Deborah Jackson Taffa, a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the celebrated author of Whiskey Tender: A Memoir, which earned critical acclaim as a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was named one of The Atlantic’s Top 10 Books of the Year. Recognized by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, and NPR, Whiskey Tender also made notable lists in Elle, Esquire, and Publisher’s Weekly. Whiskey Tender was also longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, and Tin House, among others. With an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, Deborah has taught writing at Webster University and Washington University in Saint Louis and now directs the creative writing program at the Institute for American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Salon, and Prairie Schooner, and has been anthologized in The Best of Brevity and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her play, Parents Weekend, was performed at the Autry Theater in Los Angeles.
Santa Fe Literary Review: To begin, we’d love to hear about your creative process. What does your practice look like, and how do you feel it has evolved over time? And more specifically: how would you describe the process and experience of writing your memoir, Whiskey Tender?
Deborah Jackson Taffa: My practice has become a lifestyle over the past 25 years. Despite publishing my memoir later in life, I resolved to write in my early twenties, but I felt that travel and healing would be important to my development. My family’s place in American history meant that I’d inherited a great deal of pain and confusion. It took many years of hard work—building a marriage, family, and business—to gain critical distance on my upbringing. I followed my intuition and opted to do it backwards, delaying my degree until I had some real-life success under my belt. I surmised at an early age that the callowness of youth might not allow me to write with sensitivity, and that writing could become a desperate act if it was linked too early with survival needs. In other words, I opted to give my voice a chance to develop and turned down at least one offer to publish the book before finally selling it to HarperCollins.
SFLR: Whiskey Tender recounts memories from your deep past—and uncovers difficult truths about your culture and your own family. What does it mean as a writer to expose these parts of yourself?
DJT: I initially resisted writing exclusively about my youth, but this led me to ask myself why I was ashamed of my childhood when it served as an indictment of governmental greed. I remembered the words of Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” I decided to give my childhood stories a try.
SFLR: How do you navigate the vulnerability of sharing your story—and of writing about others in your lifE?
DJT: Self-telling is difficult. It is hard to see ourselves clearly. We must learn to laugh at our oddities, and to be generous with our foibles and errors. It’s important to have a sense of humor. No one wants to read a cautionary tale. It helped me to remember that no one reads literature through a moral lens. We want to hear about all the spilled tea: the mistakes, the lies, the stupid decisions, and the lapses in judgment. It makes the reader feel less alone. The best advice I have for other writers is to take your time. There is no rush. Stay in your lane with your blinders on and don’t compare yourself to other writers. The personal story is a sacred story about your moral education. We all have cognitive dissonance. But if you give yourself time, your mask will eventually slip, and you’ll learn things about yourself that you didn’t know before.
And as for others: my father is 83 and he loved the book. My siblings are divided: some have read it, and others are afraid to read it. But I come from a very loving family, and they have all been incredibly supportive, as I knew they would be. Two things were important to navigate: I had to be honest and get the facts as straight as possible, in particular where I was dealing with family lore that occurred before I was born. I was careful to cue my reader in when I was using supposition as a craft tool. Mainly, you want to expose more about yourself than you do anyone else. Otherwise, it feels uneven and unfair.
SFLR: Tell us about your experience as an Indigenous woman navigating the literary mainstream. What has surprised you the most about how your work has been received, and what aspects of this journey have been disappointing or challenging for you?
DJT: I moved to Iowa City, where I would earn my M.F.A. when I was 39. There, my professors urged us to create a contradictory persona on the page. Rather than perform a stereotypical identity, I was to subvert expectations. I sought to draw from my tribal histories as well as the myriad of cultures I was influenced by as a modern woman; an American citizen; a dual national married to a man from Milan, Italy, who I’d met in Bali when I was twenty; a woman with a gang of biracial children who switched between English and Italian and felt as comfortable at the Uffizi Galleries as they did at Pueblo Feast Days.
For a first-semester workshop, I wrote a piece about our family picking olives on my in-laws’ farm in Italy several years before. The essay involved a neighbor who couldn’t believe I was Native. From there, the story flashed back, referencing the alcoholism I saw growing up. “You seem like a well-spoken woman,” my professor said. “Are you sure you aren’t playing the race card?” He suspected I was using a story that wasn’t my own because I thought it would be popular. I was insulted, though it was fair to assume that some Natives have happy childhoods. I learned an important lesson about the politics of representation that day. Before accepting my Native identity, some readers would ask for my street cred. Sadly, for intersectional writers like me, it’s necessary to introduce a multitudinous identity slowly on the page. This is rather disappointing, but I consoled myself by remembering that I could always write a second book.
SFLR: Like so many creatives, you wear many hats—as an educator, a scholar, an administrator, and a public figure. How do these roles inform each other? How do you make space—and set boundaries—within each of your roles?
DJT: I divide my days by time. When I’m heavily involved in an essay or project, I get up at five a.m. and write before I go to work. I tend to do administrative duties during the day, exercise right when I get home, and return to writing in the evening. My students inspire me. There are those teachers who are sapped by teaching writing. For me, it clarifies my understanding of craft. Talking about it allows me to listen to my own advice about crappy first drafts.
SFLR: What challenges you most about being a writer? We’re curious about the hurdles you face within the craft, but we also want to know about the challenges you’re navigating now in the context of Whiskey Tender’s rise to mainstream renown.
DJT: I’ve highlighted some of the hurdles I faced with the craft. Writing a persona that is multitudinous but also coheres, and finding a way to articulate and perform the consciousness of a single individual (myself!) on the page is an incredible challenge. Poetry and fiction came easier to me when I was publishing poems and short stories. Art is all about arranging and cutting. When you delete sentences that contain vital information about who you are, it can feel like you aren’t telling all that you should. You keep asking: who am I in this particular story? You ask it so many times in an attempt to be honest. It’s truly a spiritual, meditative task.
In terms of challenges due to the success of the book: the travel is brutal. You get tired of hearing yourself speak. It feels like a miracle that anyone cares about what you are saying. But in terms of the material, there is no struggle. By the time you’ve published it, you have sat with it so long you have accepted yourself. It’s the kind of self-acceptance that can’t be faked. You’ve done the work, and you are no longer afraid of the face you see in the mirror.
