I came of age as a writer reading N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, House Made of Dawn, and Angle of Geese (his creative nonfiction memoir, novel, and collection of poems) . Momaday, like Louise Erdrich, Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor and other tribal writers often created works across the arts. Harjo, who began as a visual artist, we now know as both musician and poet. My Indigenous literary ancestors danced across genre lines.

My own career began in journalism—I easily fell into other people’s stories. Through the years, I wrote scholarship on Native American literature, created plays, and have always made photos of wildlife and the watery regions I paddled. Before my debut short fiction collection, I published six books of poetry and served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Inspired by Anishinaabe pictographs and Native American ledger art, I joined my photography and poetry in a form I call picto-poems. Still when the stories I carried began to insist strongly, this latest extension of my oeuvre—from haiku, lyric, and concrete poetry to fiction—required some careful blending of old skills with new ones.

What happens when a poet of spare lines and gesture turns to fiction? She carries with her the tight construction of the line.

Rereading each draft aloud from start to end point before continuing, as I do with poetry, is impractical ten or fifteen pages into a story. I learned to prime each session with less preamble. In the margins of early story drafts I kept writing the same directions to myself: Expand. Build scene. Include example. While the “more” I called for did often serve the story, I began to see clearly how my poetic tendencies also inspired craft choices that built the energy of the fiction, that gave it a distinctive voice.

What happens when a poet of spare lines and gesture turns to fiction? She carries with her the tight construction of the line. Word play. The training in sonics. The turn, the image, the absence. Each of these elements of poetic craft can serve fiction well—sometimes in unexpected ways.

Dialogue, for example, trips up many fiction writers. The notification that my story “Waiting, A Quintet” had been selected for an O. Henry Prize, included this comment: “The five voices that comprise the quintet are so remarkably unique, yet the poetry and storyline pull them together.” In fiction, each characters’ distinct voice, its unmistakable music, comes in equal parts from cadence and linguistic fingerprint—here poetic attention to rhythm and precise word choice carry over.

I lean heavily into poetic suggestion in my fiction. This practiced restraint can manifest as understatement, unexpected phrasing, or fruitful ambiguity. Restraint in fiction, as in poetry, might also involve absence. An early review of Red Ants noted, “a nuanced ending that…allows some things to remain unspoken.” Indeed, the gesture and absence in my stories place part of the meaning-making into the imagination of the readers. In this particular choice I follow the example of Indigenous storytellers I grew up with who often require the listener to help make the story.

Absence is invitation. Gesture builds story energy. Both the not said and the unsayable—the ineffable—pull new elements into a telling. Just as in poetry, the range of the possible expands beyond the printed words.