So yeah, the book is purposefully trying to highlight those sorts of discrepancies and what gets attention and what doesn’t. There’s overlap in ways that people don't think about. Mass shootings are sometimes domestic shootings also. Yes, mass shootings are terrible, tragic events that happen, but what about the other 99 percent of gun violence in this country?Īlso, I think domestic violence in particular gets a demotion as a category. I think it’s very important to shift the focus of the conversation. The only time mass shootings come up are when I have intersected with those places and those cultures, but otherwise, no. But the other sorts of violence make up 99 percent of American gun violence. They capture the public imagination and we're fixated on them culturally, as Americans, in ways that we aren't with other sorts of violence.

TONI JENSEN: Mass shootings get an inordinate amount of media space. Shondaland spoke with Jensen about how to improve the passive discourse around gun violence, the demotion of domestic violence, critiquing racist writing, and what the face of gun violence looks like in America.ĬONNOR GOODWIN: For a book about gun violence, mass shootings aren’t front and center. The essays in Carry are thoroughly researched and furnished with startling statistics, but Jensen takes care to keep the reader tethered to the personal and the everyday so as not to lose sight of the human actors that perpetuate gun violence. Today, Jensen teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas and is outspoken about Indigenous rights and harm to the environment, as evidenced by the first essay in the book, which is set near the Standing Rock protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Jensen grew up in the Great Plains of rural Iowa as a white-passing Métis woman whose father, an American Indian and card-carrying member of the NRA, taught her to shoot guns. It is an odd confluence of issues not many would place in conversation, but they arise naturally from Jensen’s life. In addition to tackling America’s addiction to guns, Jensen’s book touches on a slew of other issues, including indigenous rights, the transmission of trauma, and the racist imaginary in MFA programs.

In Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, author Toni Jensen uses a series of interconnected personal essays to spotlight the other 99 percent of shootings to challenge how we talk and think about gun violence. Part of why we look away from it is because we’re so used to it. We have to stop accepting the everyday violence and we have to stop looking away from it.

Carry by toni jensen