Morgan Talty on Rejecting “Exoticized Foreknowledge”
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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Today, Morgan Talty live-comments on his own Goodreads review, then discusses his debut novel, Fire Exit, as well as why he enjoys interacting with his online reviewers, the expectations people bring to indigenous fiction, being an objective reader of his own work, building emotion around an idea, balancing darkness with tenderness, Alice Munro, writing from the perspective of a white man, and more!
From the episode:
Morgan Talty: So many people who go to Native literature, or any type of literature by minorities, who are looking to read some indigenous fiction, they go to the page with, perhaps, some expectations about what it should be based off of what they’ve grown up thinking. If you go to Google, and you type in Native Americans, you get pictures of Western Plains Natives dressed in regalia, as if that’s Native people, and then like Deb Haaland. One scholar called it “exoticized foreknowledge.” We go to the page expecting to see something we think is true. We expect to see a performative Native, because indigenous people have had to sell themselves and perform for a long time to survive.
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Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. His debut short story collection, Night of the Living Rez, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the New England Book Award, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Honor, and was a Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Prize, and The Story Prize. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Granta, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. 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. He lives in Levant, Maine.
