For our twenty-fifth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five writers to introduce this year’s group of debut authors. The result is intimate and honest conversations covering craft, the writing process, and publishing, as well as the very real life experiences and contemplations that have led each author to imagining wholly original creative worlds. Worlds full of humanity, humor, pain, and hope—that old friend. 

Lauren Grodstein talks with Sarah Yahm about her novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation: “As my mother declined she manifested the same inexplicable neurological symptoms as me, as if we had the same sadistic choreographer,” says Yahm. “This book exists inside that simultaneous love and distaste, otherwise known as intimacy between daughters and their ailing mothers.” David Heska Wanbli Weiden interviews Jon Hickey, author of the novel Big Chief. “The themes started as questions: Who ‘belongs’ to a tribe or nation? Who gets to decide? How does one get to that seemingly impossible state of satisfaction?” asks Hickey. Megan Kamalei Kakimoto talks with Carrie R. Moore about her story collection, Make Your Way Home: “In a way, I grew up alongside this book. My standards got higher. I learned to be simultaneously careful with my characters’ portrayals and honest about history,” says Moore. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Aaron John Curtis discuss Curtis’s novel, Old School Indian, and its origin as a shorter form. “The short story was basically an exercise, working through my fear of death and anger at [the possibility of] dying young—I was dealing with health issues much like what Abe experiences in the novel,” says Curtis. “Support and encouragement from a writers group I’d been in for a couple of years helped me expand it into a novel.” And Jonathan Escoffery introduces Jemimah Wei, author of The Original Daughter, a novel: “Interrogating our desires is a way of intentionally cultivating the vision our art grows out of, which comes back to asking the age-old question of how we want to live,” Wei says. 

Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation (Dzanc Books, May) by Sarah Yahm
Big Chief (Simon & Schuster, April) by Jon Hickey
Make Your Way Home (Tin House Books, July) by Carrie R. Moore
Old School Indian (Hillman Grad Books, May) by Aaron John Curtis
The Original Daughter (Doubleday, May) by Jemimah Wei 

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Sarah Yahm, whose debut novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, was published by Dzanc Books in May, introduced by Lauren Grodstein, author of seven books, most recently the novel A Dog in Georgia, forthcoming in August from Algonquin Books. (Credit: Yahm: Storyworkz; Grodstein: Rosie Simmons)

The strangest thing happened to me after I read Sarah Yahm’s exhilarating Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation: For weeks the novel’s characters started popping up in my memories like they were dear old friends. I saw a Chasidic family walking together on a Saturday and thought of Leon, a therapist who takes on as a patient a teenager who has begun to merge prayer with OCD. I scheduled my mammogram and thought of Lydia, the daughter who knows that both her mother and grandmother died of a heritable disease. And as I made dinner for my kids, I thought of Louise, the mother who runs away from her family to spare them the pain of watching her die.

This novel—deft, exuberant, and heartbreaking—follows Leon and Louise Rosenberg over decades as they meet, fall in love, and create a family, only to have their household break apart under the pressure of Louise’s diagnosis. Woven through their lives together are their individual journeys into art, music, academia, and psychotherapy. As a family drama, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation is about the often fractious relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. But it’s also about selfishness and anger, ritual and forbearance, debate, argument, hope. Most and best of all, it’s about the amazing gift of sharing our lives with the people we love.

The Jewish family has long been a site for memorable works of fiction. Did you read Jewish family dramas as you were becoming a writer? Do you see your work in conversation with the work of other Jewish authors? 
My father definitely pushed Philip Roth on me at an early age, and I read Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, but I was unmoved. I think even at age fifteen I found them vaguely, or not so vaguely, misogynistic. When I became a reader in my own right, the Jewish writers that influenced me the most were “Jews with Politics,” as my grandmother would say. Politics equaled the left wing—all other politics were lowercase. For me that meant Grace Paley and Tony Kushner. 

When you read Grace Paley, she doesn’t use quotation marks because the language of her characters’ thoughts and speech is inherently blurred, just like the line between generations is blurred. In her stories you step into an ongoing stream of conversation, and then you step out at the end, but the conversation continues without you. She also moves seamlessly from kitchen table to political protest. There is no artificial distinction between the domestic and the political, which I also think is elementally Jewish. All we ever did at the dinner table was argue about religion and politics, which was fantastic. I learned so much.

I discovered [Kushner’s play] Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes during my sophomore year of college, and it blew my mind. In the opening scene a rabbi is officiating a funeral for an old immigrant Jew. The rabbi describes this woman’s journey from Europe to America. Then he says to her descendants, “In you that journey is.” I think about that sentence all the time because that’s what I’m attempting to articulate and trace—the undefinable inheritance of history and trauma and memory. The Yiddish inversion of that sentence has its own elegant beauty. It brings me to tears every time I recite it, actually, which makes me feel silly, but it’s true.

Also, and this may sound silly as well—keep in mind that I have a six-year-old—but all the children’s books I read as a kid were written by Jews: Russell Hoban, Lore Segal, Arnold Lobel. There’s an essay kicking around in my head about the Frog and Toad series and how Toad represents the Jewish experience. There’s a deadpan surrealism, a grumpy vulnerability in those books that influenced me profoundly, a desperation for intimacy combined with the terror of loss. What can I say? I really identify with Toad. He’s such a lovable, grumpy catastrophizer, and there’s nothing more I aspire to be.

In this novel the Rosenbergs grapple with a hereditary neurodegenerative disease, which is not something I often read about in contemporary fiction, even though so many people I know worry about their genomic inheritances. Why did you turn to this particular subject? Was it a challenge to write about?
As somebody with an inherited illness—luckily not a terminal or degenerative one—I think about literal and metaphorical genetic transmission all the time. This book emerged out of three simultaneous states of existential terror: new motherhood, disability, and caring for a dying parent. In the span of two years I was all of my characters at once: a mother and a daughter, a patient and a caretaker, and a frustrated artist. I have a hypermobility disorder, common for Ashkenazi Jews, that was exacerbated by pregnancy and childbirth. During pregnancy I experienced a series of inexplicable neurological symptoms, semi-involuntary repetitive movements. They abated after birth, and frankly nobody’s ever really been able to figure out what caused them.

As my mother declined she manifested the same inexplicable neurological symptoms as me, as if we had the same sadistic choreographer. The literal connection between our two bodies terrified me. I felt a horrible tenderness for her, an overwhelming love, and also a profound distaste, a desire to distance myself from her intense vulnerability. I was terrified of becoming her. This book exists inside that simultaneous love and distaste, otherwise known as intimacy between daughters and their ailing mothers.

One of the things I love about this book is that it is so frank about sex—not just the act, but also the complicated ways people can feel about the act. Why did you choose to be so forthright about sex and sexuality in a family saga?
Sex is woven into the book, even though there aren’t a lot of sex scenes per se—although there are some memorable ones in the first chapter. Spoiler alert: A tarantula is tangentially involved. But sex as a normal part of life is absolutely integrated into the nonstop barrage of conversation among these family members, which mimics my family growing up. I was raised by two hippie-adjacent psychoanalysts, so not much was off-limits conversationally or intellectually.

But I don’t think this book is about sex as much as it is about embodied experiences in general. In the novel I’m forthright about the act, but I’m also forthright about breastfeeding, postpartum depression, illness, and death. There’s a moment in Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation when Lydia, one of the main characters, is talking to her best friend, Sylvie, who’s an editor for romance novels. Sylvie’s complaining about all the absurd euphemisms for penises that she has to read—“throbbing member,” etcetera. It’s meant to be funny, but it’s also kind of a real problem. As a writer I’m constantly trying to figure out how to talk about bodies in a way that doesn’t rely upon clichés or the grotesque. The impoverished language for bodily experiences in our society makes it harder for us to discover how we feel in our own bodies. It isolates us from each other. The language that we do have forces us to experience sex, death, and birth according to rigid and limiting cultural scripts.

The project of this book was to explore the unspoken ways we understand our physical experiences and give it language. For example, when Louise Rosenberg [Lydia’s mother] gets sick, she experiences her illness as a C-sharp note. Lydia experiences the same illness as brackish water rising. I experience pain in terms of color. None of this matches the pain scale you’re provided in a doctor’s office. This book is an invitation for people to explore the unarticulated experiences of their own bodies and speak them out loud in the metaphors that make sense to them. And I think doing this will make us all have better sex and get better health care.

The book is also really funny. How much of your own personality is reflected in your writing style?
Oh, I am my characters, and my characters are me. Let’s just say I’m a lot. I live in central Vermont—where people are earnest and few have a Jewish, ironic, loudmouthed, dark sensibility—and I am constantly making people uncomfortable. They either decide that I’m a charming eccentric or they cross the dirt road when they see me coming. But I don’t really care. I’m forty-six, we’re living under fascism, you get what you get. My mother used to embarrass me as a kid because she didn’t believe in dialing it back. She used to say, “Dignity is overrated,” and now that I’m a grown-up I couldn’t agree more. Whether it’s creating an off-the-cuff song about poop and performing it for a group of five-year-olds or seeing what happens when one of my characters unwraps her mother’s burritoed corpse, I believe in taking spontaneous creative risks. Everything I write is tragedy combined with playfulness. I’m picturing them right now plotted on x- and y-axes, although it’s not that literal. Whenever my work veers toward the sentimental or the melodramatic, I pull it back with a carefully calibrated act of appalling honesty, or maybe even a fart joke. Also, I think historically oppressed peoples have traditionally developed dark senses of humor, and Jews definitely fit the bill. The only way we’re going to survive the next few years is to walk around with an internal Lenny Bruce–style commentary on the world around us.

An excerpt from Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation

Maternal Math

1996

While Lydia was ranting at dinner about the latest betrayal by her best friend Billie, Louise focused on holding the knife steady in her right hand.

“I just don’t understand why she didn’t invite me to that party,” Lydia was saying.

Mind over body, Louise repeated in her head, bringing her right hand toward the pork loin on her plate. But just as she was about to cut the pallid piece of meat, an electric burst shot through her fingers, and her knife clattered against the porcelain plate in a staccato rhythm. She glanced up helplessly at Leon, hoping Lydia hadn’t noticed. She had. In the slow seconds before Leon calmly took her steak knife and began to cut her meat, Louise saw the panic in both of their eyes.

For the past few weeks, “Dinner with Louise” was starting to feel like an experimental John Cage composition. Shake the glass a little more so we can get the bass notes of the cup against the table, Imaginary John Cage told her. And come in a little earlier with the dancing fork routine? But I like what you’re doing with the jittery-leg-on-chair. You’re still making music, Louise, you’re still making music. Imaginary John Cage was so supportive. He never looked at her with thinly disguised terror, unlike Leon, who was currently carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with Lydia, pretending he wasn’t cutting his wife’s meat into tiny pieces as if she were very young or very old.

“Billie’s just exploring different facets of her identity, honey,” Leon said calmly, but she could see his shoulders hiked up almost to his ears. “And you remind her of who she really is. Or at least who she used to be, and so she’s distancing herself.”

“Billie’s a fucking cunt,” Louise said, even though she hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation, but considering Billie was a sixteen-year-old girl, she figured it was probably accurate, and it was her job to say something outrageous and unreasonable when Leon used his didactic therapist voice. Leon and Lydia laughed, clearly relieved to see some remnant of the old Louise still inhabited the broken-down body sitting in her chair at the kitchen table. I can do this on autopilot, Louise thought.

“Thanks for the astute analysis, Mom,” Lydia said sarcastically, but what she really meant was, Thanks for letting me believe that I still have a mother.

“Anytime kiddo,” Louise replied to both the spoken and the un-spoken words. But she didn’t really mean it, because pretending she wasn’t altered was starting to feel even more exhausting than being sick.

The next night was nearly identical. So similar, in fact, that for a second Louise thought she was in an anxiety dream where she was doomed to repeat this dinner over and over. Lydia complained about the exact same party, in the exact same terms, wearing the exact same Doc Martens and Ani DiFranco T-shirt. Does she ever wash that fucking shirt? Should I be washing that shirt? If I weren’t sick, would I have already washed that shirt? There was the same steamed broccoli on her plate, the same chipped salad bowl to her right. But then she looked more closely and saw that tonight’s bland meat was chicken, not pork loin, and that Leon had carefully cut it up for her into tiny squares to avoid a repetition of yesterday’s impromptu knife-on-plate concerto.

Her right hand sat traitorously in her lap, humming. It was like her hand was composed of strings that were tuned too tightly, and when she went to pick up the fork, those strings would snap and her hand would clatter uncontrollably against the plate. She knew she wouldn’t be able to spear the bits of chicken and broccoli and bring them to her mouth, but if she didn’t even try, Leon would say, “You have to keep up your strength!” and Lydia would say, “Mom, you’re not eating?” in that slightly desperate tone.

She glanced at the table again, noticing Leon hadn’t even provided her with a knife. This is so fucking infantilizing, she thought. Why doesn’t he just chew it up and regurgitate it on my plate like a wolf? That would be less humiliating. For a split second, she indulged her fury at Leon and the impossible paradox he’d created—she needed to eat to keep them from worrying about her, but if she tried to eat and her hand failed, they’d worry about her even more. She tried to will her hand to behave, but it twitched in her lap, tapping silently against her knee. She wondered if she was communicating something in Morse code, if her hand was tapping out SOS. But to whom? Who would rescue her from this? No one.

The texture of the room changed imperceptibly. The air thickened around her, and the light simultaneously dimmed and brightened. She was both in the room and not in the room.

I think I’m about to have a panic attack, she thought as she felt the essence of herself, her Louise-ness, move out of her body and up toward the ceiling. Peering down at the three of them from above, in this strange light, they looked like painted versions of themselves. It was all so wholesome, like a Jewish Norman Rockwell. All you’d have to do is paint over the furrows on Leon’s forehead, erase the stains from Lydia’s ever-present T-shirt, and paint out Louise’s disobedient hand. In fact, maybe paint out Louise altogether and paint in some other, healthier mother.

From Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation by Sarah Yahm, published by Dzanc Books on May 6, 2025. Reprinted with permission.  

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Jon Hickey, whose debut novel, Big Chief, was published by Simon & Schuster in April, introduced by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, author of the novel Winter Counts, published by Ecco in 2020. (Credit: Hickey: Sarah Peterson; Weiden: Aslan Chalom)

I met Jon Hickey at the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2018, where we were assigned to Benjamin Percy’s fiction workshop. Jon and I were both delighted to find another Native person in the class, and we spent many hours in Portland, Oregon, talking about Indigenous literature, culture, and ideas. During the intensive, Jon and I shared very early versions of what would become our debut novels. 

So I was somewhat familiar with the plot and characters of Big Chief, but the final form of the book was startling in its intensity and fully realized vision. I was blown away by the compelling characters—many of whom reminded me of people I know—as well as the way in which Jon skillfully integrates the themes of Indigenous sovereignty, identity, and community. Featuring Mitch Caddo, a young lawyer and emerging political operative for the Passage Rouge Nation, the novel follows his efforts to get his best friend reelected as tribal president. However, as events spiral badly out of control, Mitch must reconcile the limits of his ambition with his principles. The book is a real page-turner with a wry satiric edge, and Native readers especially will find Jon’s portrayal of reservation politics both amusing and all too realistic.

During our Tin House workshop you submitted a very early section from Big
Chief. How did the book change after those early drafts? 
The start of our friendship! That turned out to be quite a prolific workshop cohort, and it was a pleasure to be a part of it. After I workshopped that very early chapter, it took a long time for Big Chief to find its natural form. The novel had a much longer time frame than it does now, spanning multiple years, decades even. But the immediate, urgent story—the days before the election—was always there, and over the course of a couple of drafts, that election weekend became the focus of the narrative. I found there was an endless source of things that I was interested in, but including them took away from the immediacy of the present-day narrative. Once that fell into place, and once I was at peace with cutting almost half my novel—and backfilling some of it—Big Chief became what it is now. 

Big Chief is, among other things, a novel of politics in the tradition of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. But there are very few Native novels that deal so explicitly with the complicated world of tribal councils and reservation politics. Did you plan to make politics the cornerstone of the novel, or did that develop over time? 
I’m glad you picked up on the allusions to All the King’s Men, which was entirely intentional, as I consider Warren’s book a sort of spiritual precursor to Big Chief. They are both novels about politics, but also about a search for meaning, at least I hope so for my novel. I would be remiss in not mentioning some of my debut’s antecedents, such as Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and The Night Watchman, James Welch’s The Indian Lawyer—books that taught me that a story like this can be both substantive and intriguing. 

I’ve always been interested in how power works on reservations, much as your novel Winter Counts delves into the legal gray areas inherent in Indian law. These are fundamentally local elections but with the added complexities of leading sovereign entities and, in some cases, multimillion-dollar economies. I’ve sensed the rich dramatic possibilities of the reservation political process for a while now, and I knew that my book would take place during an election, but it took time to find the correct format and characters. And to my surprise it took years to realize that I wasn’t just talking about politics. I was talking about a character in search of a spiritual center, a character questioning his very identity and sense of belonging. There are other ways to get there, but for me politics and the corrupting influence of power were the most direct route to what I was trying to write about. 

I love the character of Mitch Caddo, who’s both calculating and sincere while dealing with his own insecurities and issues regarding his identity. Did this protagonist change over the course of your writing the novel? 
Mitch definitely took some time to develop. I identify with Mitch in certain important aspects of his character; as I’ve gotten older I often question my own sense of spirituality, where it comes from and how to nurture it. And I’ve had ambitions and difficulties in finding my own place among my community. Mitch also shares qualities with a lot of younger people I know, and his quest mirrors those who have inspired me in their dedication to service, their talents, their abilities. 

But unlike these idealistic people I know, Mitch, in the beginning at least, lacks a certain moral center. He’s ruthless in ways and feels justified in his ruthlessness. In the early drafts I felt like his voice was withholding things, hiding some true feelings out of insecurity. I felt like my job was to put him in increasingly stressful situations where withholding was no longer an option. And once I got to those deep, dark secrets, I began to empathize with him.

Did you consider the themes of the novel as you wrote it? If so, did they evolve as you revised the manuscript? 
Because this is my first book, I was taking care not to throw every single theme into it. I don’t want to give the impression that I sit down at my desk thinking, “What is my theme?” It comes out as, “Why are you writing this?” The answer is that I want to write about the things I care deeply about, my questioning of my identity and who I am to my family, both immediate and extended. The themes started as questions: Who “belongs” to a tribe or nation? Who gets to decide? How does one get to that seemingly impossible state of satisfaction? As the book goes on, the answers to those questions begin to emerge, as does the purpose of the novel as I understand it. It took me a while to figure out exactly what I was trying to say about those themes.

There has been an explosion of Indigenous art in the past decade, especially in the literary sphere. Not just literary fiction, but Native horror, speculative, crime, and romance novels have been published recently. How do you see Big Chief fitting into this new landscape of Native literature?
We live in exciting times for Indigenous art and literature, don’t we? It was so exciting to see your novel really catch readers’ imaginations in the literary crime and thriller genres—can’t wait for the sequel. And we have some incredible authors who have come out with books recently, or have books forthcoming, like Kyle Edwards, Carson Faust, Eliana Ramage, Aaron John Curtis, and Jake Skeets, to name just a few. 

This explosion of new works is important for so many reasons, namely broadening the breadth of what we know as “Indigenous” fiction, as it’s necessary to show that there is no unitary Indigenous experience. Those of us who are citizens of these First Nations have varying degrees of familiarity and belongingness with our people. So many of us live off reservations, some of us are enrolled and some of us aren’t, and we all have different relationships to our cultures. The conventional wisdom is to try to put all of us Indigenous artists in easily recognizable boxes, and Big Chief is meant to address this. Outside of our communities, there are certain expectations placed upon us to demonstrate our experiences in outdated imagery, and there’s a premium on surfaces, images, stereotypes.

In my case, I’m the second generation that has lived primarily off the reservation, but our roots are deep, and my living elsewhere doesn’t take away from my experience, or my obligations to my nation. I hope Big Chief will find Native readers who know these feelings, readers going through their own searches, but I also hope that non-Indigenous readers grasp that same meaning. 

An excerpt from Big Chief

Chapter 1

The season’s first shiver comes on Thanksgiving morning, five days before the election.

It’s a passing shudder when I leave for work and see the dead leaves and pine needles standing defiantly through the soft snow that blankets the Passage Rouge Indian Reservation. The shudder becomes a shake as I scrape the frost glaze off my windshield and fumble with my car keys. I try to keep it together when I drive through what’s left of the Old Village, where my grandparents and ancestors once survived the harsh winters, but when I pass the blind corner outside the Chippewa Super, where ten years ago my mother eased her car onto Highway 92 and into the path of four high school kids with a handle of E&J brandy and a stolen 1994 Pontiac Grand Prix, the shiver is chattering my teeth together. But then it’s gone and I’m standing in the parking lot looking up at the log cabin facade of the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, briefcase in hand, confused and thinking of a question my mother might have asked me had she lived to see this: Mitch Caddo, what, exactly, are you doing here?

I’m thirty years old, the youngest-ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, a tribe of about five thousand enrolled members. Our reservation is in the north woods of Wisconsin, nestled within a confluence of picturesque lakes and lush forest that has drawn the chimokomonaag, the whites, and their money for more than three centuries. We’re not huge like the Navajo nation, but we’re bigger than our neighbors in Bad River and Menominee, and we have federal recognition and a sovereign constitutional government. Its bureaucracy—legal, business development, education, safety, enrollment, health and family services, et al.—answers to me, and I’m also the chief operations officer of Passage Rouge Golden Eagle Enterprises, the limited-liability corporation that manages the day-to-day operations at the Golden Eagle Casino and Resort, the economic center of the reservation that rakes in $25 million a year, home of the loosest slots in the state.

I’m the suit and tie, the short haircut, the white-passing face of Passage Rouge when we have business with the chimokomonaag. On the top floor of the Golden Eagle, though, inside the Migizi Suite, presides the man I put up there just two years ago, Mack Beck, tribal president. While I take meetings with the state reps looking for outfield chatter for whatever Indian Country bills they’re moving through the legislature, or knuckle down with the governor’s office to discuss the compacts regulating our gaming operations, Mack Beck is the name at the top of the ticket, the ursine face smiling from the billboards and campaign signs staked along the highway. He represented us in the intertribal delegation to DC, where he grip-and-grinned with the president in the East Room of the White House, while I stayed in Passage Rouge for budget meetings, steering and development committees, and the granular minutiae that Mack Beck can’t be bothered with. He’s ceremonial in all senses of the word. He is the look. I’m the substance.

Does the unequal workload make me bitter? Not in the least. I’m a pragmatist. I’m too much of an outsider, a suburban Indian, to pull enough Passage Rouge votes to get anywhere near the council. Mack doesn’t have that problem. He looks the part and says the right words. Neither of us got here alone, and together we wield power not normally afforded to kids like us.

But what good is power if you can’t keep it? That’s the other part of my job. Over the last three months, I’ve handed over the bulk of my duties to the ancient order of aunties who run the tribal government so I can figure out how to get Mack reelected to another two-year term. In less than a week, the people of Passage Rouge will come down to the William R. Paulson Tribal Government Center on Peace Pipe Road to cast ballots for tribal president and council. Our election is too small for anything resembling scientific polling, but if you take the angry, misspelled all-caps posts on Facebook and the picketers loitering outside the Government Center as indicators of how our campaign is going, you might come to the reasonable conclusion that the president’s reelection prospects are in trouble. Or, in the words of our great orator and chief, straight-up fucked.

Is this the source of this morning’s shiver? The very real prospect of defeat? Nobody thinks that’s fun. And “fall guy” is in the unwritten job description of the operations director. I take the blame when everything goes wrong. His failure is my failure, and that’s the way it’s been from the jump.

But as I get myself correct in the lobby of the Eagle and swipe at the permanent sleeplessness in my reddened eyes, I suspect that this November shiver is bigger than just next week’s election. It’s an existential shiver. After all the sacrifices I’ve made, people I’ve disappointed, laws we may have broken, and maybe a lost election, is this all there is? Just what did I trade in my meager decency for?

From Big Chief. Copyright © 2025 by Jon Hickey. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.  

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Carrie R. Moore, whose debut story collection, Make Your Way Home, will be published in July by Tin House Books, introduced by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, published by Bloomsbury in 2023. (Credit: Moore: Matt Valentine; Kakimoto: Van Wishingrad)

I have always been taken with writers who can render a complicated place with the utmost care, and Carrie R. Moore is exactly that writer—though her spectacular debut collection, Make Your Way Home, encompasses much more than just keen attention to place. The Black men, women, and families orbiting these stories are reckoning with generational inheritance and trauma, romantic and erotic love, ideas of faith and freedom. Yet it’s the American South that serves as the book’s point of departure to question, unpack, and probe these thematic concerns while arriving at a place of necessary complexity so reflective of its starting point. Across these eleven stories, the through-line is one of devotion to humanity; through a deeply compassionate lens, Moore illuminates the tenderness underlying the human condition and makes the reading of Make Your Way Home a transformative experience.

The portrait of the South as depicted in these eleven stories is one of unyielding complication—and ultimately of a deep, yet pained, love. Did you set out to write into place so intentionally, and how did you navigate attending to the intersection of place and history?
That was precisely my intention. I’m from Georgia, and the South is my home. It’s full of memories of savoring my grandmothers’ home cooking and laughing at my cousins’ jokes, of taking road trips with my parents and twisting my sister’s hair. Which is to say, the South’s history for me is complicated, not solely defined by its horrors. I felt that a story collection was the ideal form for capturing the region’s complexity. Every piece could explore something different, preventing the South from being defined by a single experience. Still, what links each story is how history pushes in. The past always interrupts the characters’ lives, even if only for a moment. These small interruptions were how I tried to balance history and place.

I’m struck by the emotional depth of your characters, how you render such emotionally rich lives in short form. Can you speak to your approach in creating characters? 
All of my characters are born from some emotional question I’m grappling with in my own life: How do I keep loving people who’ve disappointed me? In what ways can I metabolize rage when Black women are so judged for it? My characters adopt extreme responses to such questions, and many of their struggles come from suppression; every story features a moment in their lives when they can no longer stifle their true feelings. That sort of structure allows for emotion to rise to the surface. A story doesn’t feel done, however, until there’s some sliver of hope at the end. Despite these challenging moments in my characters’ lives, they must emerge from these trying experiences more healed, more self-aware.

Your stories move with grace, transitioning elegantly from one tale to the next as if the stories themselves demanded their entrances. What were you considering when ordering the collection? 
My editor, Elizabeth DeMeo, and I did so much reflecting on this. Initially the collection moved solely from past to future, revealing a portrait of the American South over a period of two hundred years. The reader would begin in 1920s Florida and end in the 2120s in Tennessee. But the first story in a collection indicates so much about where a book is going, and I was concerned that opening in the 1920s might make some readers think the book wasn’t going to have many contemporary narratives. I wanted to be clear from the beginning that my stories are deeply interested in history, yet they also seek to reflect multifaceted Black communities that insist on being here now. There’s one story that features children dancing to Michael Jackson in the nineties and a later one about a grandmother recalling an encounter with the Klan. There’s a story that features both slavery and Reddit and another that acknowledges root-working practices and Beyoncé. Elizabeth and I decided to open Make Your Way Home with “When We Go, We Go Downstream”—which itself spans over one hundred fifty years—to indicate the collection’s scope. From there every story progresses more or less chronologically. My hope is that the reader experiences multiple threads of time, the way the South constantly tugs on past, present, and future.

Several stories were previously published in renowned journals such as the Sewanee Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. How have the pieces changed since their initial publications, and has your relationship to them changed? 
I wrote the first story for this collection when I was twenty, and it would take over a decade to finish the others. In a way, I grew up alongside this book. My standards got higher. I learned to be simultaneously careful with my characters’ portrayals and honest about history. Outside of my own changing intentions, new methods and resources became available for research, allowing me access to more knowledge. Then the global pandemic hit, and traveling was suddenly off-limits. For many of the stories’ magazine versions, I was limited by memories of past trips or by what I could learn from a distance. But after this collection sold, my husband and I took a road trip across the South to revisit some of the book’s settings or visit others for the first time. Now my hope is that my stories feel fuller, enriched by the sort of geographic and historical details that come from field work. The writer I am now had to be able to stand behind the decisions of her twenty-something counterpart.

An excerpt from Make Your Way Home 

“Naturale”

For a long time after, I softened. Even more than I had during my life up until then: daughter, niece, hairdresser, wife. All that time practicing being warm and willing to carry just about anything.

I carried Oriah too that April. Took in his apologies for not being the husband he should’ve been, for falling in love with someone else that winter. He let it spill out right around his spring break, his body leaning against the kitchen countertop, his fingertips pressing from brown to white against the granite: “It was just the one time. At the dig. I knew it was a mistake as soon as it was over and all that wind started flapping through the tent.” It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry, and when he said, “Please, tell me what I can do,” I swallowed and said only, “Alright. Can I have a minute to myself?”

I canceled my clients so we could spend a week inside our pollen-dusted town house, trying to piece our marriage back together. We sat cross-legged on our cream carpet, taking turns playing his archaeology podcasts and my neo soul records, songs about letting your hair down. We ate tart plums on our back patio, as if eating with our hands could return us to those early nights when I slept in his crummy grad-student housing, his tenure-track job nowhere in sight. In the few moments I left his side to relieve myself or to breathe, I wandered barefoot through our hallway’s cedar light, stepping in the footprints he’d left in the rug, like I was warming myself up to touching him again. In truth, the pollen smearing the sash windows was a relief. No woman who might’ve been watching from the sidewalk could peer in and measure herself against me.

With the way Oriah was determined to give me space, it took us until the end of that week to get naked with each other again. Bathing together was my idea. A way for us to take back everything that came with being married, because it already felt like that woman was keeping his body away from me. We soaked on opposite sides of our claw-foot tub, and through the bathroom window, Charleston light fell violet and nervous over the bathwater. I’d started wearing my hair down from its usual high puff, and it worked itself into tight knots as it floated between us.

“But do you really get what I mean?” he said. He wasn’t touching me, his large hands wrapped around his dark legs. “About being two people at once? That’s how it was. Like I wasn’t even me. Like I wasn’t—”

“I know,” I said, and I made myself reach for his hand. “Really, please don’t explain it again.”

Who cared if he was shy to wrap his fingers around mine? Anything was better than him talking about it. I’d asked him not to tell me her name, since even just knowing they’d worked together had given me visions. A woman with hair flowing in loose waves over her back, over his arms as he held her against him. When she emerged from the tent and went back to crouching over rusted pottery shards, its neat ends would sweep the earth. No kinks like mine.

“Tell me something else,” I said. “Like what you want to do tomorrow. Or I can tell you about this new idea I have for the salon. Or you can tell me about how your work’s going otherwise.”

“That’s what you want to talk about?” He pulled his hand back. Let it slip underwater. “It’s my fault, and you’re acting like it’s that easy. Gone. Over and done with.”

“Not easy,” I said, scooping water over my knees. “Just alright.”

Carefully, his shy fingers pinching the ends of my hair, he let himself talk about the colonoware his team was unearthing, the site an hour north of Charleston. I’d been there a few times before. That plantation ground littered with ceramic fragments, traces of vessels enslaved women had spent hours coiling from clay, wall after thick wall to hold water, rice, whatever needed containing. I watched the brown in his eyes lighten as he talked, and I tried to make mine light too, attentive—as if he were taking me with him into that life. That wet sun and those flashes of tan in the soil and his hands brushing away the past. He couldn’t get enough of it. Not with how he already spent so much time at the university behind a classroom podium or in meetings with full professors who hadn’t visited a dig in years, the sort of academic he was afraid of becoming.

“Doesn’t have to be you when you get tenure,” I said. “You love it too much.”

He looked at me. Then he all at once leaned forward and slipped his hands around the backs of my knees. “I don’t work with her anymore, you know,” he said. As he sweated in the warm water, he seemed to be emerging from something, his body shiny everywhere except the center of his brown face. “I told her—we’d reached the end of things. It was going to be you from now on.”

“I know,” I said. “I believe you.”

Excerpted from Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore. Reprinted with permission from Tin House. Copyright © 2025 by Carrie R. Moore.  

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Aaron John Curtis, whose debut novel, Old School Indian, was published by Hillman Grad Books in May, introduced by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of seven books, most recently the nonfiction book Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings, published by Harper in June. (Credit: Curtis: Cacá Santoro, Jeffers: Sydney A. Foster)

When I first saw the title of Aaron John Curtis’s novel, Old School Indian, I suspected I’d be delighted, that he would offer something entirely unexpected and wholly fresh. I was not disappointed. Curtis explores so much in this one book—a heck of a great contemporary story, but more than that, a journey.  

Old School Indian narrates the trials of Abe Jacobs, a Kanien’kehá:ka man living in Miami, Florida, who suffers from a disease that none of his white, Western doctors can figure out. He’s been poked and prodded and given tests, which yield no answers. In pain and desperate for an alleviation of his unknown sickness, Abe travels back to his family’s home in Ahkwesáhsne—what non-Indigenous people would call Mohawk territory, the region that straddles Canada and New York. There Abe engages his Uncle Budge to heal him with traditional Kanien’kehá:ka medicine. 

Uncle Budge doesn’t look like anybody’s sage elder—in the first scene of the novel he is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “four flaccid penises”—but as we travel deeper through the novel, the old man engages not only Abe’s body, but his spirit and heart. As readers we experience Abe’s story while also being allowed access to familial, cultural, and national histories. In presenting Old School Indian in such a way, Curtis crafts a narrative that is deeply affecting—a narrative that recalls trickster tales of old, those which distract the listener/reader with a present dilemma while teaching something needed—something wise. 

Initially your novel started as a short story. What made you want to expand the story into this current, longer form? And how did the vision change from story to the first novel draft to the finished, published version? 
The short story was basically an exercise, working through my fear of death and anger at [the possibility of] dying young—I was dealing with health issues much like what Abe experiences in the novel. Support and encouragement from a writers group I’d been in for a couple of years helped me expand it into a novel. The first draft jumped back and forth between timelines, a past one with Abe in college through leaving Miami for a healing, and a “present” 2016 one on the Rez, with poems in between. My editor wanted to raise the stakes at the beginning, so I had the idea to send Abe back home to Ahkwesáhsne before his diagnosis, rather than the diagnosis being the catalyst for going back, as I’d originally written it. I was so excited about the idea that I shared it with my agent and editor before I understood how much work it would entail. I thought it would be a matter of losing a bunch of Miami stuff and shifting scenes up, but it was nearly a complete rewrite. Unfortunately for me, they loved the idea. After that I was locked into this huge edit. I changed everything in the 2016 timeline and trimmed nearly half the book. Ultimately it worked wonders. In the first draft, the scene with Abe’s family on the porch was my favorite. It was largely comedic. In the final version the porch scene happens right after Abe’s diagnosis. The tone got a lot heavier, and the humor became a defense mechanism. It gave the whole interaction so much depth, and it was nothing I could have predicted, nothing I could have accomplished in the first draft. 

Your novel explores the story of Abe while weaving in stories of his family members as well. How did this storytelling device affect the novel’s plot—and how did you make sure Abe remained at the center of the novel while simultaneously honoring what Indigenous scholar Gerald Vizenor calls narrative wisps?
Making the family stories part of his enlightenment was key. Everyone who tells a story does it to teach Abe something. In that sense it was easy to keep him centered. Originally the beginning of the novel was a bunch of different stories, but only the beginnings. Like, you’re at a bus stop and this guy sits down next to you and starts talking. It seems like a lot of nonsense, but really it’s a test—are you patient enough and willing to listen long enough to earn hearing the actual story? I had a lot of love for that first version. Picturing how it would frustrate the reader—switching gears just as the momentum got going—gave me joy, but my agent wisely pointed out that starting a story over and over for fifty pages probably wasn’t a good way to shop a book around. I’d like to think that style was a tribute to Mohawk’s circular storytelling, but it was really a symptom of growing up listening to my family. I heard the same story about my aunts buying overbright white sneakers a dozen times, but I only heard about how my great uncle Levi swindled Tóta out of half her land once. Some of that loopy version still remains, in the way Abe’s Tóta keeps coming back to life, depending on what timeline we’re in.

Cultural awareness and learning really underpin this story of the search for physical healing. In exploring the concept of traditional medicine, did you encounter unexpected revelations?
The story Uncle Budge tells about settlers getting angry with the Kanien’kehá:ka for prescribing the same plant for diarrhea and constipation is true. As it was explained to me, it’s because the plant knows why it’s there. When you introduce it to your intestinal tract, regardless of what ails you, the plant knows what your body needs. Humans don’t know why we’re here. We’ve created the climate crisis because we’ve forgotten we’re stewards of the planet, not owners. Medicine reveals itself to many people, but only those with respect for the plants will have new, stronger Medicines open to them. Abe downplays the healing he learns about because there’s no proof, but I know of healings with before-and-after testing that can’t be refuted. I won’t be discussing those healings on tour, because I also learned that talking about certain Medicine dilutes it. So we’ll have to be content with the cinematic version.

I absolutely love the narration of this novel, which allows the protagonist to evolve without the added burden of providing backstory. The fabulous first-person narrator, Dominick Deer Woods, communicates directly with the reader, providing historical and cultural information, while Abe inhabits the novel’s main action. How did you decide on this approach to narration—and then, how did you begin to craft the narrator’s voice? 
Being an avid reader, I know what it feels like to be in conversation with a good book. I wanted to play with that, and I originally wrote the story with Abe’s voice in first person. The problem was, I’d kept a lot of fear and anger from the short story, the months when my specialists were narrowing their possible diagnoses down to several horrible deaths. The voice was actively hostile toward an imagined white reader. I was about to die, having done nothing of merit with my talent, but I would show this reader who they were and who they’d been before that happened. Author Diana Abu-Jaber suggested I switch to third person. A second writers group, one focused on finishing a long-form piece within a year, enjoyed the new version but said the narrative had lost something. Enter Dominick [Abe’s alter ego]. Abe plodded through life; Dominick capered. Making the switch back to first person in this new voice, I found Dominick was a lot more forgiving toward Abe and understanding of his flaws. Dominick also preferred humor to hostility, which made him a lot more fun to be around. A good thing, because from short story to published novel, I’ve had to spend ten years with the guy.

An excerpt from Old School Indian

AKHTSÍ:'A (MY BIG SISTER)
by Dominick Deer Woods

When I find her to say goodbye for the twelfth time
my sister’s eyes are bleary with craft brew growlers
remember when she wants to know
remember when
and I think of the time we talked about our dreams
and I think I know what it is to be a small, scared thing
       trying to be invisible in the world because I have shrunk
       myself into corners while a giant raged outside
my sister described an enormous hand stretching the
       doorway to cracking and my body prickled like the skin
       of a raw chicken

we shared the same dream because we share the same father

remember when she wants to know
and I think of the time she drank so much Southern
       Comfort her boyfriend refused to let her ride in the cab
       of his truck
so we rode in the bed and I held her hair from her face
while she covered it and us with SoCo vomit and we gagged
       and we giggled
and she cried and told me about the trio of pale men who
       preyed on her when she was walking home from work
       like she always did
how they ran her down in an orange Chevy and dragged her
       back to the bed and made an ash woman of her
and I pretended not to have made sense of her words as they
       spewed
out and she pretended she’d never said anything
but after that night we shared an understanding

do you remember she asks
and I think of the time she drank Fireball Cinnamon Whisky
       and we laughed
hard enough to fly a false tooth from her mouth
and we laughed even harder when it flew across the room
and I chased her around the rest of the night trying
to get a picture of her gap-toothed smile
and I knew the only reason she’d have a fake tooth I didn’t
       know about was
because of the man
the man who made her briefly a woman of makeup and bows
makeup to contour the lumps and cover the bruises
a bow to pull her hair tight on one side and make her eyes
       look even
but if I stopped laughing and trying to capture an image
       then she’ll know I know so I keep trying and we keep
       laughing

remember when
and I think of how she taught me about picklebacks
a shot of Jameson with a pickle juice chaser
and we laughed until she peed herself
and I thought of her birthing her good, strong boys
so much like her handsome husband
how they broke her body on the way out
and made her something she never knew she wanted to be
so the twelfth time I say goodbye that night
and we’re toasting with strong craft beer poured from
growlers and she pulls me in and on a wave
of beer breath tells me how a basswood tree
explodes with seeds before it dies
and when you see a cluster of basswood trunks
what you don’t see is the one that died
years before to create that abundance
and she tells me she is the tree
and her house and her husband and her boys
are the abundance and I think she’s finally
too sloppy to remember and I think of later how
this memory will glitter in my mind like a treasure

Four

AHKWESÁHSNE, 2016

Abe and Sis sit in Adirondack chairs on their parents’ back porch, the evening air sweet with blackberry from a patch of bushes near the shed and the faint traces of the ham Mom baked for dinner.

“What is it, again?” Sis asks.

“Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis.” Abe tries not to sound annoyed; she’s asked him to name his autoimmune diagnosis half a dozen times since he got home from The Good Road. Abe started out picking his way over each syllable like a novice hiker working a mountain, but now he’s almost got it down. Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis, acronym: SNiP.

“SNiP” puts him in mind of Greek myths—the three Fates who spun mortal’s lives, allotted their length, and cut them accordingly. Clotho weaved this disorder into Abe’s life, Lachesis is spooling out his final months, and Atropos is getting ready to cut. Only it won’t be shears for Abe, nothing so clean and quick. No, SNiP will saw at the thread of him like a rusty nail file.

He has browser tabs open to Johns Hopkins’ and the National Organization for Rare Disorders’ pages for SNiP, along with a tab from the Alzheimer’s Association. Vascular dementia is going to hit him in a matter of months. Soon his brain will start to rot, giving him strange moods and stranger habits, stealing days at first, and then years, erasing his friends, his family, Alex, everyone he’s ever known.

Since the rheumatologist gave him the diagnosis Abe has been praying. Not to avoid his fate—they don’t know what causes SNiP, and there is no cure—but to be happy, not mean or violent. He imagines himself opening his arms to everyone for a hug, calling out, “Hey, stranger”—either a warm greeting for a new friend (or nurse, more likely) or a clever “joke” if the person turns out to be family. It’s me, Abe—your sister, Cass will say. I know, he’ll laugh, knowing nothing of the sort. Picturing his future is like mourning himself, like he’s already gone.

Excerpted from Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis. © 2025 by Aaron John Curtis. Used with permission of the publisher, Hillman Grad Books, an imprint of Zando, LLC.