Following his critically acclaimed debut story collection Night of the Living Rez, which won the New England Book Award, was a Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, and is a Finalist for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, Morgan Talty's debut novel Fire Exit is a masterful, continued exploration of the themes and intergenerational stories about reservation life and Native identity and concerns.
A citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, Talty has conceived a compelling, funny, and sympathetic protagonist in recovering alcoholic Charles Lamosway, who watches as his daughter Elizabeth, who knows him only as the neighbor across the river, grows up and descends into a similar depression to that of Charles' semi-estranged mother, the haunting and itinerant Louise, who struggles with a severe bout of depression as the story unfolds. Within this intergenerational tale are questions about Charles' father's identity and his ongoing struggles with drinking, as well as his persistent grief at the death of his stepfather. Fire Exit explores with poignancy and subtle, dark humor questions of social and cultural heritage, mental illness, loyalty, and what we owe—and what makes—community and family.
In this interview conducted via email, I spoke with Morgan about novel and story forms, tribal membership and bloodlines, houses in fiction, dialogue, and the timeless quality of Fire Exit.
JP Solheim
I'd love to hear about the genesis of your Fire Exit alongside Night of the Living Rez. Both works possess the gemlike qualities of the short story, the night-time sky expansiveness of the universe of a novel, though each work is also distinct to its form. Did these two books emerge one alongside the other, or did one precede the other?
Morgan Talty
Thank you for the kind, kind words and thank you, too, for these wonderful questions!
I wrote the title story "Night of the Living Rez" in 2015-ish for an undergraduate workshop. Then, a semester or two later when still revising the story, I came up with the idea for the novel— a non-native man having a child with a Native woman whose percentage of Indian Blood (blood quantum) was at the lowest allowable level (25%), which meant the child would be ineligible to be considered a "member" or citizen of the tribe, and so when she does carry this man's child, she would choose to lie and say the child belonged to another man. That was it, I noted it in my phone and moved on with my life.
This idea came about, in part, because of a course I was taking called "Native American Literature and the Law," which was and still is taught by the brilliant Professor N. Bruce Duthu at Dartmouth.
We read Louise Erdrich's The Round House, which was published in 2012 and won the National Book Award (it should have won that and the Pulitzer, too, and every other award in existence), and was, I think, a contributing factor for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. To make a long story short, in 1978 the supreme court ruled in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 that federally recognized tribes to not possess the inherent power to try non-members of the tribe who commit crimes within the boundaries of those tribal nations, which left it entirely up to the federal government (who had already been overseeing crimes that fell specifically under The Major Crimes Act of 1885).
But as the years progressed, more crime was occurring. Amnesty International found that the federal government had historically failed to prosecute non-members who committed crimes against Natives on Native land, and they also found that one in three Native American and Alaskan women would be raped in their lifetime. Of course, there was underreporting when it came to this, yet those who did report almost always said the perpetrator was white (around 85%).
In Erdrich's novel, she takes this head on. Told from the POV of a 13-year-old looking back, he recounts his mother having been raped by a white man and how she could not say where, exactly, the crime occurred. This is super important: on state, tribal, or fee simple land. Since she could not say where it happened, nobody knew who had jurisdiction, thus the perpetrator walks free. It's a situation that happened all over Indian Country.
Federal Indian Law makes no sense. None. And so in reading her novel—in seeing how Erdrich looked at the law—I wondered, what is a situation that could arise out of the nonsensical structure holding up Indian Country? Blood quantum jumped into my head and that was the genesis. But it wasn't until 2017 that I wrote the novel.
Ultimately, I rewrote Fire Exit five times from scratch. So to answer your question, yes, these two works emerged at the same time, but I focused only on one after each was complete.
JP Solheim
I appreciated how artfully the story jumped through time, marked by Elizabeth getting older. It reminds me a bit of the structure of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, marking time and space within the stories/chapters rather than in the titles or with time markers. How did you think about time and structure while working on Fire Exit? How did it speak to the intergenerational issues that are central to your characters?
Morgan Talty
Funnily enough, through all the rewrites I did, I kept a timeline going of dates or important moments/events that happened so I could easily refer to them. That visual allowed me to play with "plot" or consequences when the opportunity presented itself. People have said that the novel has loose ends—this is intentional. There are loose threads in the novel, yet when I tied them, they broke the story, undercutting the emotion. Why? I don't know. I felt the story wanted a different structure, a way that wasn't the expected narrative arc that people graph out and can draw on the board. No. And that's why, I think, it is able to speak to intergenerational trauma. Intergenerational trauma is linear, but healing from it and dealing with it is not linear. This is one of the points of the book.
JP Solheim
Louise's dialogue takes my breath away. They reflected this oracle-like quality while simultaneously reflecting her mental and psychological vicissitudes and decline. For example, when Charles asks her, "Do you know where you are?":
Never before had I heard such certainty in a voice. "I'm in my bones," she said, and she rolled back onto her side.
Could you speak to how you think about dialogue in fiction, how it functions in your storytelling?
Morgan Talty
Ha…well, I, uh, I stole that one from my grandmother (I want to say thank you, Grammy, but that sounds strange—I'll say it anyways, though, kci-woliwoni!). My grandmother suffered from Alzheimer's, and it was something she said one time that I thought was so mind blowing! So I wrote it down, as I do with a lot of stuff people say. It comes in handy. Just listen, be present, and you'll find great material.
When it comes to how I think about dialogue in fiction and how it functions in storytelling, I tackle both at the same time. I think about dialogue as being part of characterization, part of scene, part of setting, part of voice, part of plot, and so on. The dialogue is a way to open all aspects of story. To avoid dialogue—or any craft element—is to be frightened of failure and potential. I have tons to say about the ways dialogue can and should be used, but in short, I think of it as a unique way we as human beings employ story to tell a narrative in a form or structure we created. And so that's how it functions too—it's a tool used to excavate down to the depths of the human condition.
JP Solheim
I'm interested in the significance of characters' houses as the settings for this book. How did you map the geography of this world? Were there specific things you thought about with the houses, qualities you wanted to be sure to give them, in the same way that characters can be developed through their particularities?
Morgan Talty
I really don't know the significance behind the characters' houses. They were markers in a way, a way for me to keep track of this place I'm creating (the Penobscot Nation, which is real and exists but, in my mind, has no borders and can be as big an island as it wants). I mean, having people moving and talking as they went to check somewhere developed plot and characters, and so I suppose that could be the significance.
JP Solheim
Fire Exit feels timeless: the story moves back and forth between several decades, but it also feels like it could be set in any modern time period. With which other authors or novels do you see Fire Exit in most intimate conversation? Who were you reading, what were you watching and listening to while you were writing?
Morgan Talty
Oh, boy. First, thank you for that praise. Really. I'm actually afraid to answer this because I wonder if it's dangerous to hierarchize art. I mean, yeah, people gravitate toward a book/author who they hail as being phenomenal and untouchable (Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Anton Chekhov, etc.). I'm not saying these people are wrong—I recognize the brilliance of those Hall of Famers.
But out of respect for the dead authors whose work now is in the Hall of Fame, I can't say! However, for the living, I reread and learned so much from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong—Hall of Famers one day? Yeah, definitely.
FICTION
Fire Exit
By Morgan Talty
Tin House Books
Published June 4, 2024
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