D[r]ive into Rez Ball: An Interview with Award-Winning Author Byron Graves

Don't forget to check out the Summit

The 2026 Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature
Online
Thursday evening, February 26 & Friday, February 27, 2026
https://www.yalsummit.org/

Call for Proposals
Proposals Due by December 5, 2025
Proposal Form: https://forms.gle/NjeWp1kCubyFuF1R8

Meet out Contributor: Dr. Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez is an assistant professor and the director of English Education at North Dakota State University, where she is living her dream, teaching Methods courses and Young Adult Literature and mentoring preservice English teachers. She is in her 16th year of teaching and loves it just as much now as she did on day one. She has taught and worked with pre- and in-service teachers in Montana (very rural), Arkansas (urban), Arizona (urban and rural), and, now, North Dakota (urban and rural). She has been a member of NCTE since 2008, and is a strong supporter of professional organizations like NCTE, its state affiliates, and ALAN. Her research interests include teacher education, rural teacher support, YAL, and methods of teaching reading. She can be reached at [email protected].

D[r]ive into Rez Ball: An Interview with Award-Winning Author Byron Graves by Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez

Byron Graves, Ojibwe and Lakota, is from the Red Lake Nation in the state known as Minnesota. They played basketball there and have even been teaching themselves to skateboard for their latest book project.
 
Byron has contributed to two anthologies: one multicultural anthology, All Signs Point to Yes, and the other an Indigenous anthology, Legendary Frybread Drive-In, published this year. Their debut novel, Rez Ball, released in 2023, has won several awards, including YALSA’s William C. Morris Award for the best debut novel for young adults and the American Indian Youth Literature Award from the American Indian Library Association. In addition, Rez Ball was a finalist for the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. 

Of Rez Ball, the Morris Award chair said, “Rez Ball impressed us with its authentic voice, well-developed characters and exciting action scenes as it explored grief, prejudice, friendships, family and community.” I can attest to this statement, as I personally could not put this book down and am still so in love with the characters and with the writing. If you haven’t had the chance to dive into Byron’s writing yet, you have such a treat in store for you.
 
On October 24, 2025, the North Dakota Council of Teachers of English was privileged to welcome Byron Graves as the keynote speaker at our annual conference. They opened the day by telling us how they found their voice through writing. Byron shared that their time playing basketball provided them with the model of hard work that they needed in order to push through the tough writing times, but it also showed them that they needed to find the fun in writing just as they had in basketball. In between Byron’s opening keynote and after-lunch writing workshop, I was lucky enough to be able to interview them. In this interview, Byron and I dove into topics, such as the role community plays in our lives, the importance of personal expression, how Byron poignantly captures loss and healing in Tre’s story, and so much more. I hope you enjoy listening to and learning from Byron as much as I did!

Interview with Bryon Graves, the Author of the Award-Winning Novel, Rez Ball

**Note: for reading fluidity, I have not included the indications of active listening (yeahs, mmhmms, for sures) during both my longer questions and Byron’s longer answers. 

Rebecca: So, Byron, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I really appreciate it.
 
Byron: Yeah, my pleasure.
 
Rebecca: I'm going to share it on Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday blog in November
 
Byron: Okay, cool.
 
Rebecca: and I'm going to share Rez Ball on there as well.
 
Byron: Woohoo! Thank you.
 
Rebecca: Yeah! So for the uninitiated, can you describe what rez ball is and how it differs from basketball maybe people think of in their heads from their Friday night basketball games in school or what we might see on TV?

Byron: Yeah, I think it's a combination of street ball. I think it's a combination of like freestyle hip hop. I think it's a combination of kids who are coming from a place where anything and everything can happen at any moment, and there's that uncertainty, and you're constantly in a state of reaction. And basketball, and rez ball specifically, is that opportunity to be the one creating that beautiful madness. And so instead of having a set play where, once you watch a team a few times – other teams – you can say, ‘Hey, look, when they call this play, this guy runs over here, they stop, and then that guy runs over here,’ and you can start to see the pattern and the rhythm, where rez ball is completely uncertain. It's constantly being created, so nobody can just say, ‘Hey, I know what they're going to do,’ because you literally don't know what's coming. But I think that's part of necessity, and it's part of Indigenous survival is constantly figuring out how can we overcome this difference? Like when I was writing Rez Ball, I knew a huge part of that story that I wanted to tell, at least, that, I hope that I told correctly, was that, what's the difference between a Native American teenage athlete and then, say, a teenager in like, an affluent suburb, and what's their life like? What are their challenges like, and how do they differ? And I think when you're looking at a rez ball high school team, a lot of times you're going to have a lot of kids who are, like, 5’10”, and they might be going up against the city team with a bunch of guys who are 6’3”, 6’5”, 6’7”, so it's being able to adapt and be creative with like, ‘Okay, here's the challenge we're facing. But what can we do about that challenge?’
 
Rebecca: Mmm, yes. Yeah, I really like that because, in the book, I think the spirit of rez ball really comes through, especially when they're playing the other team and they decide to just go for it, and he calls out ‘Superboy,’ and they decide they're just gonna play rez ball. And there's actually joy to it because they're not playing within another set of rules. I really loved that.
​
So in your keynote, you talked about how, or I thought, you really demonstrated how any subject or activity can be intellectualized. The way that you talked about how you came to love and play and understand basketball, watching the tape and all that, which I think really contradicts with what people often think about young men who play sports or who play video games, right, is that it's completely non-intellectual pursuit, which is not at all true. And I think in the book, you really work against a lot of stereotypes, not just against Native Americans in general, but against young boys, male friendship, all those things. Were you thinking about that as you were writing? Were you thinking about how Tre and Nate and Wes would push back on these stereotypes as you were going through? Can you talk about your thought process? 

Byron: It definitely was something that I came up with in later drafts and later versions. As you revisit that story, you're revisiting it (1) from, like, a storytelling perspective, of like, what's going to be interesting, what's going to be page turning, what's going to be entertaining, right? But then you're also asking yourself, ‘How is this going to be interpreted? What kind of impact can this make? How could say a teenage boy read this and be influenced by it?’ And so part of me was sharing my childhood friendship stories from my teenage time, but then part of me was also sharing my adult epiphanies and realizations of how you can break those gender norms or those gender stereotypes, and you can show young men a side of being just a human being and how you can interact with other guys, and that it doesn't always have to be macho or misogynistic or tough guy, and that it's okay to be open and vulnerable and kind and patient with your friends: guys, girls, whoever, non-binary people. That you just can share those adult realizations and stories with a younger reading audience but still make it completely organic and not feel forced, which is another challenge when you're trying to write something. When you're watching a movie and you're like, ‘Oh, that was the info dump’ or ‘Oh, that was them telling me the plot of the story’ – How can I do that in a way that comes across like normal dialogue? So it's a challenge, but it also pays off if you can execute it correctly.
 
Rebecca: Mmhmm. I definitely think that through loss, so like when my brother was in high school, they had a friend who passed away in a really tragic farming accident. And I think that in those moments, young men seemed to feel okay showing their grief, right? And they did bond as a team, and they still, you know, talk about that and are able to share that, but it seems like then it gets restricted. I had students who lost family members, and it was like, you're allowed to be sad about that, but now we're also not going to talk about the anger that you feel. We're not going to talk about the loneliness or the isolation or, like, how Tre sometimes thinks ‘Can't they just love me for me? Does it always have to be about Jaxon?’ and I felt that in my students, right? That ‘Oh, I'm allowed to be sad, but these other sets of emotions that come out…’ And I think your book really shows how they can actually deal with those emotions and be real people, right?
So that was really so cool.
​
You write these characters really lovingly; like I really felt that you loved them as I was reading. I wondered, after reading some of your other interviews, too, and how you talked about your relationship with your dad, if writing Tre in particular, in this way, was also a way of loving yourself at that time in your life?

Byron: It was very therapeutic as I went through each iteration of Rez Ball and each rewrite or addition, or, you know, revision, going into a deeper exploration of those dynamics of the family members, the friendships, the dynamics between anybody and everybody, and all the situations and emotions that Tre is going through. With each layer of that that I peeled back, I got deeper and deeper into the psychology behind a lot of it and had my own epiphanies and realizations of those dynamics with say, for example, specifically, like my own father and things that I didn't even know were challenges or obstacles that he and I had in deepening our relationship, or better understanding each other. And so telling this story was, in some way, me understanding what that was like having a father like I had who was very macho and sports-loving and Mr. Tough Guy, Mr. Never Cries, Mr. all of those things and how that can impact a teenager who wants to be themselves and is trying to find themselves and is trying to blossom into their own personality and their own understanding of the world, while also appeasing, you know, their father, mother, siblings, friends, whoever that is. So it definitely was deeper than I thought it was going to be, as far as how it would impact me. I had a lot of nights where I would be writing a specific scene and I would actually have a deeply emotional reaction to it. So in some ways, it was incredibly challenging, because I had to keep experiencing these emotions. But then, on the flip side of that same coin, it was therapeutic, because I was getting stuff out of me that I didn't even know was in there.
 
Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.
I know you've talked about how on the reservation, loss of friends or siblings or community members, especially in your high school years, can be really common. I think we experienced that in Montana as well. I think rural areas, especially with driving accidents, right? And it did make me wonder how you were able to write so poignantly about specifically the loss of a sibling, especially in your keynote this morning after hearing you say, ‘Oh, first it was a teammate, then it was a cousin, then it was a brother,’ and then the healing aspect of it, too, that really comes in bits and pieces, especially between Tre and his dad, like the scene with Jaxon’s shoes or the Sunday morning basketball court scene. How were you able to capture that?

Byron: I think it was revisiting my experience with losing my dad or my nephew or friends and going through the different moments, whether that's that initial loss, whether it's that grief and anger, whether it's later, when you're looking back and you're thinking nostalgically about this beautiful moment you had or something kind they did for you, and what that healing process can look like. But then I also was examining – because my sister was playing high school basketball, and she was the star point guard of our team when we lost our dad, and so I had to watch her still go to school a couple days later after the funeral, and then still play basketball, because it was mid-season, and the strength and the courage that I saw with her. And my niece, she lost her brother, my nephew, to cancer while she was in the middle of her basketball season her junior year, and she dedicated the rest of her high school basketball career to him, and she wore his number, and she was our first athlete to go play Division I basketball. And so watching the strength of those two young ladies also very directly informed that experience of that character, and what that would look like and sound like and feel like, and how it would not just be linear, but it would be kind of this back and forth, up and down, evolution of that experience.
 
Rebecca: I love that you used women as your example, because I think Tre comes across as, as a young man, as himself, but like you were saying, you can do kind of, not necessarily gender-bending, but like break gender expectations, especially because it was young girls who you used as an example. That's so cool.
​
So did your relationship with your dad, and your mom, too, really affect how you wrote about Tre and his parents? 

Byron: Yeah, 100%. In the earlier drafts of Rez Ball, there was way more of my personal story of the backlash that I faced from my parents for, you know, painting my fingernails, coloring my hair, wearing clothes that weren't just typically ‘male.’ When I was trying to really find myself and express myself, they had a lot of issues with it. And my frustration with it was that I was a straight A student. I was kind to all my teachers. My teachers loved me. My classmates were kind to me and loved me, and I was a star athlete, and I was staying out of trouble. And where I'm from, if you're not drinking, if you're not on drugs, if you're not truant, you know, I felt like this, you know, anomaly of a student at that time in that place, and all I wanted to do was paint my fingernails and color my hair. And that was a problem. It was an extreme problem for my parents, and we had some of the worst fights we've ever had because of those things. So in my earlier drafts, I really dug into that and visited that a lot more and sat with that a lot more, and then later it just didn't make as much sense for that story or that character, so I pulled some of those things out. But I think anytime you have something that's that big or deep in a story, and you pull it out, the echoes of it still exist. So I think that permeated around the story, and you can still see it and hear it and feel it. You just don't know exactly what it is, but you know there's that difference, or this delta, between him and his parents and how they're all viewing each other. So I think it definitely left a mark on it, and I get to visit that now in future books that I'm working on now that that's more of the focus of the story, instead of more of the basketball and grieving portion that Rez Ball had.
 
Rebecca: I know. It's so hard when you write something and you just desperately need your own story in it, and then you have to take that part out, and it’s other people telling you to take it out, and so you are mad about it but you take it out anyway, and then you end up thinking, ‘All right, I guess it’s better now.’

Byron: For sure. 100%. And I trust – you know, I work with Cynthia Leitich Smith, and I work with Rosemary Brosnan, and I work with my wonderful agent, Terrie Wolf, and I just … I believe all of them, because they're such brilliant storytellers, and they have so much experience in this industry that I'm still trying to gather and learn from. So if they say ‘I really feel this way or that way about this aspect of a scene or about this chapter,’ I just believe them, and I do my best to then work with that feedback that they're giving me. Instantly I'm like, ‘Okay, well, if that's what Cynthia thinks…’ or ‘if that's what Rosemary thinks…’ then there's a reason they say that and let's figure out how to better tell this story and save that thing maybe for some other story.
 
Rebecca: Yeah, those relationships are so important, especially with mentors.
​
As I read the book, I thought about a student that I had had in my student teaching semester, actually, so 16 years ago. His name was Kris, and he was Blackfeet and a devoted basketball player. Of course. We used to play together after school sometimes because I was the only teacher willing to supervise after-school weightlifting, and as I was reading the book, I could just picture him absolutely whooping his way through, especially through the basketball scenes. And I just wondered, did you have young boys like that really in your mind? Like, did you picture an audience as you were writing this? Or were you more thinking about the message as you were writing? Or was it both?

Byron: Initially, it was for teenage Indigenous males who liked basketball. That was it; it was super specific. And sometimes you can kind of create challenges for yourself when you want to make art that's that specific. It's like, if you're going to make the heaviest death metal band of all time, people who like Taylor Swift might not like your band, right? But it's a decision you're making, and it's the art you want to make. But then as I got deeper and further along, I started to figure out that you could do both. I could tell a story that was for those kids who loved basketball, didn't like reading, wanted something fast paced and moving, but then I was like, but that's not just life. Like, even if you are a high schooler who's playing basketball, there's more than basketball, right? Like, ‘what else is happening in your life?’ And that's where the universal aspects of the story started to blossom in those later versions of the book, when I thought, ‘Well, what's his love life look like? What do his friendships look like? What’s school look like?’ And that's when I think it became something that anyone else could listen to. You know, we turned down those heavy guitars, and we turned down the sound of the snare a little bit, and we made it something that was a little more palpable and a little more digestible for anyone to pick up and read or listen to and say, ‘Oh, hey, I hear the message in this.’ And so it was really pulling back some of the strings and just letting the story kind of tell itself, and I think that's when it started to become more of a universal story, so I had my intention initially, and then I went to write a better story. It opened the story up to being something that I hope anybody could pick up and see something in that they understand or get.
 
Rebecca: I love that, because I think sometimes, especially in the English classroom, the argument for ‘Classics’ is that their themes are universal, and the pushback from teachers is ‘Okay, but universal for whom?’ Yes, some Charles Dickens is still applicable today. He's my favorite author. I will continue to read him. But Young Adult Literature can be universal as well, and I think more so, especially for young people. So, yeah, I love that.

Byron: I think with how fast the world is constantly changing and getting into different generations who are saying, you know, ‘skibidi rizz’ and ‘six-seven’ and the like, and then that's only a thing for like a flash in the pan, right? Like for just one week. So I think contemporary young adult literature is so important. I think if they can see social media or a video game or a smartphone in someone's hand – because this younger generation has never seen a world without social media. They've never seen a world without a smartphone or an iPad or YouTube or Minecraft or Fortnite. So how in the heck are they going to understand language that sounds different, from 100 years ago? It's hard to understand what someone's saying, just the way it's hard for us to understand when kids are saying what they're saying. You're like, ‘Wait, what?’ At least having the technology and the world that they're in, the contemporary setting, it's super important to getting kids into reading because our attention spans are shrinking down to like, seven seconds, because we're just used to these short bits of reels and TikToks. But then you're going to read a book that's so dense or so hard for them to understand, it's going to turn them off from reading, and they're going to go, ‘What is this? I don't even like this thing. I'm back to my iPad.’ If you can get them something where a kid's on his iPad watching a Minecraft video of a streamer, they’ll think, ‘I get that, you know, let me read the rest of this chapter.’ I think shifting towards contemporary is the only way we're going to salvage young readers. You can get them on the contemporary side. Then later you can say, ‘Here's Charles Dickens,’ or ‘Here's Shakespeare,’ or here's something now that they're like, ‘Oh, I like reading. I've trained my brain to sit and read for 15 minutes straight.’ Yeah, then you can show them the classics.
 
Rebecca: Yeah, I agree. I think it has to be a building of the reading muscle first and what they like because why would you try something that you couldn't even access if you've never even been able to read something you could access before. So, yeah, super important to get the Young Adult novels in there and build their build their love. Show them that there's books out there that are about them and that they can read without the teacher. I think it’s so important.

Byron: When I was reading Shakespeare in school, I needed the Cliff’s Notes, and I needed to watch the Leonardo DiCaprio movie. When I watched the movie, I thought, ‘Oh, that's what they're saying when they’re describing this or that’ or ‘Oh, this scene, I get it now.’ I needed those additional resources, the Cliff’s Notes and the movie, for me to understand a single line.
 
Rebecca: Mmhmm. I think half the teachers need the Cliff’s Notes and the movie, too! I always tell my students that I think Shakespeare, whom I refer to as Willie Shakes, would absolutely love today's generation. They are gender-bending. They're making up their own words. They're doing, I mean, they're so inventive. I think he would have absolutely dug it. He would have been so into it. And they always respond with, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I say, ‘Y'all, he did the literal same stuff. It was just 400 years ago, so we can’t understand it!’ So, yeah, I love that so much.

​So I played basketball – never at the level that you did – I was far too small. And by the time I turned 14, I was like, ‘I just want to do homework.’ But my grandma played basketball, too, back when women still had to wear skirts to play and could only play half court, and she loved it so much. And when she got to watch me play, she was so excited, and I was reading some of the Goodreads reviews for Rez Ball, and there was a gal down in Oklahoma who said that ‘Rez Ball is a love letter to community.’ And that really struck me. And I was wondering if you could talk about the importance of community in your life, but also on the rez, in particular?

Byron: When I was playing basketball, I would go to, say, pick up the mail for my mom, and the lady working at the post office would say, ‘Oh my god, I watched your game last night. And when you dove on the floor and saved the ball…,’ or I would go to a community event, and our tribal chairman would come up and shake my hand and say, ‘Good luck in the playoffs.’ Anywhere I went and everywhere I went on our reservation, I could be at a powwow, and a young kid would come and, like, crawl onto my shoulders and like, tell me they were going to be better at basketball than me someday, kind of having that Indian Humor moment. And so anywhere I went and everywhere I went, being this, like, shy, introverted kid before basketball to then being completely welcomed and absorbed and championed in my community by anyone and everyone – kids, teenagers, elderly – I all of a sudden felt like my family had grown, and it wasn't just my mom and dad and my siblings, but literally anywhere I went, I would get a high five or, you know, someone would dap me up. And so I started to feel like I belonged, and, being someone who has lighter skin and not dressing like a lot of my peers, I had always felt, especially in a Native American community, like I didn't belong or I didn't fit in, and that a lot of the bullying was around that, so getting to feel welcomed and cheered on by everyone in my community because of basketball at that time was such a beautiful thing for me.

But I think community extends to whatever group that you're working in or cheering on or belonging to, right? Because now I belong to the literary community, and I get to go meet all different readers and different authors and people who work in the industry, and it all feels that same thing where it's like this family and I support all these other authors, and they support me, and we cheer each other on. So community can be whatever kind of thing you're working on or doing, but it can be beautiful. It can be helpful, you know? It can make you feel like you're welcome and belong, but I think it's also something that as we grow in that industry or field, or as we get that experience, we also have to make sure that we're then nurturing the people who are brand new, or stepping in that door for the first time, and paying it forward. And that's what continues to help grow and blossom and nurture it.
 
Rebecca: Yeah, I think, especially as I'm listening you talk about how there was still bullying, but once you did something that was in the spotlight that that kind of pulled back, I feel like you're also expanding the types of community members who get recognized, right? Because, yeah, you were a star basketball player, but now also you're writing. You do paint your fingernails, and you do dye your hair, so it's cool to do that now, right? Kids might think, ‘Oh, Byron does that. I could do it,’ and so you're making the community even better by being yourself. 

​Byron: Thank you. When I go to book events or I go to school visits, it's always at the very end where a couple of kids will come up who are wearing, like, a My Chemical Romance shirt, or a boy with his nails painted, or a boy who doesn't have his nails painted, they'll come up and they'll have a moment where they bond with me, and they're the ones who wait till everyone's gone because they don't want to talk next to or near anybody. They don't want to be within earshot. They wait until the very end, and then they come up and, for example, I had a teenage boy at a school visit recently, tell me, ‘I wish I could paint my fingernails. I think it looks so cool, but I'm afraid. I'm scared because we're in this really rural middle of nowhere Minnesota town.’ And I was like, ‘I totally get it,’ but it was cool being able to know that. It's still scary for me. Sometimes, depending on where I am, I'll notice I'll kind of curl my fingernails in depending on where I'm at or who I’m talking to. And I know, like the other day, I was complaining to my fiancé that I was in a mall food court, and it was busy. There was like 100 people there, and every single person – babies, kids, teenagers, older people, people my age, whatever – eventually I'd feel eyes on me, and I'd look up and someone was looking at me, and I was like, oh, well, you know, it feels awkward. I'm just trying to eat. But then I was like, I bring it on myself: I'm the one wearing a cheetah print hat with usually purple or pink hair and nails. Part of it is me bringing it on myself, but it is part of why I do what I do and part of why I dress the way I dress. Because sometimes it's like, it would be easier for me to not spend time doing my nails or my hair. I could just wear a white t-shirt and jeans, and my life would be a little easier. But one, I wouldn't feel like myself, and two, I would be thinking I know there's a kid out there or a person out there somewhere who needs to also see a version of themselves, and I've had that. Prince was that for me. David Bowie was that for me. Dennis Rodman was that for me. So there's been… I've had my own role models who were androgynous or just said, ‘Fuck the norm’ and were just like, ‘I'm just gonna be myself.’ And I always thought that was just the coolest thing.
 
Rebecca: I love that you brought up Dennis Rodman, because one year for Christmas, my brother bought our dad the Dennis Rodman book!
 
Byron: Oh Bad as I Wanna Be?
 
Rebecca: Yeah, and I was just thinking ‘this is amazing.’ Perfection. Also, Dennis Rodman, what a time we were living in, right? [we laughed a lot during this exchange!]
​
Also, though, I cannot wait to share your book with one of my absolute best friends that I met through our mom’s club. Her name is Sam, and she has a mohawk that she dyes all the colors of the rainbow, and she has three boys, and she's such a good mom. One of them has really long hair, doesn't dye it, but the middle one and the younger one love to have a mohawk just like their mom and dye it different colors. And they're six and ten, and I just love it so much. But I think she sometimes feels the way you do, like the mohawk maybe makes her stand out. But she said, even recently, people have actually been complimenting it instead of being weird about it. And so I think you're right: the more people are themselves, the more people can be themselves.

So I want to just switch over. I have a bonus question: were your Star Wars and Yoda references a nod to Eric Gansworth?

​Byron: You know, that's funny. Um, he's one of my favorite authors. If I Ever Get Out of Here is one of my favorite books. So good. I've read it a couple times.

Yeah, it hadn't crossed my mind. I just grew up watching a lot of Star Wars, and when I was finishing up high school, the prequels started to come out, and I loved, I was like, one of the only people, I guess, at the time, who loved the prequels. I thought they were amazing, and so I just always loved Star Wars. My mom is a huge Star Wars fan. I think part of her world and spiritual views have been impacted by the idea of Star Wars and the Force and feeling the universe and feeling that God-like energy that's in all of us and how to use it for good. So I think a lot of her teachings came from stuff she probably heard from Yoda, and then she tells me, so I didn't realize it, but yeah. I even have an R2D2 tattoo.
 
Rebecca: Oh my gosh, yes, that’s amazing!
 
Byron: But, yeah, I hadn't even put two and two together. But, you know, sometimes I think about how much is subconsciously in my mind, like song lyrics, movies I've watched, books I've read, conversations I've had with people that when I'm writing a scene, maybe I don't realize that's like the scene that it stemmed from but I always wonder that all the time. I'm obsessed with music, so I probably have 1000s of albums worth of lyrics in my head, and sometimes I worry when I'm writing something, ‘Is this a lyric from a song? Am I ripping something off?’ Or is it just me being impacted and affected by it, but still creating something that's just influenced by it, and not just ripping something off?

Rebecca: Meh, all writing is intertextual, right?!

I knew, I knew you liked Eric Gansworth. I really love him as well, but I know he absolutely loves Yoda. I was not on the prequel bandwagon until I watched the Clone Wars series, and then you go back and watch it, and you're like, ‘Oh, these are actually great, but you just needed these seven seasons of information to get it, so…’
 
Byron: I think it's super hard when you think about now that we've seen so many TV series, and they're 10 episodes and 52 minutes for each episode, and that's telling a story – almost 10 hours’ worth of time, but back, like for so long until today, you're like, here's two hours to make this all interesting, for this all to make sense, for this all the matter. And that's really hard to do. And when a movie is two and a half hours, or two hours and 45 minutes, I always hear people complain, ‘Oh, that movie was so long.’ And I'm thinking, you just been binge-watched all of Breaking Bad, 500 hours, or whatever. That wasn't too long, right? But a movie, for some reason… Yeah, sometimes we wonder why we have a harder time getting into movies, but I'm thinking it's because we don't let them be as long as they need to be. Yeah so I think those prequels could have been better if they could have been a series.
 
Rebecca: Oh, for sure, yeah, I agree. So last question, kind of a mix: why was it important to do a collaborative piece like Legendary Frybread Drive-In, and then can you tell us about what the future is holding?

​Byron: So I got to be included with so many of my all-time favorite authors, like Darcie Little Badger, who's a hero of mine, and Eric Gansworth, another hero of mine. So I always joke – we were talking about the Dream Team earlier – I feel like the Christian Laettner of the Dream Team, like everyone's thinking, ‘Why is he on the team? We got Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, … and Christian Leitner. One of these things is not like the others.’ But I also, being a huge comic book fan and loving the connected universes like the MCU or comic books, it was cool getting to work with the other authors and seeing, ‘What are you doing with yours? What am I doing with mine? How could we have some intermingling or crossover of characters?’ Some of the characters from the other stories are in the background of mine. You just see them. And if you read their story first, you would know, ‘Oh, hey, that's that other story that Jen Ferguson wrote, or something along those lines. I thought that was really fun to do. The interconnectedness, that's just how Indian Country is, and what it's like being on a reservation. For example, someone downstairs [at the conference] was telling us a story of how she was talking about Rez Ball in Bemidji, and someone said, ‘Oh, Byron's my cousin.’ And that's what you see the whole time in this anthology is how anyone and everyone can be connected. And I think that's definitely an Indigenous thing in story.
 
Rebecca: I loved that about Ancestor Approved. I haven’t started Legendary Frybread Drive-In yet, and so I was thinking, ‘Oh, I wonder if that's going to be the same?’
 
Byron: I went back and read that when I got asked to do the Legendary Frybread. I had read Ancestor Approved before, but I wanted to read it one more time as I was writing mine to be thinking, ‘How did they do this?’
​
For the future, I have Medicine Wheels, which is Rez Ball, but stripping away the community, and stripping away that family life, and making this character's journey a lot harder. Just like you do when you're writing a story, you're constantly making that main character's journey harder. For me, from book one to book two, it was like, well, everything that Tre had, what if we took that all away? And skateboarding, you don't have a gymnasium full of people cheering you on. And this kid is learning how to skateboard, kind of by himself, going through a really tough summer, and it becomes this beautiful distraction. And the message for kids is what do you love? What are you passionate about? Because your dark days, whether they're here or coming, will be part of your life. And what's going to be your escapism, what's going to be your coping mechanism? And so for me, that message is find it, embrace it, hold on to it, because you're going to need it. And that's what this kid learns in Medicine Wheels, and that'll be out this summer. 

Rebecca: Oh, I love that so much. It sounds so good.
 
Byron: Yeah, I'm excited.
 
Rebecca: I can't wait. And the video game one that you talked about earlier, I think is going to be – that sounds like it's going to be amazing as well. And I already know so many people that I
would share it with.
 
Byron: Yeah, Moccasin Games came up as an idea for me as I was exploring my gender identity and my gender expression and knowing how I used video game avatars and characters to comfortably, more safely explore that side of myself first. Being able to be in that virtual world and being able to dress how I wanted and look how I wanted, and then I thought, ‘What if there's a younger teenager who is trying to find themselves, and they do it via a video game? And that was kind of the genesis of the idea, not the Sega Genesis. [We laughed hard at this excellent ‘90s joke]
That’s how I came up with the whole story of these kids who are gamers, who haven't even met in real life, and then the dynamics of the people who have a lot of money, who can pay for all the power ups and weapons and better things, and then the kids who don't have any money and just have to be crafty or sharper, smarter. So it's exploring those real-world dynamics of wealth division and different separations in communities and cities, rural areas, and how there can be an even playing field in different ways, and then just being able to explore that other side of yourself through a video game. So there's those two different storylines happening. It's definitely, again, very personal and things that I didn't get to explore in Rez Ball.
 
Rebecca: Oh my gosh, I love that, because the online community is a totally different version of community that people who are not a part of it, I think, think doesn't exist or is not as good as ‘real life’ community. But also I love it because books are a way for kids to explore different things, right? And video games are literature, and so treating them that way in the book, it's super meta.
 
Byron: Yeah!
 
Rebecca: Yeah, I love that. Well, we were here longer than I thought we would be, but you gave way amazing answers.
 
Byron: Thank you.
 
Rebecca: I appreciate it.
 
Byron: My pleasure.
 
Rebecca: Thank you so much, Byron.
 
Byron: Of course.