About the author
Joe Starita
Joe Starita was an investigative reporter and New York bureau chief for
The Miami Herald, where one of his stories was a Pulitzer Prize
finalist. He is now a professor at the University of Nebraska's College
of Journalism and the author of The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge,
an account of four generations of a Lakota Sioux family, that garnered a
second Pulitzer Prize nomination, won the Mountain and Plains
Booksellers Association Award, and has been published in six foreign
languages.
Source:
Macmillan/St. Martin's Press
Joe Starita is an associate professor in the College of Journalism
and Mass Communications. For the past seven years, he has taught many of
the college's depth reporting classes - classes designed to give
students the skills to probe deeply into a focused topic while also
providing some international reporting opportunities. To that end, he
has taken groups of students to Cuba, France and Sri Lanka. Closer to
home, he currently is co-teaching a depth reporting class that will
exhaustively examine the pros and cons of using corn-based ethanol to
help wean the nation off of Mideast oil.
Before joining the journalism faculty in 2000, Starita spent 13 years
at The Miami Herald, where he served as the paper's New York
bureau chief from 1983-1987. He also spent four years on the Herald's
Investigations Team, where he specialized in stories exposing unethical
doctors and lawyers. One of those stories, an article examining how
impoverished and illiterate Haitians were being used to extort insurance
companies into settling bogus auto claims, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist
in local reporting.
Interested in American Indian history and culture since his youth,
Starita returned to his native Nebraska in 1992 and began work on a
three-year book project about five generations of an Indian family. "The
Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge - A Lakota Odyssey" - was published in 1995 by
G.P. Putnam and Sons in New York, has been translated into six foreign
languages and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Source:
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Interviews with Joe Starita
Q: You grew up in Lincoln, went to school here—what led you
to your interest in Native Americans?
A: Yes, I am a Lincoln - and a Nebraska - product through
and through. And I think by virtue of growing up here, you get
exposed to the heavy footprint left behind by the Native people of
this state. And the more I got exposed to it, the more fascinated I
became with Native culture - the people, their way of life, their
value system and spiritual beliefs. They had a very strong sense of
place - it was who they were - and the more you get exposed to that,
the more real their experiences became in my young mind. Even today,
when I stand at the Fort Robinson marker was Crazy Horse was
stabbed, or look at the barracks where Dull Knife and the Cheyenne
broke out of, or look down at the confluence of the Niobrara and
Missouri, I still get chills. So it's not an abstract concept - like
imagining what things may have been like in ancient Greece. It's
something that was only several generations removed and that gave it
a power that resonated in me at any early age and has never stopped. —Joe Starita, Nebraska Center for the Book interview excerpt, November 2011
- - -
Q: As a writer, do you have a daily work schedule?
A: I've liked to write for as long as I can remember. I like
the feel and the flow and the arrangement of words to convey
information, mood and emotion in a way similar to what musicians
must feel when composing a score. In sixth-grade, I remember we were
supposed to do a 10-page paper as a final project and I ended up
doing a 40-page paper on Chief Crazy Horse. It was a story - written
by Mari Sandoz - that I became thoroughly absorbed in. And it's
where I also think I got my first whiff of the power of good
storytelling. And that's what I really like: finding compelling
characters and compelling themes and weaving them into a story that
becomes real, that people can follow and identify with. I think it
was E.M. Forester who once said: If you say the king died, and then
the queen died - that's journalism; that's simply recording
historical fact. But if you say the king died, and then the queen
died of grief - now you have a story. And that's what I'm constantly
on the lookout for: a good story, with strong characters and themes
in which the landscape also can become a character because
developing a strong sense of place is very important. When the
research is finished and the in-the-trenches kind of writing begins,
I am very disciplined: I like to start writing about 9 a.m., work
straight through to about 1 p.m., take a brief lunch and nap and
then keep going until about 4-4:30. Then you just have to drop it
cold and back away from it and do other things - long walks, bike
rides, workouts and just let your subconscious kind of work out any
of the writing issues or stumbling blocks you've encountered during
that days session at the word processor. And then you get up the
next morning and do it all over again. —Joe Starita, Nebraska Center for the Book interview excerpt, November 2011
- - -
Q: Tell us about your new book.
A: What I'm working on now is a book that in many ways is
very similar to the Standing Bear story - it's just on the opposite
side of the gender highway. This story - a true story - is again
drawn from the cloth of Nebraska history. It's a biography of Susan
La Flesche, an Omaha Indian woman who was the younger sister of
Susette La Flesche - also known as Bright Eyes and who had a
prominent role in Standing Bear's story as an interpreter. The story
of Susan, the younger sister, embodies many of the same values and
themes as Standing Bear, but it's told from a completely different
viewpoint and perspective. Susan was born in the waning years of the
Civil War in a buffalo hide tipi in a remote corner of the Great
Plains - and 24 years later, she graduated as the valedictorian of
her medical school class in Philadelphia and became the nation's
first female Native physician. How did that happen? How could that
possibly have happened? Well, that's one of many things this book
will delve into, so it's kind of become my Moby Dick right now. —Joe Starita, Nebraska Center for the Book interview excerpt, November 2011