An Interview with Morgan Talty

Fire Exit, Morgan Talty’s searing debut novel, is a haunting exploration of inheritance, fatherhood, and responsibility. Set outside Maine’s Penobscot Reservation, Fire Exit deftly tracks the lives of characters weighed down by long-held secrets. With hard-hitting prose and a tightly-wound plot, Fire Exit asks the reader what it really means to belong. Sitting in his UMaine office a few weeks before publication, Morgan Talty chatted with associate editor, Kira Compton, about the publishing industry, identity, and objective correlative.

IR: I’ll start off with a congratulations on the second book! How’s it been so far? Did Night of the Living Rez prepare you for the lead up to publication day, or is every book its own beast?

MT: Oh man, I’m just sort of in this limbo where I don’t know what will happen.

With Night of the Living Rez, nobody wanted it. I don’t think people quite understood it as being both a novel and a collection. But then a mentor of mine from Stonecoast, Cara Hoffman, introduced me to her longtime friend and current agent, Rebecca Friedman. Rebecca read the collection and immediately was like, “Oh yeah, I can sell this!”

We did a little work, but there really wasn’t much to be done with the collection by that point because a lot of the pieces had been published. She sent it out to the editors at the big houses—I don’t know how many there are right now. One?

IR: Yeah, one big megacorp.

MT: Yeah. She sent it out to all of them, but then also sent it to the top indie places. Tin House wanted it from the very beginning, and we ended up going with them. They gave me a $3,000 advance—I’m of the opinion that writers should talk about what they get paid—and my wife and I were like, okay, well, this is a stepping stone to the next one. That’s what most people do, you know? Indie houses have to work really hard to stay alive, so they put in a lot of effort to make a book sell. Writers get a good sales track, and then agents use that to get a large advance on their next book with Viking or Penguin or wherever.

That was my expectation. Not that the book would do what it did. I had no idea it was going to sell as many copies or go on to win these awards, which allowed UMaine to do an opportunity hire. I mean, it’s just been this incredible thing. A blind side in a good way.

So right now, I’m sitting in this weird place where I just don’t know what’s going to happen next. It feels different in that I know what could potentially be waiting for me on the other side. It’s hard to explain—like, I’ve been here before, but the landscape has changed.

IR: Speaking of, Fire Exit has this really beautiful sense of return, these constant cycles the characters keep getting pulled back into. In my personal experience, it’s easy to feel entrapped or beholden to these cycles.

But Fire Exit looks at it differently. You treat these parallels with reverence instead, particularly in moments when Charles is reflecting on his past. How did that come to be in the book?

MT: So, I rewrote this book five times. I’m surprised it wasn’t more than that. The first draft was in third person omniscient—the worst thing you can do in literary fiction—but it allowed me to jump around time and get in people’s heads, you know, figure out their family’s past and future. And then came the second draft, where I now knew all this history and could off-load some of that weight. And then another draft, for conflict and tension, and then another, and at that point you’ve internalized it in a way that you can easily grab what you need. When you do get to the final draft of this thing you need to polish, you’ve gotten there because you’ve spread the work out.

I recognized the parallel somewhere in those drafts. I don’t know how it works for other people, but for me it’s a matter of paying attention to moments with no resistance. We hear ‘missed opportunity’ all the time—oh, this is a missed opportunity of specificity, oh this is a missed opportunity for setting—and really, I think it’s a way of expressing the question, what does the story want you to do?

I haven’t figured out the whole thing yet, but my philosophy is that if humans didn’t exist, the concept of a story still would. An observer watching animals would see all these tiny conflicts—squirrels chasing each other, a storm destroying a bird’s nest. Story would still be there. We didn’t invent it. We discovered it. It’s what allows us writers to make sense of the world.

IR: Another thing I wanted to talk about is the prose. Your writing is clean and not very self-indulgent, often sticking with physical surroundings and details. But then as I was reading, I'd be walloped by these deep moments of emotion that would always surprise me. A quote of yours from another interview articulates it better than I ever could: I stay in the literal and use it to get to the abstract. How did you come to this stylistic choice, and how does it serve the story?  

MT: Part of it has to do with the fact that I came to writing at eighteen. I went to community college and barely graduated high school. My vocabulary was pretty limited at the time, and I’ve always said to myself that I’m never going to leave who I was back then. So I do want it to be simple, even when it’s complex.

When you say surprised, do you mean emotionally?

IR: Yeah, like when you get hit in the gut while reading.

MT: Okay. There’s a saying by William Carlos Williams, no ideas but in things. We can’t transmit an emotion without putting it into a literal thing. It’s called objective correlative, and it’s mostly used in poetry. A good example is in a James Crews poem, Telling My Father. There’s an image of a sweating glass of orange juice, and the reader knows all the time it’s spent sitting there encapsulates the emotions of both the father and the son.

So when I’m writing fiction, I try to follow that idea and avoid any abstraction. The moment you get into abstraction is the moment that the reader has to do mental gymnastics.

But yeah, creating that sense of emotion is the hardest part, because you can write a really cool, plotted story, but if there’s no feeling there, it becomes more entertaining than transcendental—not to say entertainment can’t be transcendental. I’m just saying there’s a difference between and indie film that will live on forever and a Michael Bay film.

IR: No, I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you want something that will stick with you for a little while.

MT: Yeah, I mean personally as a reader, I always need to find a line or something that’s written so wonderfully I can’t get it out of my head. And that upholds me until I find the next thing.

IR: One thing I admired about Fire Exit—and I felt Night of the Living Rez did this too—is the way in which you write about addiction.

I guess this is an opinion, but it’s really easy to write about addiction in a way that comes off false on the page. There’s this compulsion, or expectation even, to be overly confessional or really stark or wow, look how bad this is!

One of the reasons I loved Charles’ story is because it’s treated with a lot of restraint. The only major scene we have of him in active addiction isn’t really about the addiction at all, but about this important familial relationship.

I’m wondering why you think that restraint helps create a more honest representation of these character’s lives. Rather than… well, I’m not trying to shit on other stories, but—

MT: I know what you mean. How other stories can play into the pathos of it to manipulate you as a reader.

IR: Exactly.

MT: I can list writers who do that stuff all the time. For me, though, I don’t know. I grew up around it. My father died from it. My mother died from it. My sister could potentially die from it. But we loved each other anyway. The addiction takes a backseat to me. I’m more interested in the person as they behave, as they’re placed in the situation of life.

In fiction, I don’t even feel like I’m writing about addiction. I’m just writing about a person who has particular wants and needs that they can’t achieve because the obstacle is addiction. I’m more concerned with the person than I am with the addiction, and I’m not going to exploit it and create misery porn. I’m going to just be a decent human being, you know?

IR: Yeah, not like, reduce someone to this one part of who they are.

MT: Yeah.

IR: Okay, I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t have a super clear question with this one, but I’d just really love to hear your thoughts on what I consider to be the beating heart of the book. The big thing I’ve been mulling over since finishing Fire Exit is the ways in which we interact with our identities. On my read, that’s what’s haunting all the characters.  

It seems to me that there’s this vested interested in the structures that be—capitalist structures, colonialist structures—to make identity just one thing. You know, your blood or genetics or what have you. Profits can be made if we’re all easily defined and easily separated.

And my big takeaway from Fire Exit is that it’s much more complicated than that. It’s asking the reader to take a more critical look at how they view identity and what that could mean.

MT: I’m glad you caught that. I could go on and on about this. I mean, I don’t go to the page in order to critique something. What I’m really invested in is the art of storytelling, the art of fiction. Character, setting, conflict, plot, those things. But if you’ve done that, and you’ve done it well enough, it’s going to come with all this messy stuff from life.

Capitalism and colonialism have compartmentalized race and ethnicity.  If you look at any English department, they have 18thCentury British Literature, and 20th Century Literature, and Contemporary Literature, and those courses are filled with everybody. Black, White, Asian, Native. You get a flavor of everybody’s race and the types of writing they’re doing.

But then you also have courses like Introduction to African American Literature, Introduction to Asian American Literature, Introduction to Native American Literature. But why is there no Introduction to White People Literature? Why is Introduction to Native American Literature its own category? Why is it compartmentalized? You can’t get away from it. I’ve always been frustrated by that.

I’m hoping this book really frustrates people because, one, it’s written by a Native person, but the narrator is a white guy. Two, the daughter is a descendant but not an enrolled member. Is this Native American literature, then? Is it American? What is it?

This book belongs with all other books, good or bad. It doesn’t matter. To quote Audre Lorde: It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

We are different in many ways because of where we come from and because of what colonialism has done to us. Regardless of where you come from, we all have one thing in common, and that’s our ability to feel. If we can acknowledge that, then perhaps we can fix something that has been broken for a long, long time.

But I highly doubt it. [laughs]

IR: [laughs] I mean, you never know.

Okay, lastly, most of our readers are students, and this is an MFA-run magazine. What advice do you have for young writers that are still developing their craft and trying to get out there?

MT: Don’t be blinded by the false promises of being a writer. That if you do x, y, z, you will get this outcome. As a writer, you have to find your own way into the literary world. Eventually, you become your own teacher. There will come a point, not that there’s nothing left for you to learn, but that you have to take it into your own hands. You have to seek it out.

Another thing: don’t take writer’s advice about anything. [laughs] I know I’m giving advice, but I mean don’t hold yourself to the routines of other writers. I took Stephen King’s advice about writing 2000 words a day and I wanted to just kill myself. That’s too much writing. It took me a long time, but I figured out I can only write between 500 and 1500 words a day. My advice is to find your own process. Look at others to get a blueprint, maybe, but make your own.

And lastly, there’s no such thing as failed writing. Every page you write is just a mile on the odometer until you get to where you’re going. None of it is ever lost.

Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, is the author of the national bestselling and critically acclaimed story collection Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, 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. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.

Purchase Fire Exit here, or anywhere books are sold.