And I was like, what if one of the children’s relationship is completely different than the other’s?” “You read a book about a family and you get the typical dynamics of the mother, the father, the children, and how those relationships work. “They have a super complicated relationship,” Talty said. Perhaps the most contentious relationship in the book is between Mom and Paige, David’s mother whom he loves and his older sister whom he also loves, who David likens to his “mother’s sister” rather than her child, and who periodically erupt into violent arguments, Paige tearfully telling Mom, “He’s going to grow up to hate you too,” or Mom harshly blaming Paige for anything her daughter does which she perceives as slightly wrong. Talty’s characters hurt and help each other in equal measure, sometimes both, whether it is David’s mother’s boyfriend Frick curing the house they inhabit from restless, ghostly spirits but making David and his older sister uncomfortable after he moves in, or David cutting his friend Fellis’ long hair out of frozen ice after failing to buy a gram of weed. This book talks about how to love people better, how to care for them better, and how to deal with difficult people and not give up on them.” I just feel like we can’t give up on each other, because the moment we do that is the moment we stop being human. ![]() “I also don’t think others in my life would be without my never abandoning them. “I don’t think I would be where I am today without people being selfless,” Talty said, crediting his own community for paving the way to his growth as a person, and success as a writer. ![]() The community is not perfect, but they are united because, as Talty says: “All they have is each other.” Talty’s stories push the boundaries of what’s real and not real, relenting to the spontaneity and imagination inherent to fiction, while still drawing on the realism of families, identity, and the constant, abiding presence and commitment to the community to which his Penobscot characters belong, a lifelong community that spans childhood to adulthood for its members, and which encompasses different generations, capturing the essence and permanence of what it means to belong to a collective, but not necessarily at the expense of the individual self. “And then I started to move into fiction and fell in love with it.” “Eventually, I got to this point where I was like, ‘Oh, it would be cool if this could happen’,” Talty said. Talty initially started writing what would become Night of the Living Rez when he was 25, working on standalone nonfiction stories channeling his own life and experiences, particularly his relationships with his friends and family. David is a patient, mellow character, saying a lot by subtly saying very little at all in the first-person stories, and who adopts a fly-on-the-wall utility as he bears witness to the trauma, tragedy, laughter and everyday happenstances in his community. The short stories in the collection are filtered through David’s perspective, from when he is a boy playing with action-figures to a young man living in the nearby city off the rez with his white girlfriend in an apartment. Night of the Living Rez is Talty’s debut of fiction, following the lives of people in the Penobscot nation, a federally-recognized tribe of more than 2000 members in Maine, and whose traditional land stretches to Quebec and eastern Canada.
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