On October 11, 2023, Word for Word, Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) online literary series, kicked off its 2023-24 season with special guest author, Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation who lives in Levant, Maine.
Talty is the author of the critically acclaimed story collection “Night of the Living Rez” from Tin House Books, which won the 2022 New England Book Award for fiction and the 2022 John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and was a finalist for the 2022 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award and the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
His writing has appeared in Granta, the Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty has been supported in his work by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022).
He is an assistant professor of English in creative writing and Native American and contemporary literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Talty is also a prose editor at the Massachusetts Review.
After reading ‘Burn,’ the opening story in “Night of the Living Rez,” Talty answered questions from event moderators and attendees. The following is an edited transcript of that Q&A.
W4W: When you began the book, did you look at it as a project of short stories to be interwoven and connected, or did the stories begin as standalone pieces that were eventually interconnected through revision?
MT: I wish I was smart enough to know that was what I wanted to do. It would have saved me a lot of time. No, originally, I wanted to write a story collection with just recurring characters, and I wanted each story to stand alone.
When I went into my MFA Program at Stonecoast, I had three or four stories told from the point of view of David, the narrator of these stories. I had the story, “Night of the Living Rez,” which is the title story, and I had ‘Smokes Last,’ which is also in the book. Then I had two other stories that didn’t end up making it in, because they just weren’t good, but they were blueprints for other stories that I went on to write eventually.
I guess I saw a framework or scaffold. I was like, “All right, I have David as a young adult at 18 and living on the rez. And I thought, “Well, what if we start from the very beginning, and he’s young, coming to the reservation, escaping something with his mother?”
And so I wrote the story ‘In a Jar.’ And I just kept writing stories chronologically until I caught up to ‘Night of the Living Rez.’ I wrote 14 or 15 stories told from David’s point of view. And I chose 10 of the best ones.
W4W: And that became the book?
MT: No, because it just didn’t work. Some of the stories were good, but as a book, it didn’t work, because it wasn’t a traditional story collection, like something from George Saunders or Karen Russell, where each story is in a different setting, and there’s different characters and different situations. Maybe the only commonality between them is theme or subject matter.
But my stories featured the same people, just a little bit older from story to story. And with a book like that, the reader expectation is that there’s some type of overarching arc to it. That all the stories connect somehow. Which mine didn’t. And so, I was like, “Well, this sucks. This isn’t working.”
So, I decided to write something else. I’d heard this story about a native guy getting his hair frozen in the snow and this white guy cutting him loose. I thought it was such a visceral image and incident. And I kept hearing this name in my head: Fellis.
So, I wrote the story with Fellis as the guy who gets his hair frozen. I didn’t write as part of the story collection at all, even though it was also set in the Penobscot Nation. But as I was revising it, I got to this line that goes, “‘Get me out, Dee,’ Fellis said. ‘Dee, get me out.’”
I knew for rhythm purposes that the character’s name needed to be said there; I just knew it. I was so used to writing from David’s point of view that I wanted to say David, but I kept resisting it. But finally, I thought, “Wait a minute. What if this is David, but he’s much older than he is in ‘Night of the Living Rez,’ and he is in his early to mid-thirties or something?”
That’s when I realized I was on to something. I had a question, so to speak, that was guiding the book and guiding the reader. How did David from the earlier stories turn into Dee from the later ones?
W4W: How did the publication process work? A lot of these stories were published in literary magazines. Were you submitting them as you wrote them, or did you wait until you had them all written?
MT: I would submit them when they were written. I’m 32 now; I’ve been submitting stories since I was 19. So I was no stranger to submitting.
Before the book was even accepted for publication, before the book even had an agent representing it, the majority of the stories in the book had been published in various places.
W4W: Do you see this book as a collection of short stories or as a novel? Do you think it matters one way or another what it’s called?
MT: I see it as a story collection. I think it functions much more as a story collection than it does a novel. Novels tend to be so expansive, and short-story collections tend to draw their power from what’s left out. I think this book has silences in it that give it extra power a novel wouldn’t have.
W4W: It seems like these days, publishers are looking to break a new writer out with a novel rather than a collection of short stories. I’d love to hear your take on what enabled you to break out with this short story collection. I mean, is this something aspiring writers should think of as an option?
MT: You’re going to have a much more difficult time selling a story collection than you are a novel.
With my current agent, when we went out on submission with this book, we went to the big houses first. I’d published some stories, I’d won a couple of prizes, but even so, there was no response.
We waited for months and months and months, even after Tin House, a small press, had expressed interest. Finally, I said to my agent, “You know what? Screw this. We’re going with Tin House.”
W4W: What made you pick Tin House specifically?
MT: I talked to the editor there, and she saw the book just as I did. She had no intention of trying to turn it into a novel. She saw it exactly as it was meant to be seen. She came at it from an artistic standpoint.
And they gave me a very small advance because they’re a small publishing house. I think I got $3,000, which is small compared to getting a $250,000 advance at Viking or something like that.
But for me, it wasn’t primarily about money at that point. I figured what mattered was to have a book coming out, and it would be a stepping stone to the next one, where I could maybe go on and get a major deal with a bigger publishing house. Though in the end, I chose to stay with Tin House for my novel, which is coming out next summer, just because they are very good at what they do.
W4W: You mentioned the things that get left out of stories. It seems that happens frequently with short stories, giving them their punch. Is that something you set out to do? Is it a writing technique you use?
MT: I want to use a metaphor here. The story is this painting that I’ve done. And it’s like, OK, now I have this white paintbrush, and I ask myself, “How much white can I put on this painting until the reader can’t recognize it anymore for what it actually is?”
I like short fiction that makes the reader work, where readers have to meet the writer halfway or meet the story halfway. In the beginning, it’s always about character, it’s always about setting, it’s always about what characters want, and how that affects plot, and how that pushes the story forward. That’s where I start. Then I delete a lot, making a 20-page story into 10 pages or sometimes one page.
W4W: Would you say that the central part of your revision process is concision and cutting stuff that doesn’t belong and seeing how much you can take out?
MT: Yeah. It’s really weird. When I was younger, drafting was the thing I loved to do. I hated revision. And now that I’m older, I hate drafting, and I love revising, because revising just is so much easier. At the same time, I might write a 30-page story and then recognize that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, and I’ll just put it in the junk folder and start over. That doesn’t bother me. That’s the work you have to do. You can’t be afraid to start over.
I don’t look at stories as being failures. I look at stories as just being “OK, I didn’t take as many steps as I was supposed to take, so let me just start over, and we’ll call this the new starting point.” But that’s how my brain processes it.
W4W: It seems like that’s what you did with “Night of the Living Rez.” You had a book that was compiled of short stories, some of which were the stories that wound up in book as published, but most of which didn’t. And you realized the stories weren’t holding together as a book.
So rather than just beating your head against the wall and trying to make it work, you came to the point where you were able to listen to that part of yourself that knew all along, “Hey, this is what you need to do with this book.” And then began a very difficult process, I assume, which was writing a lot of other stories that fleshed out your vision into the final form of the book.
MT: Yeah. It was exactly that.
W4W: Some of the stories in the book are about David as a young person, and then some are about Dee, who is David grown older. And I don’t want to suggest that these stories are autobiographical because you happen to share certain characteristics of your narrator. You too grew up in the Penobscot reservation, for example.
What I’m imagining—and you can tell me if I’m full of crap or not—but I’m imagining that the David character might be closer to some of the experiences that you actually had, and then there came a divergence point where you went in one way and Dee went in another. And I’m just wondering, how did you keep these voices distinct in your head yet at the same time delve into material that was so personal?
MT: You’re completely right. That’s actually how I respond when people ask me about autobiographical aspects in this book. David is much closer to who I am and to my lived experiences than Dee and Fellis are, although the themes of their lives are themes that I’m familiar with too.
To keep the tones different, it’s a matter of paying attention to syntax, paying attention to diction, being mindful of what characters want, what characters do. It’s a lot of work to really be able to change voices, and to change tone, and to keep them consistent throughout.
That’s what editors are for. Also, they can help you see where that consistency falters. If you have a friend who’s a good reader, that is also a great resource to help you. People think of writers as these solitary creatures, and that may be true for some, but I think for many it’s actually a much more collaborative process.
W4W: Do you have any routine for when you’re writing, something that gets you into the zone? Do you write every day? Do you listen to music when you write? What’s your method?
MT: Right now, I have no idea. I have a seven-month-old. And so my writing life has changed drastically. But I’ve come to realize that I don’t beat myself up when I haven’t written for a while. I’m just not that type of writer. I’m not Stephen King. I can’t sit down and write 2,000 words a day. I’ve tried it. Mentally, I have killed myself trying to do that.
I tend to write best–I don’t know why–750 words to 2,000 tops; somewhere in there is my sweet spot for a day of writing. Anything over that, and I can’t do anything the next day. I’ve overworked myself. Anything under that, I’ve just been lazy.
The one constant, however, is that when I set out to write a project, I see it through from beginning to end. So that means setting aside time every single day with the exception of Saturday and Sunday, unless I feel strongly about working on it, to see the project through.
I can really write anywhere, but my ideal setup is having YouTube on and listening to just a dryer, white noise. When I was writing this book and my other book, I would (take) my wife to work then come home and write, and we always had laundry to do. And the laundry was right below where I wrote. So I would hear the washer and dryer, and I always had that noise in the background. Now, when I have to write, I just throw that on. When I need to get down to business, the dryer gets turned on.
W4W: As we all know, there has been a rise in ChatGPT and large language AI models. From your perspective as teacher, instructor and writer, is this a threat, or can there be a benefit to it?
MT: I think it will find its place. I don’t think it’s going to disappear.
But can a machine absorb all this literature and then produce something transcendental? I don’t know. I mean, we’ll find out. I think those machines can perhaps fake emotion, but they don’t truly know what it is, and that’s the distinguishing factor between a writer and ChatGPT or any other AI device. We can feel, and they can’t.
On the other hand, who knows if machines feel? Maybe they feel in some weird way. I don’t know.
W4W: Going back to your own writing, the stories in “Night of the Living Rez” take place on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation. For those unfamiliar with the area in Maine, it’s near Orono and the University of Maine on the Penobscot River.
Can you talk about depicting a real place in a work of fiction? How do you balance the creative invention of fiction with maintaining the real place’s heart and meaning and purpose?
MT: I think knowing a place really, really well is so important. If you’re going to write about a place, you need to go there.
That’s what’s so great about grants. They can give you the means to travel to another country, for example, and live there and absorb aspects or elements of its culture, get to the way the streets move, and curve and those sorts of things. I feel you need to know a place intimately to write about it. Maybe you can hop on Google Maps and do Street View and walk around that way, but you’ll be limited in that sense.
For me, it’s about nailing down the specifics of what makes that place unique. What is it that you can never forget about it?
For me, it was always the water. It was always the trees scratching against me. It was always the roads, it was always the cold, it was always the movement of just being able to go anywhere on the island. And capturing that in each story, using those sensory details to the maximum, really helped create a sense of setting so that the reader felt very, very present.
W4W: You mentioned you went to Stonecoast for your MFA. How did you get there? Can you fill us in on your writer’s journey a little bit?
MT: I didn’t do well in high school. I had a lot of issues at home that impeded my ability to do well or to even go to school.
When I graduated, there were very few schools that accepted me. One of them was Eastern Maine Community College, and so I went there for three years. Then I transferred to Dartmouth, where I did four years, and then I went and got my MFA.
But I was about 18 when I started college. I wasn’t at home, and there was this quiet that I’d never quite experienced before. I started reading, and I started to really fall in love with literature, not because it was something different, but rather because it was something that I recognized I had been doing for a very long time, which was telling stories orally. I mean, growing up, I loved telling stories. I loved them. That’s all we did.
Me and my friends, hanging out and smoking cigarettes or drinking, I was the one who was always telling stories. I don’t want to say I was the memory keeper, but I was the one who would bring up stuff that had happened the day before, or a week, or a month, or a year ago. And recount the whole thing and set it up, and I just loved that.
So, I was like, “Oh, no shit, people can do this, people can write and potentially make a living out of it.” I never really questioned it; I just went with it. And I wound up at the Stonecoast MFA looking to tell these stories on paper as well as I did orally with my friends. I wanted those stories I told cold at night around a fire to be as potent to a different audience in the same way.
W4W: When you started finding that silence and you were able to pick up literature and think about becoming a writer, was there any author or genre of writing you were drawn to?
MT: I loved Chekhov; I loved his short fiction and his plays. And strangely, Jack Kerouac and the whole Beat Generation. I’ve read everything by the most obscure Beat writers.
There was something to “On the Road” that resonated with me, being on the move, going place to place. I’ve gone back and reread “On the Road.” Kerouac’s voice is so beautiful, it’s so gorgeous, but it doesn’t read how it did when I first read it. But those are the first two writers I fell in love with.
W4W: What’s next for you? You mentioned a novel coming out sometime next year…
MT: June 4, 2024 is the (publication) date. It’s called “Fire Exit,” and it’s already up for preorder Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online retailers. If you go to my (author page) on Amazon, you can see the cover. Lithub did a piece on it recently.
W4W: Thank you so much for sharing your time with us tonight, Morgan.
MT: Thanks for having me, and hopefully, it’s not the last time.
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