positive or, at times, only performative. What if you are someone whose mom is a nurse, you’re a waitress, or whatever you do for a living? What kind of “Indian” are you anyway? You can hear the doubt and sarcasm in that question that I’ve been asked before. Being “half-white” and a lesbian, being removed from my native culture as a second generation of the boarding-school period, having our language and culture taken and being told we are less than, being indoctrinated into a religion and language that was said to be superior to the native one has taken me years of educating myself about what happened and of getting to know and understand myself to accept all the parts of me and to gaze at myself through those eyes.
The story entitled “The Last One” is about Native children forced by the government to attend religious boarding schools. Talk about the “two world” feeling these children walk away with.
The book explores the lives and feelings of those living in liminal spaces and the decisions that they must make to survive. Often, the narrative structure of a story is from a distance. The narrator is eavesdropping or removed from the scene and the characters in the story. She’s an outsider. That narrative structure and the structure of the book speak to that feeling of living between worlds. As the daughter and narrator says in prologue, the pieces she has collected were as a whole a “hazy collage of words, photos, and facts, whispers and memories and dreams she is trying to piece together” into a cohesive story of who she is and who they are. These stories are my way of navigating that zigzagged liminal path.
In “Intro—Comfortably Numb,” a woman seeks to understand the worldview that is her heritage but is stymied by the complexity of her clan’s ceremonies and her inability to even speak the language. She (and her mother) appears throughout the book. Would you say by the end she has come to a better understanding of what is essentially “home?”
Yes. That relates to the above answers. What is so essential for all of us is to accept who we are. To find the home within ourselves. Everything is always changing. That is Diné philosophy. We always leave an opening for change. I realize that I am part of that change. Not for better or worse, but as a witness, as a witness for myself and for my family.
While some of your stories are heartbreaking, many are playful, such as “Suspicious Minds,” which is about the separated twins Thunder and Lightning and ends with a sort of literary wink involving “Uncle Tito’s dentures.” Can you talk about the power of playfulness in this book?
This book could not be read without humor. This life, our lives, cannot be led without humor. I try to not take myself too seriously. I try not to get a big head. Humor is a good way of looking at myself and laughing instead of criticizing. Humor is required to understand two-leggeds. We are kind of ridiculous, aren’t we? LOL
The narrator of “Personal Jesus” steals a bowling ball pin from her friend’s toy set as a way of having something of Missy’s even if she can’t have her. In “Little Wing,” Teenie buries a bowl at a proposed casino construction site to halt progress on the project. The Zwiggler lure with which Ruth “catches” a human leg is made from feather earrings her daughter left behind when she moved out. Please talk about the importance of objects in The Half-White Album.
Well, there is a whole chapter related to returning our “things” to us. In “Personal Jesus,” the objects relate to how things possess us versus us possessing them. I only see that in retrospect. I don’t write with a theme in mind. However, Western culture is obsessed with things and possessions. What do we have, and how much? In the chapter, “Live at the House Made of Blue Smoke,” the band member and lead singer, Jeannie J, says, “We loved playing the Blue Smoke. We return, and we’re home [… the] things we left behind are returned to us.” Native people have “lost” so much; for me, the only way to retrieve it is by going back. It takes a lot of strength to do that. So the objects really are just ways into the story. A true story about a prosthetic leg becomes about the danger of living in a world that pulls you apart. The objects become a metaphor for what has really been lost or found.
At the end of “Do You Want to Dance?,” after Ruth and Dolores deliver a human leg to the parents of the young man it once belonged to, the two women look out at The Sleeping Sisters (three volcanoes), who dream the story of the leg into one that ends with the dead son and his wife having a hundred children and traveling the universe “dancing and laughing and dancing and laughing.” Can you discuss how stories get mythologized in your book?
You could say this collection is my creation story. My legends. My way of finding a place to exist. All creation stories are used for that same purpose. To explain our existence in the vast universe. To ease our minds and let us know we are not a mistake. We belong somewhere.
Cynthia Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines. She received the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference, is a graduate of the University of New Mexico, and received her MFA in creative writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Sylvester’s debut book, The Half-White Album, was published by the University of New Mexico Press as part of the Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series. The Half-White Album won the best LGBTQ+ book in the 2023 New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards. She was a 2024 faculty member in creative writing at the Emergine Diné Writers Institute at NTU. Monthly, Cynthia hosts Albuquerque DimeStories—three-minute stories written and read by the author. She’s currently working on a novel and a children’s story.
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