[originaltext]W: Good morning, Doctor Sherman Alexie. Let’s talk about your lif

W: Good morning, Doctor Sherman Alexie. Let’s talk about your life, where you come from?
M: I come from the Rez, an Indian reservation. I grew up there, lived there until 18.
I lived on and off the reservation for the next 6 or 7 years during college. I lived there after I graduated, worked at a high school exchange program. I thought I do that kind of job to support my writing. Day jobs that require no emotional investment beyond 8 hours a day where I wouldn’t need to bring work home. I didn’t want to be part of management or anybody important at the job. I wanted to be completely replaceable, that is what I thought I would be doing for most of my life and writing. Then I got a ground and my first book got a frontpage review in the New York Times Book Review.
W: When did writing enter your life?
M: Books are always being in my life. My dad love books and most of what he read were westerns-spy novels, mysteries. I grew up loving books, copying my father’s love for books. But nobody has showed me a book written by an Indian, not even one piece of poem. Nothing. At that time I was going to be a physician. I loved math and science. I got to college, couldn’t handle physiology, and was looking around for options and took a poetry writing class for fun.
W: Poetry was your way in?
M: Yes, that’s where I started. I took the class and honestly, I just thought it would be an easy grade. But I completely underestimated poetry and what it would do to me and the realm of possibility for it. I took the class and was hooked about ten minutes after reading my first contemporary poem.