THE OPENING PAGES of Ramona Emerson’s new novel, Exposure, are crime-scene-level gory. A family is brutally murdered—and Navajo forensic photographer Rita Todacheene is back on the job. She’s also still seeing ghosts after being shot at the end of Emerson’s first novel, Shutter, which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. After 16 years of working in forensics and running her own production company, Reel Indian Pictures, in Albuquerque, Emerson earned an MFA in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), turned to writing fiction, and now teaches film at the University of New Mexico. Shutter began as a memoir about growing up with her grandmother on the Navajo Nation, but a mentor at IAIA saw something else. “She told me to take what I was doing and apply it to fiction,” Emerson says. “And then it all changed.”
You never know when you work in forensics. You can be in a divorce proceeding one day and videotaping a child getting his wound debrided the next day.
Most of my forensics work was pretty boring. Most of the horrible stuff I saw was on people who were still alive.
I’m allowed to go places in writing that I can’t go anywhere else.
I don’t have to think about how much it would cost to film.
I was writing true stories about my grandma or my grumpy boss. I was thinking about doing a documentary about Navajos who work with death, like EMTs. It was all a mishmash in my head.
I started to see it developing: What if I wrote a story about a Navajo woman who worked in forensic photography? I’d never seen a book like that. And then I thought, What if she could talk to the dead?
At a crime scene, you start at the outside, from each corner, and move closer and closer until you’re measuring blood droplets or a bullet hole. That’s how I like to bring readers into the scene.
I describe it in detail because you won’t understand how horrible it is unless I do.
My mom was a plein air landscape painter. We went all over New Mexico, to every nook and cranny of the reservation, to secret places only she knew about.
As Diné people, our land is sacred. We live within four sacred mountains, where there’s a safety that you don’t get when you’re outside of them. In New Mexico, once we’re past Mount Taylor, it becomes a meaner, harder world.
When you grow up in Catholic school, you’ll find brothers who are wonderful people, and then you’ll find ones who use their power to hurt people. Just like everything else: Good cop, bad cop; good priest, bad priest.
Readers ask me why I don’t help them understand Rita’s spiritual journey with her medicine man. My answer is that it’s none of our business.
Back in the day, you never paid medicine men to sing for you or do medicine for you. Now people go into debt doing spiritual things for their families.
We never talked about the Navajo stuff in workshops [at IAIA]. No one cared. Critiques were all about how many ghosts I could fit into one chapter.
Maybe I’m a poet that’s going for hard-boiled. Poets talk about darkness a lot.
Being an artist is learning how to juggle what you love with what you need to do to survive.
SEE FOR YOURSELF
See Ramona Emerson on May 17 at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. Follow her online at ramonaemersonbooks.com and Instagram (@reelindian).