One of many small towns scattered across 225,000 square miles of the Navajo reservation, Pinon, Arizona, was once known as the place “Where the pavement ends and the wild west begins,” a slogan imbued with new meaning in the film Frybread Face and Me. After watching the movie earlier this month, I wrote the following personal reflection, which appeared as a guest column in The Navajo Times on December 14, 2023. As it is not available online, I share my original submission, below.
My Emergence Place
by Andrea M. Penner
Even thirty-nine years after I moved away, I still hold in my heart the place from which my life, as I know it now, emerged. For me, the pavement not only ended, but also began in Pinon, Arizona. When I moved there from southern California in 1985, my family and friends wondered why I was going to a place they couldn’t find on a map. They weren’t the only ones. At the Pinon trading post, you could buy a T-shirt with the slogan, “Where the Hell is Pinon?” But today those same bilagáanas would at least have heard of it, thanks to the new indy drama, FRYBREAD FACE AND ME, which I recently watched on the recommendation of my friend Luci.
Written and directed by Billy Luther and based, in part, on his childhood, the movie was filmed on a custom-built set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the story takes place in the Pinon area.
I’m guessing that an average American Netflix viewer—a millennial woman with no college degree living in the suburbs and earning less than $50,000 a year, according to Business Insider in 2021—didn’t pinpoint the story’s setting as that dot on the map (if you have the right map!) bisecting an invisible line about halfway between Flagstaff and the Four Corners, as the raven flies.
In one scene, the film’s main characters, kids named Benny and Fry (Dawn), watch their uncle ride a bull in a rodeo. When the announcer introduces him as “a regular from Pinon, Arizona,” my already happy heart skipped a beat. “Pinon! That’s where I lived,” I told my partner as we watched the movie in our Albuquerque living room. (Not that he needed to be told. I took him to Pinon on one of our first road-trip dates two decades ago. I figured if he still loved me after that rough road, we’d be just fine.)
And at the end of the film when adult-Benny recalls the summer he spent with his cousin at their grandmother’s family camp, the place “where the dirt road ends and the paved road begins,” I understood Luther’s subversion. He transforms the worn-out phrase, “Where the Pavement Ends and the Wild West Begins” (also a T-shirt slogan) for a new era.
For me, two roads diverged in Pinon, where I lived from June 1985 to August 1986. With my then-husband and baby, I was a twenty-six-year-old missionary wife bringing what I [then] believed was the good news of Jesus to the Diné. We lived in Pinon on the Pinon Gospel Church compound for just over a year when we were reassigned to Flagstaff to start a Native American Christian student ministry at Northern Arizona University (NAU). In Flagstaff, I was still a missionary mom, but my life was changing. I didn’t leave the church or missionary work right then—that would take several more years—but I did see a new path laid before me.
By August 1988, I was enrolled in graduate English studies at NAU and taking a class called Women Writers and Feminist Theory. When the professor assigned the term paper, I sought advice from NAU’s Navajo language professor, Irene Silentman.
I will always be grateful she did not laugh at my white-woman ignorance when I asked, “Are there any Navajo women writers?” Instead, she handed me a copy of A Breeze Swept Through by Luci Tapahonso and said, “read this.”
In Tapahonso’s poetry, I recognized Navajos like those I’d known in Pinon. One handsome raisin-eyed cowboy often used our land-line phone (when it worked) to call rodeo locations for dates and fee information. At the Pinon Rodeo, right near our house, the announcer called him “the pretty boy of the Ind’n rodeo circuit.” And our neighbor, Rose, had the sheepherder blues—living in town above Chee’s store after relocation. And Betty wove rugs so big she could trade them in for a new pick-up truck at the dealership in Gallup. Luci brought these characters to life.
Pinon was never far from my thoughts when I wrote my first essay, Changing Woman, Changing Women, which later became the basis for my master’s degree thesis, At Once Gentle and Powerful: Voices of the Landscape in the Poetry of Luci Tapahonso, a decade before Luci was named the first Navajo Nation poet laureate. That paper was the seedling for later doctoral study at the University of New Mexico and my academic career teaching English, including Native American Literature.
In the Dec. 1, 2023, HuffPost article, "Frybread Face And Me Follows A Misfit’s Summer On The Navajo Rez,” author Kelby Vera mistakes the kids’ just being themselves for their not fitting in. The characters Benny and Fry (Dawn) are coming of age in a bicultural world deeply grounded in Dinétah. They are not misfits. They are the future.
What roads have you traveled? Where did your life, as you know it now wherever you find yourself, begin? As 2023 comes to an end, where will 2024 take you? Wishing you all a very happy new year. Peace be with us all.
TUNE IN ONLINE, DECEMBER 27…
In November, it was my pleasure to be interviewed by DelSheree Gladden for her KSJE radio show Write On Four Corners. We talked about poetry and the writing life. You can listen live on Weds., Dec. 27, at 10:30 am (U.S. Mountain Standard Time). After December 27, the audio podcast should be available at KSJE: Write on Four Corners.
The enthusiastic host of yWrite, Angela Grout, interviewed me for her video series of author conversations in Philadelphia where we both attended the International Women’s Writing Guild conference last July. She asked me about the workshop I gave on Mindful Editing and about the process of writing poetry. The episode should be available on YouTube sometime after Dec. 27, 2023 (if the link says “private,” it means Angela hasn’t uploaded it yet. Please check back in a few days).
Both interviewers refer to my second book, Rabbit Sun, Lotus Moon (2017), poetry finalist for the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award. Still available!
Aw, it's Erin! :)) My life began (again) with my move to Prague. And probably for the first time, fully as me. <3 Happy new year and peaceful reflections to you.
Thank you, Joanne! xo