The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams

The yearning to write, muses this irrepressible Native American author, ""was the epitome of perversity, because reading and writing were such tortures for me."" Born in 1950 on the Navajo Reservation to migrant workersDa Navajo mother and a white, cowboy fatherDNasdijj has always suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which has made his 20 years as a journalist for Southwest smalltown newspapers, like everything else in his peripatetic, sometimes harrowing life, a terrible struggle. But for Nasdijj, writing was necessary to survival, a means of remembering and vindicating his personal and ancestral history. The symbols he molds out of the bleakness of the desert or his own emotional terrain, as well as the variations of the book's title, trail through 20 fragmented chapters like a plangent refrain. These elements cohere into a unique voice, whether Nasdijj is recounting his adventures on the periphery of white America, musing over the continued impoverishment of the Navajo, or lamenting the loss of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, who died when he was six years old from fetal alcohol syndrome. Balancing a propensity to overanalyze his life in deliriously lyric passages with a gift for understatement that can yield more lucid revelations, Nasdijj reveals a great sensitivity to epiphanies wherever they may be found: in the wild stallions of the mesa, in the beautiful face of a troubled teen he mentors, in the bittersweet vandalism of a jingoistic statue of a Spanish conquistador. Agent, Heather Schroder, ICM. (Oct.) Forecast: Nasdijj first attracted attention when the title piece ran in Esquire in June 1999; he was subsequently named a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Already selected by several newspapers for fall preview roundups and early reviews, this haunting memoir is likely to garner widespread review coverage and, consequently, a solid audience that will be further enlarged by a six-city author tour.