 My friendship with Janice was in some ways a very typical writerly relationship friendship in that we communicated infrequently but intensely. In other ways it was atypical in that we shared a lot of emotional stories as well as academic and creative ones. We met back in 1999, actually this year marks the 20th year that I've known Janice. We met when we were putting together this book, Speak to Me Words, which Jen mentioned early on. I had put together a panel on recent Native American poetry for the Big Modern Language Association Conference and after the panel, a couple of the participants, Carter Rivard in particular said, you know, that would make a really good book. You should propose the panel just to a press and turn it into a book. And so I did propose it to the University of Arizona Press and they said that would make a great book but you need a co-editor and I said, I agree, I really feel like I could use a co-editor. And we talked about some options and the person on the top of both of our lists is the editor of University of Arizona Press, was Janice and I didn't really know Janice at all. I knew her work both as a poet and as a scholar and I was really impressed by it. I taught her work, I'd written about it and so we decided that Patty would make the initial introduction to see if she was interested, Janice seemed to be interested and so then we agreed that we would talk by phone. So I called her and like Jan, I was a little nervous. I didn't really know what to expect. I was living in Texas, she had been living on a houseboat up in Oregon. We wound up having this very long conversation, I think about two hours. And if you've ever talked with Janice, you know that a conversation with her is amazing but there are a lot of pauses. And so on the phone, the first time you're meeting with someone, there would be these long pauses but it's her brain working. And I was always worried that things were going poorly but apparently they went well. And we wound up putting together this book which at the time, and actually it might still be, was the first collection of essays devoted to recent indigenous American poetry. And that friendship that was established there kind of changed my life in a number of ways. I've gone on to do a number of collaborations but I think of my initial work with Janice as a kind of base code for collaboration and the many resonances of the aesthetic project. And our friendship would evolve over the years and we might go a while without seeing each other in person. I would often see her if she came out to the Bay Area from the many places she lived. And we would keep in touch as she would make the decision to go to grad school to get a graduate library degree or as she was writing her dissertation, she would say, hey, can I send you my dissertation? And I would say yes and she would say, good thing, it's on its way. I would send her poems. I would ask her advice on essays I was writing. I think I was telling Mimi and Jen, we got together for a tribute in Colorado last month that Janice is one of the few people with whom I've exchanged both scholarly and creative work. I admired her eye and her ear a great deal. And I learned many things from her mostly about how one listens to language. I also learned from her about how a poem can look inward and outward at the same time. And this is something that not many poets can do. I think of Janice's three great themes as being California, as Linda said, history, which is something Jen talked about, and the body, in particular the female body, which Mimi referred to. And all three of those are contested spaces, they're contact zones. And Janice was one of the best at being sneakily political. In that long poem that Jen wrote, you'll notice that you get this description of land and landscape. And then right at the end, there's the line, I think often what it was like before white people got here. And so you are lulled into this unbelievable poetic space. And I always think of her as gently puncturing stereotypes. And what she would do is she might ask you to put on one earphone. So it wouldn't really hurt you that badly, but then she's still going to pop the balloon anyway. And I felt like she's one of the great mentors in that regard. So what I wanted to do, oh, the other way we collaborated, our final collaboration was, my most recent book project is, I co-edited to this anthology of contemporary indigenous poetry with Cindy Furman. And of course, we were going to include Janice. And so I got in touch with her and I said, hey, I'm going to put your poems in this book. But I asked her, I said, what do you want to go in? Like what poems do you want? And so we had this long conversation about what poems should go in. And I was so, so these are the poems that she and I both thought sort of embodied her work. So what did she pick? Indian mascot, 1959, well done. A poem, the first poem that Jen read. And I thought I would read a couple of the other poems from this book that I really love. Um, and this is called The Day of the Dead. And this is one of the poems that I think of as one of her great poems since the poem that she really wanted in the book, The Day of the Dead. I wish it were like this. El Dia de los Huertos comes and we fill our baskets with bread, apples, chicken and beer and go out to the graveyard. We bring flowers with significant colors, yellow, crimson and gold, the strong, hungry colors of life, full of saliva and blood. We sit on the sandy mounds and I play my accordion. It groans like the gates of hell. The flames of the votives flicker in the wind. My music makes everything sway. All the visible and the invisible. Friends, candles, ants, the wind. Because for me, life ripens. And for now, it's on my side. Though it's true, I am often afraid. I wear my boots when I play the old squeeze box and stomp hard rhythms till the headstones dance on their graves. I love that poem. I just taught this poem, this poem that's called Kim. I just taught it. I'm a professor here at USF. And after I read this poem, this one woman in the class teared up and she had recently come out as a being lesbian and she was like, that poem, it gets it. And I think this is one of the great gifts of Janice's work. Kim, we sat on the stairs at our friend's house all of 16, giddy with longing and thick hesitation. I wanted to touch her face. Had she waited for that gesture? What would she think? I had gazed at her often wondering what to do, how to be. She had listened and nodded when I sang, strumming my guitar. At last, almost trembling, I whispered, sometimes I hate you. And watched as she recoiled from that slap. She stood without a word and turned to look at me, harrowing me with her eyes. I gassed, I hardened myself, stopped hot tears, but felt myself falling like a rock hurled furiously through the arc of my shame, my lie. Her willingness to be vulnerable is something else I learned. I thought also, I love that Linda read some of her prose. I think Janice is an underrated prose writer and critic. And I just want to read a passage from the essay she contributed for our book. She wrote this brilliant essay called Poems as Maps in American Indian Women's Writing, and she kind of talks about the poem as a map into various places. And I thought about this after I learned she passed. It's by being human, alive, mortal, connected to what has come before and what will come after that we find our way to the next world, the fifth world, which may be a higher realm of existence. Bless you. That mystic journey is known through the body through our own births and deaths, both physical and metaphysical. The poet promises that as we pass through the membrane of death, we'll smell the cooking fires of our relatives who are preparing a feast for us because, quote, they have never left us. We abandoned them for science. The circle of connection remains unbroken in the poet's vision. The maps we construct and follow ultimately lead us home. Is the fifth world, the next world, the one where our relatives live, eating, talking, gambling, singing? Is death a stage through which we pass in order to travel on to that farther world? I don't know, but it seems the fifth world is the place where our loved ones await us. And because there is no guidebook, once we enter that world, we have to navigate by memory of our mother's voice and renew the song she is singing. As the traveler enters the fifth world, she may see the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the city of artificial light and killed what was killing us. I was thinking about that passage and Janus and the question that she has for the soul. Anyway, I wrote this poem. A lot of some of Janus' poems in the form of letters and our introduction to this book, we wrote as a dialogue, which was a little edgy at the time, but I think of so much of my work with Janus as a collaboration. And so, I don't know, I feel like this poem to her is some sort of collaboration in which I'm asking her questions, looking for advice. Anyway, thank you all for coming. Thanks to Linda and Mimi for coming from California, Colorado, and Jen, thanks, Kim. Thank you, Janus. Dear Janus, today it was over 90 degrees in San Francisco, 94 in Berkeley. Do you remember those days in September when the fog took off its coat and laid in the sun like a tourist? Today was one of those days. You would have loved it. If the weather could be an instrument, today was a drum. I've been thinking about you lately. I have so many questions. How did you begin your poems? Did they ever start with questions? Mine almost always do. But I'd like to change things up a bit. I'm looking to you for help. I want to write a poem for you that is a painting. Here's what I'm thinking. When my pencil touches the paper, it will become a canvas and the pencil a brush. Instead of ink, there will be paint. I will write a poem full of emotions and courageous ideas for everyone else will see a painting that invokes an impressive range of emotions and creative ideas. Some guy will say that he feels about this painting the way he always wished he had felt about poetry. Perhaps the painting will appear on mouse pads and T-shirts, maybe even a postcard. A professor somewhere will tape it to her office door when her musician friend stops by to talk, he will look at the painting and hear a lovely song replete with courageous ideas and melodious emotions. This is another way of saying that I would like to write a poem that sings to you. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to write a poem about one thing? I've been thinking about baskets lately, but also the mountains in Colorado and that bridge on the north fork of the Feather River. Do you know what I'm talking about? When you were on that bridge, you think you might be in Colorado and the mountains just might be upside down baskets. Listen, you can hear the notes of a guitar somewhere in the clouds or maybe the river. What if you could put a guitar in a poem the way Picasso put one in a painting? If I could, I would write a book for you made entirely of clouds. It would be shaped like a guitar. When you opened it, poems would cascade like a river, everywhere, an orchestra, everything changing shapes, switching sounds. I can see you dancing. You are a painting making a wall made of music. Hey Janice, who gets to decide what's beautiful? I ask because I'm looking for you in the sky. Angels are spread across the blue like a quilt of sun stars and all the gods have put on their nighttime skin. Everything is shining. The birds in their little vessels of feathers, the beams and rays of all our devices, the dust of wheat rising like incense and the soft gloaming, even our voices are shining, even language, even the dead, nothing Janice, nothing will not glow. Maybe language like life exists only to end. Like rain, like the song, like this poem. But then I think of you and I realize that everything like you is only beginning to begin. Thank you.