Brendan Basham is a Diné author, teacher and artist who lives in New Mexico, near the Navajo and Zuni Reservations. He first stayed at the Ucross Foundation's ranch in Sheridan County in 2020, as the organization’s first Native American writing fellow. During that time, he worked on his debut novel, “Swim Home to the Vanished,” which tells the story of a small-town Diné line cook and uses magical realism to explore themes of grief and redemption.
Basham returned this year as the foundation’s first culinary resident after working as a chef for years and co-owning two restaurants in Puerto Rico. He spent six weeks at the ranch with uninterrupted time to create in and out of the kitchen. He’s currently working on a new novel about twins dealing with mysterious deaths in their family, connected to unremediated uranium mines.
The author reflected on all things art with Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Habermann: The bio on your website refers to you as a recovering chef. How has your relationship with cooking changed over time?
Brendan Basham: My relationship with cooking started as a way to survive. It was a way to pay my way through college and do all that stuff, because I went to an out-of-state school and had to pay out-of-state tuition and didn't have all my scholarships lined up.
It was also a way of surviving at home as well, because my parents worked on the reservation while we went to school in a border town. I actually learned how to do a lot of cooking for me and my little brother at the time. I was lucky enough to have a good spice rack that my dad curated.
It has changed in the sense that it's not essential to my being or to my personality or to the definition of who I am. It's more of another avenue, another outlet, another artistic way of saying something that I don't know quite how to say in regular ways. So over time, over 20-something years, it became a kind of poetry project and 3D project.
It became less about feeding people. Then it became less about me. And then it became more about, ‘How can food actually be political?’
Art can be innately political, and I think that in a way that's where my soul was heading when I was cooking. It was like, ‘Where are my foods coming from?’ Did they have a name, like in Portlandia? Getting things very fresh, working straight from farmers and using all the skills I learned from working with chefs in the States, bringing those skills and techniques to Puerto Rico where my restaurants were.
HH: What are some of your favorite parts about cooking as an art form, and how does it feel different compared to expressing ideas through writing?
BB: It's 3D work, it's sculptural, it's visual, right? Not just 3D, but colors and the palette of that setting, that canvas. Each plate to me was its own painting in a way.
Even as we grew larger, the first restaurant was only about 35 seats or so, and the second one, we tripled that. As we scaled up, it was harder to have some quality control there. But that was one of my main jobs as a chef, is consistency. But having control over something from beginning to end is – there's something from the conceptual, to seeing it in the physical form in space.
One thing that writing and literature can do is, no, it doesn't actually physically exist in space, but it rocks your imagination. And in that way, things become real.
In an Indigenous sense of things, as soon as you speak an idea or a word, suddenly that word is true. It has life. Writing fiction might be kind of taboo in my culture, in Navajo culture, because as soon as you say something out loud, it becomes true. Because it's a taboo, that makes me drawn to it even more, and I think that's how I was as a cook.
HH: “Swim Home to the Vanished,” your debut novel, came out in 2023. You worked on that book during another fellowship at Ucross, and it sounds like you were maybe making a new novel during your most recent stay in Wyoming. I'd love to hear a little bit about that new project.
BB: This most recent Ucross visit, which was the very first culinary residency, it was a little bit more free falling. It’s a new program and I was really inspired by the group of people that I had the chance to cook for. There were some young Sundance producers, just wonderful people, and so smart and great people to talk to. The first week was fiction, the second week was documentary, and so with each group we had different things to speak about.
Lucky for me, I can carry a conversation with just about anybody, so the food aspect was only one part of the experience of the residency. The real highlight, as with many of these artist residencies, was the cross pollination – being able to speak about different kinds of art or labor or politics and finding common ground, and usually that common ground happens over a meal, where this is yet another tribe that I might belong to.
This seems to be a reoccurring theme in my life, where I’m like, ‘Where do I belong? Where do I fit in?’ I'm a weirdo, and I'm proud of that fact. Where are the other weirdos hanging out? That's one of the reasons why I ended up in a kitchen for so many years.
I think it's also telling that when I got into the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program, not only was I hanging out with a bunch of talented writers and we're weirdos, we found a tribe there. But in addition to that, because it's the Institute of American Indian Arts, many of these students were Indigenous from Canada and all over the States, so there was that tribe within the tribe.
I didn't have to explain myself. None of us had to explain ourselves to each other, about who we are, where we're coming from and what we're writing about. We didn't have to dumb down our writing for an audience who doesn't understand, who needs a lot more context. It's a game changer.
HH: What words of advice do you have for aspiring writers or aspiring cooks? What would you say to those folks?
BB: Number one for any young Native person: It doesn't matter what you want to do with your life, your story matters. Your story counts and it needs to be heard.
Number two: If you're a young artist writer, you need to read everything you can get your hands on. All genres, all time eras. And you’ve got to travel a lot, and you’ve got to learn new languages and challenge any kind of preconceived notions of the world that you've had.
Also: Don't forget where you come from.
I want to see craft, I want people to make beautiful things. I don't want to see young Native writers writing to white readers. I would like to see young Native writers write to their elders or to their lost siblings or cousins.
There are certain things that Native writers are tempted to write about. And they need to, to understand, and they need to, in order for the rest of us to hear those stories.
But on the other hand, there's a sense of joy and humor and laughter and comradery and family that is not captured enough in Native literature, I think today.
There are heavy themes and those are necessary, and those stories are necessary to be shared and told. But equally necessary, we don't want to be bogged down by those same stories.
We're an evolving, growing center. This is a new literary movement. Don't let us get bogged down in the way that other people have bogged us down, in the way that they have written about us. Let's write about ourselves in a way that reflects all sides of our humanity.
