Hensci

HESCI, HENSCI, interj. This is how you say “hello” in Mvskoke/Muscogee, an indigenous language of North America. Historically, speakers lived in what is now the southeastern United States (Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida). In the 1830s the US government forcibly displaced many of them to Oklahoma (that’s in the central US for anyone unfamiliar; I know most of my readers are in the US, and US cultural hegemony means a lot of people outside the US do know our geography, but I still feel it’s rude to presume).

Today, per Wikipedia, there are about 400 native speakers of Mvskoke, out of a nation of 100,000. The native speakers mostly live in Oklahoma, though there are still Muscogee living in the southeast as well. The Muscogee Nation is engaged in language revitalization efforts, training teachers and offering language classes. If you want to hear a little bit of spoken Mvskoke, here’s a video with some common greetings, including “he(n)sci.”

I have no expertise on this topic, but I bring it up because I read a romance with Muscogee characters in it, reviewed below, and it made me want to hear the language.

In small-r romance, here’s what I’ve read lately:

Love Is a War Song (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Danica Nava. Avery Fox is former Disney child actor turned popstar who just made a terrible mistake: posing on the cover of Rolling Stone in a war bonnet. Fans and haters are both furious with her for this sacrilege. She’s getting death threats and people online are accusing her of being a Pretendian, even though she really is Muscogee. It’s just that her mother is estranged from her family back in Oklahoma, and Avery has spent her whole life working, so she doesn’t know anything about it. But now that she needs a place to hide, her mother sends her back to the family horse ranch, where Avery immediately runs afoul of Lucas Iron Eyes, a handsome cowboy who hates her music. This is a classic fish-out-of-water, city mouse/country mouse kind of story. Avery is very young, and she has a particular child-star combination of exploited and naive, and it’s a little difficult to read her point of view in the beginning as she repeatedly screws up her ranch chores and mourns her designer luggage and shoes. But Lucas grudgingly agrees to teach her as long as she’ll help him save the struggling ranch. It’s silly and heartwarming and of course Avery makes amends, wins over the town, and gets her man. I loved how this book celebrated Muscogee customs and language—see above!—and how directly it addressed the romance genre’s history of using racist stereotypes of Native Americans. I hope to read more from Danica Nava. Library loan.

Method Acting (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Adele Buck. Alicia Johnson is an actress who has spent her entire adult life moving around for jobs, keeping few possessions and fewer relationships. Leaving behind her terrible family and fending for herself has made her very guarded and prickly—and self-sufficient to a fault. So it’s very satisfying to see her finally make friends and let someone take care of her, especially since she and posh lobbyist Colin St. Cyr have such excellent banter. They come from different worlds, and many times he accidentally offends her, but he’s quick to apologize and listen. This is set in Washington, DC (unoccupied, sob) and there’s so much love here for the city’s theaters, art museums, and architecture. So much good use of Shakespeare, too. Further word-nerd appreciation for the tiny detail that in Colin’s point of view in one particular scene, Alicia removes his “braces,” and when the scene switches to her point of view, the same item becomes “suspenders.” Indie published, bought from Amazon in a previous year.

In books that are romance-adjacent, I recently read two fantasy novels with central romantic arcs that are obviously going to continue in the rest of the series.
The first is AJ Lancaster’s The Lord of Stariel (m/f, both cis and het as far as I know), which has great family relationships and—this is very important to me in a fantasy novel—trains! I love an unusual, slightly more “modern” fantasy setting. This one features Hetta, the lipstick- and trouser-wearing rebel of her family, returning to their country estate after six years living and working in the big city as an illusionist for a theatre troupe. Her father has passed and her family must hold the ritual to choose the next Lord of Stariel. She discovers a lot of family secrets, including that one of her close friends from childhood isn’t who she thought he was. Indie published; purchased from Amazon in a previous year.

The second is Maiga Doocy’s Sorcery and Small Magics (bi m/? m, both cis), which features two rival students at a magic university accidentally cursing themselves to be in each other’s presence at all times—one of the best, most fanfiction-y tropes. I also love how in a fantasy novel, if you’re told that there’s a place called, like, The Bad Magic Place Where We Don’t Go, or, say, The Unquiet Wood, you know for sure the characters are going there. So this book has, in addition to delicious magical forced proximity, my other favorite thing: surviving the wilderness together. They run from monsters. They patch each other up after injuries. They discover maybe they don’t hate each other after all. It’s great. The first-person narrator is a messy bitch and kind of a dingdong, so you get both the impression that the story would be very different from another point of view and the pleasure of watching him become slightly less of a dick over the course of the book. This was so fun that it was a one-day read for me. The only thing wrong with it is that the sequel’s not out yet. Library ebook.

One last thing: novelist Alix E. Harrow wrote this excellent defense and illustration of purple prose, and she mentions that my newsletter about Black Silk inspired her to reread it, which is an honor. Also, she calls Black Silk "an extended work of Middlemarch fanfic," which blew my mind, because of course it is and how did I not see it?! Submit is Dorothea. My eyes are open now.

Anyway, I highly recommend her essay.

I'll be back in your inbox on October 12.