Morgan Talty’s 2022 debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, earned him a Writers to Watch nod for its fresh portrayal of Native lives. He returns this spring with Fire Exit (Tin House, June), the story of a white man named Charles who grew up on the Penobscot reservation in Maine with his white mother and Native stepfather. When Charles’s Penobscot girlfriend learns she is pregnant, she decides to claim another man is the father so the child will qualify for tribal membership.
Could you talk about the origins of this novel?
I actually wrote the first draft of Fire Exit while I was writing Night of the Living Rez in 2015. I was studying at Dartmouth College at the time, and the idea for the novel came out of a class I was taking on tribal Indian law. I wondered what weird situations federal Indian law has created for Indigenous people. My wife isn’t Native, and I’m a quarter Penobscot, which makes our son ineligible to be enrolled in the tribe. I feel like there’s no Indigenous fiction out there that really talks about what it means to be Indigenous. Tommy Orange’s book There There came quite close, but nobody has ever gone head on with a novel that really thinks about blood quantum.
How did the experience of writing a novel differ from writing your debut story collection?
It was a different animal. With the story collection, I was able to dip in and out of it, but with the novel, it’s a marathon. I remember rewriting the book from scratch. Every morning, I would drop my wife off at work and have two hours before I had to teach a college class. I would sit for two hours at the table rewriting every day until I finished it.
How did you settle on the novel’s narrator, Charles, a figure who is both inside and outside of the Native community?
I started with the third-person omniscient, which is the worst thing you can do. It gave me the ability to jump anywhere I wanted but no boundaries. I tried to go outside of Charles and experiment with the different characters, but I kept finding myself coming back to him. And I also can’t think of an Indigenous book where the protagonist isn’t Native. With Charles, here’s this dude who grew up on the reservation and had to deal his entire life with being an outsider. To stay in that place gave me an immense ability to dramatize emotion. As a writer, that’s where I start. I need to create a foundation of emotion and then look for opportunities to introduce Indigenous elements. If you do it the other way around, it’s much easier for a commercialized market to be like, yeah, that is definitely Indigenous fiction.
Charles’s mother and daughter both undergo repeated courses of electroconvulsive therapy, the former for dementia, the latter for depression. How did you approach writing about this subject, which others have portrayed rather gruesomely?
I feel like a lot of people think of ECT as an outdated form of medicine, when it’s really not. It’s actually really useful. I’ve had close family members who have used ECT treatments for severe depression, and I’d bring my mother to get them when she was alive. Somebody reached out to me too who had read the book, and they commended me for not using ECT as a ploy but just letting it be a thing.
