Tommy Orange: ‘I’m trying to bring a level of humanity to addiction. It’s not as stigmatized as it used to be, but it hasn’t fully been humanized.’
A Q&A with the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of Wandering Stars and There, There
By Shelbi Polk
Tommy Orange photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
When Tommy Orange decided to write a sequel to his award-winning novel, There, There (2019, Vintage, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), he began by jumping back in time. Wandering Stars opens in the 19th century, following Jude Star, an ancestor of several of the characters in There, There, as he escapes from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and survives incarceration in a prison camp in Florida. We follow Star’s journey and that of his son, and then finally meet his granddaughter, Opal Viola Bear Shield, before we leap ahead (or back) to 2018 and catch up again with the Bear Shield/Red Feather family we met in There, There.
The genealogical context and abrupt shift from one history to the present day underscores the immediacy of the family’s long struggle with both systemic oppression and addiction. Readers have been looking forward to seeing how Orange would follow the breakout success of his debut, and his latest effort did not disappoint.
High Country News’s Shelbi Polk reached out to Orange as his workday was wrapping up in California to talk about historical fiction, how writing about Oakland (an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange was born and raised in Oakland, CA) affected his relationship with the city, and the still-necessary work of destigmatizing addiction through literature.
Wandering Stars continues the story of There, There, but first you jump back several generations. Why did it feel important to write that context?
TO: It wasn’t planned that way. I started this book a few months before There, There came out, and at first it was a straightforward sequel. I was writing the book for almost a year, and then I was invited to Sweden for the translation of There, There. While I was there, I was invited to a museum where basically they were like, “We have some of your people’s stuff. Do you want to see it?” There’s this awkward tour of like, “We know we’re not supposed to have it. We’re trying to figure it out.” I think the museum world is going through a reckoning. While I was there, I saw this newspaper clipping, and it had Southern Cheyenne in Florida in 1875. I never knew about us being in Florida for any reason, so I fell down this rabbit hole. I was anti-historical fiction — for myself, not other people — because Native people have been depicted so often only historically. In There, There, I was leaning into contemporary stuff pretty hard, and I basically planned on doing the same thing for Wandering Stars. But doing research for this book, I realized that basically Marion Prison Castle, where half the prisoners were Southern Cheyenne, was the blueprint for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. I found a list of the names of the prisoners, and one of them was Star and one of them was Bear Shield. So I knew immediately that I was going to tie this together somehow. It took a long time to make that happen, and I feel like it worked.
It was such a good reminder of how close that history is. A couple generations back is really not very long ago. What was writing your second book like compared to writing the first one?
TO: Well, the first one, I won’t say that it came effortlessly because writing is just hard. But it came from a much different place. The success of There, There had nothing to do with the writing of There, There. It was an aftereffect. So, in the writing space, I didn’t have anybody in the room with me. There wasn’t an audience. Nobody that I knew even really knew that I wrote; I was doing nonprofit work, and a couple of people in my inner circle knew. Writing the first half was that, and then the second half was in the MFA. (Ed. Note: Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.) So There, There came very much out of passion for this absence of a narrative about contemporary Native people and our relationship to cities.
It was much different this time around. In writing Wandering Stars, there were a lot of outside things that just were not present for There, There. So, like I said, writing is already hard. And then you have all these pressures around, like the sophomore effort being jinxed and sequels never really measuring up to the originals — a lot of things working against me. So, it was a much harder book to write, but I feel like I learned a lot about the process. And I sold my third book at the end of last year. It’s not related to this universe, and I’m looking forward to not taking another six years to write it.
How has writing about Oakland, and becoming known for speaking about the Native experience in Oakland, affected your relationship to the city?
TO: Well, in a few crazy ways. First off, I think I had to leave Oakland to finish writing about it, which didn’t really happen by choice. My wife and I lost our jobs in 2014 because of a sudden tribal leadership change, and we couldn’t afford Oakland. I was just starting the MFA, and we moved out into the country, in the mountains where she grew up. That’s where I wrote the second half of There, There. And we were trying to move back for a long time but couldn’t afford it, even after the success of the book. Because Oakland is like that. And then I resold the TV rights two years ago, and that allowed us to be able to move back. And I think a couple months after I was back, I was invited by the mayor and was given a key to the city, which was pretty crazy. Then, I was acknowledged more recently at the Chamber of Commerce. So, I feel really embraced by Oakland. And the Native community in Oakland — I already had good relationships with a lot of the leaders of the organizations here and worked with them before, so that part wasn’t a new piece.
My favorite passage from this novel came near the end. “Selfish is the most likely thing to become if you’ve been abandoned. Being abandoned means you don’t think anyone else is really there for you when it comes down to it.” This section felt like a bit of a thesis. Can you dig into that quote for me?
TO: Yeah, Lony kind of emerged as this pure, innocent, dark force in the novel. He tries to be at the hub of the love he thinks should hold the family together by pretty extreme means. And the family sort of fails him. I really wanted to get a child’s perspective of the chaos that can happen around addiction and trauma because I think the voices of kids, they’re lost. They hear, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” from adults who act very selfishly and silence the kids, who have very valid feelings about reality and the stuff that happens to them. I wanted Lony to have this moment to voice his perspective. The prologue begins within the children, and, obviously, the boarding schools were the punishment to all Native people, by coercing, sometimes forcing, Indian children to be there. The “kill the Indian, save the man” campaign was aimed at them. So, it felt important for the whole novel to voice that feeling.
Every step in and out of addiction in this book made perfect sense. None of it was inevitable, but it was all understandable — the tricky balance of trying to change your own behavior without losing the context of the systemic failures that make it so hard to break these cycles.
TO: I appreciate that. I appreciate you seeing that because, you know, I’m trying to bring a level of humanity to addiction. It’s not as stigmatized as it used to be, but it hasn’t fully been humanized. There’s still it’s still kind of a binary of, like, you’re in recovery, you’re sober, then you’re good. And it’s sort of a moral failing for everyone that’s still caught up in it. But there’s so many different figures around the black holes of addiction that sort of get sucked into it. And there are voices that need to tell stories about that too. If what I’m doing can help people who are going through it, it feels worth all of the heartache that goes into the writing.
SHELBI POLK is a journalist, copy writer and storyteller based in North Carolina.
Republished by permission of Deep Roots Media Partner High Country News (hcn.org), where it appeared on May 2, 2024.
