The 12 interconnected stories in Morgan Talty’s remarkable debut story collection,
Night of the Living Rez, are set on a Penobscot reservation in Maine and told through the eyes of David, a young boy living on the reservation. The stories are both vast and intimate in their scope, covering so much ground: from intergenerational trauma to community bonds to porcupine runs, from tribal museums to methadone clinics to a jar filled with a curse, all told with language that manages to be searing, funny, and tender. You’ll want to get on the Morgan Talty train now —
Night of the Living Rez is a promising start from an exciting new author.
We feel incredibly lucky that Talty took the time to sit down and answer some of our most pressing questions about range of topics, including what scares him the most as a writer, his biggest grammatical pet peeve, and the best advice he’s ever received.
What was your favorite book as a child?
I’ll be completely honest: I hated reading when I was younger, and so I really didn’t have a favorite book. But if there were a book I would have loved, it would have to be
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen.
When did you know you were a writer?
Not until way late! It’s funny — ever since I was 18, I wanted to be a writer, and even though I wrote and mentors always said I was good at it, I never believed them. It wasn’t until I started publishing some stories that I knew I was writer, not because of the publishing necessarily, but because the publishing allowed me to see the two sides of writing: the act of creation versus the business side. I’m drawn so much more to the former, and it’s there that I knew I was a writer.
It wasn’t until I started publishing some stories that I knew I was writer, not because of the publishing necessarily, but because the publishing allowed me to see the two sides of writing: the act of creation versus the business side. I’m drawn so much more the former, and it’s there that I knew I was a writer.
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What does your writing workspace look like?
I just sit at the kitchen table with my laptop. I’m hoping one day to build a writer’s shed where I can go work and be surrounded by books and the things that I love — stuff my mom left behind like her cedar chest and artwork.
What do you care about more than most people around you?
“What do I care more about than most people?” I asked my wife.
After a long pause, she said, “I don’t know.”
Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
I used to have really bad road rage, which I think I inherited from my mother.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Richard Van Camp’s
The Lesser Blessed.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
Tiny trinkets of all sorts. When my mom passed away, she left behind tons of tiny decorations like mini books with real pages, itty-bitty glass soda bottles, wooden fruit the size of a Skittles.
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
During my summers in high school, I worked for a moving company, and I got to work with some spectacular people who had so many stories. It was also super interesting to see some of the houses — just monstrous sometimes. I also worked a job once where we only had to move furniture in this person’s house, because that’s how big it was. They tipped good, too.
What scares you the most as a writer?
How little time there really is.
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door." —
All the Pretty Horses
Share a sentence of your own that you're particularly proud of.
"Winter, and I walked the sidewalk at night along banks of hard snow."
"Winter, and I walked the sidewalk at night along banks of hard snow."
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What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
Comma splice. It drives me nuts. I also hate the comma of address — whenever someone uses it in an email to me, it just makes me feel stupid because I can never bring myself to use it.
Do you have any phobias?
I hate spiders.
Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly (reality TV, video games, karaoke, celebrity gossip blogs, YouTube videos, etc.).
I’m inclined to say video games, but is that a guilty pleasure? I consider it work. Ha! But if it’s a guilty pleasure, then I’m guilty for partaking in it.
What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
I’ll default to writing here — "Make something inexplicable happen, then work to reconcile it, to make sense of it."
What one thing do you hope people take away from reading your book?
My hope is that everyone can find something in this book that heals them, that changes them, that gets them thinking about how they themselves are reflected here, even if the story feels strange and unfamiliar. Because I can assure you: these stories, for however alien they may feel, are not unfamiliar. They are around us all the time, but we sometimes fail to see them. This work is my attempt to bring us all closer together, to help us celebrate our similarities and our differences, to help us learn to love one another more deeply.
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Morgan Talty is the author of
Night of the Living Rez and a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. Named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30,” Talty’s work has appeared in
Granta, The
Georgia Review,
Shenandoah,
TriQuarterly,
Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. He lives in Levant, Maine.