Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s 2022 debut story collection, established him as an inimitable literary voice while garnering myriad awards, including the coveted PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Fire Exit (Tin House Books, 2024), his debut novel, is Talty’s longest story to date and is sure to amass further accolades. Not every short story writer makes the transition to longform this spectacularly—the novel is an absolute knock-out! As anyone who follows Talty on social media knows, the man is always telling a story. His constant posts on TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads—even precarious outliers like Mastodon and Hive—offer his followers a glimpse into his perpetually generative mind.
I know Talty from grad school; we crossed paths while students in one nonfiction class and while working on our school’s literary journal. He didn’t strike me as the most loquacious fellow at the time, but I learned that if I joined him on his smoke breaks—a personal sacrifice, as I didn’t smoke—I’d hear elaborations on his stories so notably unique for their equal measures of hilarity and pathos, I consider enduring the second hand-smoke risks well worth it.
When the pandemic truncated his teaching schedule—an associate professor at University of Maine, Talty teaches two undergraduate writing courses as well as a graduate fiction course at Stonecoast MFA—he expanded his storytelling to a larger screen, writing and starring in Alex Coppola’s short film, Belongings.
Even when responding to my email about scheduling this interview, the storyteller in him delivered bonus paragraphs detailing someone he knows living behind a dumpster whom he Venmos money to, under an alias. When we spoke another time just prior to this interview, he shared a story of how he recently gained and then lost over one hundred pounds. Like all of Talty’s stories, these carry slightly unbelievable premises transubstantiated into entirely credible narratives through his telling.
For this interview, Talty spoke to me—during a call so lengthy it drained my fully-charged cellphone battery by half—from a parked car in his driveway during his one-year-old’s afternoon nap.
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The Rumpus: I want to start by quoting something the protagonist, Charles, says ten pages before Fire Exit ends: “We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them—the ones that make us—how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” I’m wondering when you first formed this opinion, and why the character of Charles is entirely driven by this belief?
Morgan Talty: I’ve always innately understood the significance of storytelling, but I could never articulate it until recently while thinking about teaching writing. More specifically, I wondered if someone can be taught to be a great writer? When I was writing this book, I thought about N. Scott Momaday saying, in his novel House Made of Dawn, “We are made of stories,” and that helped solidify my belief that we all live through stories and that’s how we come to realize ourselves . . . how we come to be who we are in the world, how we engage in community, etcetera.
We have always used storytelling to make sense of the world—as in the Bible or any culture’s “mythology”—to fill in holes and gaps we don’t comprehend. But it’s also how we come to be who we are. Like in Indigenous communities, if a kid messes up, a story is created around that incident, and that story teases the kid but in a way they can later laugh about as well. Everyone sharing that story creates intersubjectivity, and it then becomes everyone’s objective truth.
Ultimately, each individual forms a sense of self through the stories created about them and told to them. So, I wondered, what if you don’t have a community? What if you haven’t been told your entire story? If pieces of your story are missing from your consciousness, how can you become a complete person?
But I also think if no humans existed, stories still exist. Consider animals. Squirrels will fight over acorns, hide them, etcetera—and that creates tension, conflict, time—so squirrels are in fact stories, they just don’t tell them. But what if there were no animals? There are still other forms of life. For instance, trees are alive, they exist in community with each other, they grow or get sick or are cut down, so there are stories surrounding them. So, thinking about it that way, story is the basis upon which life exists. Story itself is an entity.
When my students tell me they’re stuck somewhere in their writing, I tell them that simply means they’re pushing a story where it won’t go, where it doesn’t want to go. A writer isn’t in control of what’s on the page, the story is. But if you give a story something, it gives it back. Story exists outside of us. If we weren’t here, story would still be.
Rumpus: Your book practically drips with blood. You use blood as a central theme in this novel, both the presence and absence of it. Let’s start with the presence: Charles had to leave the reservation when he turned eighteen, due to blood quantum, a concept created by white people determining which Native Americans deserve tribal membership based on their percentage of Native blood. Before the book begins, Mary—Charles’ childhood friend and then girlfriend—breaks up with Charles shortly after becoming pregnant with his child. She leaves Charles to marry Roger, a tribal member, instead, initiating the lie that the child is his daughter. The impact of Mary’s action becomes seismic, launching decades of repercussions. Why did you choose to make blood this core motivator?
Talty: The idea came to me in 2015 while I was a student at Dartmouth. I was taking a Native American literature course, and we read The Round House by Louise Erdrich. The book’s protagonist, thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts, in trying to identify the perpetrator of his mother’s brutal attack and rape, learns of Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe—the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that tribes do not possess the inherent sovereign power to prosecute non-Native people for crimes committed on reservation land. Because Joe’s mother can’t remember where the rape occurred, there’s an issue of jurisdiction, so no one can bring the perpetrator to justice. I thought a lot about blood in the same way—all the kids I grew up with who were forced to leave the reservation when they turned eighteen. They were raised Native just like me, they were seemingly equally part of the community, but then they had to leave. So I thought, what becomes of them after they leave? I mean, what are they, in the first place, if they eventually aren’t considered Native? I thought of the idea that if someone has a child like these kids I grew up with, who won’t have enough Native blood to stay within the community that raised them and defines their sense of self, what happens to them? I kept that idea in my back pocket until I pulled it out to write this book.
Rumpus: A contrapuntal theme in the book of equal weight is what I’ll refer to as the absence of blood. You also use the absence of blood as a huge motivator. Mary’s husband, Roger, while not the blood father of their daughter, Elizabeth, loves and raises her much like Fredrick loved and raised Charles as his son. Charles considers Frederick to be entirely his father, acknowledging that the absence of blood between them does nothing to undermine their familial bond.
So while Charles cares deeply about his blood daughter entirely because they are linked by blood, he simultaneously feels he is entirely Frederick’s son, though they don’t share blood. Your book seems to assert a construct that human emotion and actions ultimately trumps blood in determining what or who constitutes family and belonging. Is this your belief?
Talty: In a word: Absolutely!
I don’t think blood matters—we have been convinced to think it does, but that thinking is wrong. In Louise Erdrich’s book LaRose, an Ojibwe couple gives their kid—five-year-old LaRose Iron—to another family to raise in compensation for accidentally killing that family’s five-year-old son. LaRose becomes their family, though there is no blood between them.
Rumpus: Well, I think many foster, step, and adoptive parents will appreciate this book’s assertion!
Talty: Good! I mean, what the fuck does it matter if you take in a kid who isn’t your own and raise them as your own? That action and commitment creates true family.
Rumpus: It’s interesting to me that these themes we’re discussing are ubiquitous, and yet this book is a story focused entirely within the Penobscot Indian Nation. Your characters, customs, traditions, as is the case in your first book, Night of the Living Rez, are Native. Do you feel it’s your responsibility, or purpose, to tell Native stories?
Talty: I feel like sometimes, maybe, yeah. But I think mostly what it is, what I have, is an obsession with storytelling. When I was kid, I always brought my friends down to my family’s shed or to our boiler room where I’d tell them stories. My story “The Gambler” comes out of those early stories I was telling. I mean, I was surrounded by so much ridiculous stuff growing up that I couldn’t help but tell stories to make sense of it and also to entertain people.
On one hand, I feel like it’s not my responsibility—I will write and have written stories that do not have Native characters in them—but on the other hand, colonialism and a dominant white readership has made it my responsibility. But then again, maybe it’s not about responsibility in terms of storytelling but rather a responsibility to be a story-keeper, a person who holds onto the stories and passes them down.
Rumpus: Because you grew up and are now raising your own family within the Penobscot Indian Nation, will your work continue articulating reservation-based stories?
Talty: Most likely. I mean, being Indigenous and raised where I was, and having read an enormous amount of scholarly works on Native history, I’m certainly well-versed in it. I can probably hold my own with anyone who has a PhD in Native American Literature. But a question—one that others have asked and so it is not entirely my question—I pose to the students in my Native American Lit course is, “Does Native American lit even exist?”
When I interviewed Tommy Orange for Esquire about his new book Wandering Stars, I asked, somewhat facetiously, if he thought universities should offer “White People Literature” courses. Orange laments frequently finding his previous blockbuster book There There in the Native American section of bookstores instead of within the general fiction section. When the New York Times gave my first book an extremely favorable review, they ended by saying, “Talty has assured himself a spot in the canon of great Native American literature.” Why isn’t it simply the great American canon? When they originally reviewed James Welch’s Winter in the Blood in 1974, they said it was “. . . by no means an Indian novel” and meant it as a compliment, a reason to read it.
Why are we constantly being compartmentalized? How can Native American Studies even exist from an ontological and epistemological standpoint? The answer is it’s only categorized this way through the non-Native Western lens. It’s what Audre Lorde meant when she said, “. . . [T]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” It’s what Joy Harjo says in her poem “She Had Some Horses.” We need different tools, a different way of thinking . . . because the more we build on this incorrect ideology the more we fail.
Also, the term “Native American Renaissance”—coined by Kenneth Lincoln in his book of the same name—has been used so much since N. Scott Momaday published House Made of Dawn in 1968. But a Renaissance, by definition, means that something has died and then there’s a revival. And that’s not the case with Native stories. Like us, they have always been here, have always been around without interruption . . . it’s really only a Renaissance when seen through the non-Native western lens. When I took over this 300-level Native American Lit course—previously taught by a non-Native—I rebuilt it entirely, shifting the focus away from this concept of Renaissance.
Rumpus: You had mentioned to me outside of this interview that you’re at work on your third book and that this one is a memoir. The literary world knows and celebrates you as a fiction author. Can you speak about why you’re choosing to make this departure?
Talty: I really come from memoir. I started out writing nonfiction and autofiction. What happens in Fire Exit comes from actual issues occurring in Indian Country that led to intergenerational trauma. So yes, it’s fiction, but it’s totally personal. My niece is Indigenous but isn’t on the census, she’s not an enrolled member of the Penobscot Nation. My son isn’t eligible either. When he’s an adult, he won’t have the rights I have to continue living where he grew up. Like the book’s protagonist Charles, my son and my niece will have to leave. So my fiction is a part of my reality . . . I don’t see my nonfiction as a huge departure from that.
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Author photograph courtesy of Morgan Talty
