Q. Your book, Eye Killers is very interesting. It's about vampires. Maybe we could start by talking about the way you combined two different traditions about vampires in this book.

A. Well it's the two myths that I'm combining actually -- the Navajo myth of the Monster Slayer. It's the old legend where twin boys were born to Changing Woman who's a very important deity to the Navajos. It's because of her that the seasons change. As the day progresses, from Early morning to Night fall, she changed from a young girl to an old woman. Each day this happens. These twin sons that she bore are Monster Slayer and Child of the Water. These two boys went out and killed the monsters who were actually killing the Navajos' children a long time ago, and Eye Killers are one of the creatures that they destroy. I mixed that with the vampire myth, which I think everybody knows about. The connection between the two is basically the sun- sunlight. In Navajo mythology, the sun is very important. The sun is the father to the Twins. And for vampires it's a very destructive force. So that's the connection between the two that I have. The vampire or eye killer in this book has memories of coming from Vienna and the a European tradition.

Q. And here he is in Albuquerque. What does that have to do with the story in terms of how the people have mixed here and how it's affected this area from your point of view?

A. Well, actually, Albuquerque is kind of an odd place. The main university is here, and there's a huge mix of people -- an international mix of people. There was that about it, and then for myself I actually kind of consider myself more a film maker than, I consider myself a writer too, but a film maker more. And when I was at the university taking film classes, I saw this film, "Nosferatu", the silent film, and I just fell in love with it, the whole story telling silent film technique. I was raised with movies and hearing stories that my grandmother and my mother told me, and I pictured these things, and here was this movie -- this film that just really inspired me to write about -- not just the vampire, Nosferatu, but also the culture itself, the stories.

Q. -- the stories about the vampires --

A. -- yeah. Exactly. And the Doppelganger, for example. And the somnambulistic creatures that figure in some things. There are some creatures of that type, in Navajo myth. And so that's where I got this whole thing going.

Q. So you see a lot of a similarities then in mythology.

A. Very much. In fact, when I read those kind of dramatic myths, I pictured them happening here. I mean, we have dark forests, and we have these empty landscapes that are very bleak and very mysterious. So that was a big part for me.

Q. You started out making animated films.

A. I started making clay-animated films. And later -- they grew into short kind of black and white, really intense kind of films. I've also done documentaries. What I'd really like to do now is to -- since I have the film rights, to get the film of Eye Killers going.

Q. How has the response been to the book?

A. The kind of tradition that I come from is a storytelling, an oral tradition, Native American, where things are passed down through this oral history. One of the nicest things I've heard people say is that they feel like this book is something that they'd like to read to people. It's almost like coming full circle around to how I was raised. The University Press is a kind of small press, which is really nice in certain ways because they really allowed me leeway. There was some big commercial firms that were really interested in the book, but they wanted me to cut out a lot of the Navajo -- some of the characters and some of the history behind the story.

Q. Really. And what were their reasons for wanting you to do that?

A. Well, they wanted -- they saw it as a thriller, you know. Basically a kind of fast paced thriller They wanted me to streamline it by getting rid of some of the characters and some of the background to not just the Navajos but the Pueblo people too. It was kind of a -- I came to this crossroads because here were these big firms that really wanted it, and, you know, there was that money thing in there. I realized that that wasn't really the point for me, which was nice. A friend of mine, who was my professor at the university, my creative writing professor, he had several books published by the University of Oklahoma, and they were very interested in the book too, because basically it's the first novel really to be published by a Navajo author.

Q. That's quite a unique possession to be in.

A. It is. What would my community think of me if I just wanted to get rid of all the history behind the story. The great thing about the University of Oklahoma Press was that they wanted the Navajo stuff. They wanted that Navajo history in there, those references to the old tradition. So I went with them right away. It's been really nice being with them. I feel like I've been honest with not just with my own family but with the story itself, with the history, with the legends that it came from.

Q. You have an interesting combination of characters between this old sheep herder and the young white school teacher, and I'm just getting to the part where they are meeting each other, and I guess feeling each other out in terms of how they're going to work together to figure out the problem with his neice. Do you see that sort of thing happening in real life maybe? I mean, not necessarily about vampires, but people coming together, I think, over a lot of barriers really and maybe finding out something valuable about either each other, like these two. Maybe, otherwise, they may never have met each other or spoken to each other except under these extreme circumstances.

A. That was one of the main points in the book, the introduction of people to the Navajo culture, It's really a huge question, I think, not just for outsiders who want to become involved with Native Americans or my tribe, particularly, but also for Native American writers to become involved with themselves. There's this whole idea of since stories and legends are a strong oral tradition. What are we doing now, translating our stories and our history into this other language? And this is something that came up with me when I was writing the book. So for myself it was not only introducing outsiders through Diana, the teacher, to the Navajo culture and to Navajo people, but also translating my own history to myself. I stayed summers with my grandparents, and was raised a lot out on the reservation, but my own history -- the main part of my history is I was raised here in the city, and I have this whole background of popular culture going inside me. One of the main criticisms of the book when it came out was that I had a white character, who's almost in this position of a heroine -- like a "Dances with Wolves" type thing. But that's not what the serious reader will see. I think somebody who goes into the book really deeply will see that Diana is there for a purpose. One of the things that's kind of well known, through Tony Hillerman's books, is that Navajos have this strong fear of the dead. And that's one of the things that came up a lot when I was working with the vampires. So I really needed a character who would not only introduce the reader to this other culture but also to bring herself into the story as an integral part. And so she's the only person who can really go in and deal with the vampires because she doesn't have that kind of taboo that's holding her back, you know, this fear of the dead.

Q. I suppose novelists are pretty much of a European sort of tradition. You started describing that. I think you had some questions about it, or you had to address that as you were writing it to be writing about your traditions in the English language, and, yet, somehow you're preserving it by doing that. Is that how you think about it, or you have a different way of thinking about it?

A. That's what I'm trying to do. I think it's very important to preserve the legends. I think that is a responsibility that all Native American writers have. It goes beyond popularity or money. It's more that --because a lot of people, even on the reservation the kids that are growing up now, they don't have a grasp on these traditions, on these legends, on the stories. I feel really fortunate to have been raised with these stories. They're really deep inside me, which is an interesting thing to me because I didn't realize that. That I had these stories inside me, inside my soul. And in my heart. In a way, I am preserving -- trying to preserve those stories and the way they were told to me. The voice. The particular voice they were told to me. They're not just "once upon a time", bedtime stories. They're traditional, ceremonial things. Some of the stories are very much tied to a certain ceremony. One of the main things too is preserving my grandmother's voice. She had a very particular way of telling me stories, and that's something that in a way has kind of trickled into my own story telling technique, and I think that's really nice because I think a lot of Native American people respond to that way of being told a story. It's very personal, and that's something important to me.

Q. So if this character, the old Navajo man, Michael, he - from what I've read so far, he's going through trying to remember the stories that he was told as a child, and a lot of them have left his memory, and he's trying to recall them --and for him it's a struggle between wanting to believe in them, I think, and being really angry with what happened to his grandmother and so on, and sort of wanting to reject them because he's maybe not happy with the outcome of what happened with his grandmother.

A. Right. Exactly. I mean, that was the process that I went through too. My main problem in the beginning of writing the story was, do I really have this background? Can I really tell the story from the point of view of an old Navajo man? And so it was really a painful thing, remembering -- going back into my own childhood and really looking at it and almost saying to myself, do I really have this tradition? Am I really a traditional person? And so as Michael does, as the story progresses, he realizes that, yeah, he does have these stories, and they're inside, not just inside his mind. He remembers the events and stuff of the story in his heart, he remembers what they were tied to and those -- it's almost as if the story sparked memories of people that he had known, and important things that he has to remember.

Q. And so did you draw a lot of this out of your memory? Did you do some more research? Did you have to go talk to people and learn some more stories, or did you find that you really could recall most of what you needed?

A. I can recall the stories. The only research I really did was to go to the library here at the university. You see, there's this whole thing again with the missionaries and those people even soldiers, were going into the reservation. They would record some of these stories told to them by Navajo medicine men or some of the older people. So my research was really looking to see what exactly these old people were willing to give up. What parts of the stories because even with these stories I could tell that there were things left out, or there were just different ways of telling -- or there were things avoided, or there were things kind of made up, almost. So, see, it's really interesting, that process too -- saying, well, this is okay to say and this was not okay. I shouldn't say this. And then my own grandparents and my mother, also, went through the book with a red marker, saying, you can't say this. You shouldn't say this --

Q. -- because it's not right or because you shouldn't give certain things away? --

A. -- you shouldn't give certain things away, or it's not right. Also like say an old Navajo man wouldn't do this, or wouldn't particularly do this, or he wouldn't say it this way. That was really helpful to me, too. I thought, ah, this is great. This is what it means. So that was my research, mainly memory --