Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West

Belgrade-born Téa Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), set against the landscape of the former Yugoslavia, blended myth, village life, wartime strife and deep grandfather-granddaughter love into a marvel that won her the Orange Prize for Fiction at the age of twenty-five. Her follow-up, Inland (2019), brought her magic touch to parallel tales of two characters adrift in the ghostly desert of frontier-era Arizona where it’s “hard to distinguish waking from dreaming.” The Morningside (2024) imagines a young eleven-year-old and her mother, displaced by war “Back Home,” living in a mostly empty thirty-three-story apartment building in a flood-ravaged Island City, trying to find a way forward.

Her new novel reinvents the Western crime novel, wrapping together stories from 2024, 2003 and 1902, with characters ping-ponging off each other, surprises at every turn.

The opening lines to Sunrise are gripping:

Now you see her. From above, she’s a dark speck against darker water. Head, shoulders, occasional hands. Below, her legs are churning , flashes in the green. She’s fighting the chaos of the moment, the sense that she’s been teleported into this cold horror. For now, she’s still screaming. Grabbing at empty space as her clothes continue to swell with water. Her brain is convinced her feet will eventually find ground. They won’t—she’s almost half a mile from land, and the lake, where she’s fallen, is over four hundred feet deep. In a minute or two she’ll realize the broad strokes of all this and slow her thrashing.

How complicated was it to begin a novel with a woman falling out of a plane into a lake? I asked Obreht.

“I thought about the opening for months before I ever sat down to attempt it (a rarity for me, as I normally need to see sentences, even the worst possible version of them, before I can start shaping a story),” she explained.

No matter how long I waited, I was never able to see the details that had led up to the accident. Only the aftermath was clear to me: a young woman, cold and alone, fighting to stay afloat in the moments immediately after the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to her. I did want the book to start with the plane crash, but it was incredibly uncomfortable to write without knowing anything about Nina, or what she was doing there, or who was flying the plane—to feel, essentially, as the reader would, coming in completely cold to this scene. Once I accepted this, however, it was very freeing. The rest of the book became about Nina living up to the mandate of having survived that initial horror.

Jane Ciabattari: What inspired this novel?

Téa Obreht: About ten years ago, in the grip of an obsession with western dime novels, I wrote the first few drafts of a book about an aging gunslinger grappling with remorse about a falling-out with a man he had known since youth. In those first few drafts, Anton Vargas was very much the man he is in Sunrise: vainglorious, self-centered, and defensive about the role he has played in pushing the expanding American empire westward. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t managing to finish his story, and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t managing to just set it aside for good.

I realized that these three nagging, unfinished pieces all evoked the same feeling in me when I thought about them, and that this probably meant that they were trying to tell the same story.

In the meantime, I wrote Inland. I started what I thought would be a novella about a young woman who gets shipwrecked on a tropical island and finds a corpse with an unfinished manuscript beside it. I wrote The Morningside. I started what I thought was a short story about a young historical reenactor who gets embroiled in a terrible incident in a Wyoming bar. And then, one afternoon, on a flight home to Wyoming, I realized that these three nagging, unfinished pieces all evoked the same feeling in me when I thought about them, and that this probably meant that they were trying to tell the same story.

JC: How did you arrive at the title—the location around which these narratives circle? There is a Sunrise, Wyoming. Is this based on that real ghost town?

TO: The story of how this book came to be called Sunrise goes back to that plane ride during which I realized the story of Nina, Anton Vargas, and Coll were part of the same whole. I was on my way home from Vermont via Chicago, where I had just had a staggering revelation at the airport bookstore. Quite casually, I had picked up a bestseller that everyone I knew was reading, opened it, and realized that the novel I had been working on matched its premise exactly. It’s hard to describe the utter panic and despair of that moment. I bought some magazines, got on the next flight, tried to calm myself down.

There was a whole monologue: it’s not so bad, it’s not such a big deal to put a book away, you’ve been through worse, etc. I was watching the flight tracker and feeling very sorry for myself, sitting there in the red evening light, wondering where I would reroute my energy now that there was no going back to the book I’d been working on for a year. I thought of Vargas. I thought of Coll. I thought of Nina. And at the moment they all lit up in my mind in the same shade of purple, the in-flight tracker hit me with trivia for an eastern Wyoming point of interest, a ghost town called “Sunrise.” So, yes—there is a real Sunrise in Wyoming, and it is a real ghost town, but the town in this book is named “Sunrise” in honor of that moment of revelation more than anything else. It’s much closer in appearance and geography to the ghost town of South Pass, which I began visiting back in 2015, when I was first writing the story of Anton Vargas.

JC: You unwind multiple mysteries in this novel, across several generations. There’s this “Incident at Horseshoe Lake in August 2024”—the plane accident that which brings Nina to Sunrise (and the question of why Ben pushed her out of the plane, brought up in your early pages). There’s the story of a “noble gunslinger” named Anton Vargas, told in two installments—a “heroic” 1882 classic Western version and a 1902 more nuanced, less “heroic” draft by a 2003 author. And a narrative about Coll, the leader of the 2003 annual Sunrise reenactment, who finds himself entangled in an unsavory bar incident and pursued by an ambitious wannabe author of that draft for details about Sunrise. How did you track all these narratives?

TO: I have to admit that it was the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. It was helpful to be armed with the hard-earned certainty that these three stories belonged together, and that they were dependent on each other for both meaning and existence. That said, from a practical standpoint, I had to approach the first few drafts as if I was writing three separate books so that the characters could grow, and so that the style and prose of each section could develop on its own. By the third draft, I was able to work on them simultaneously, and it was thrilling to see how knowledge and detail from one storyline would inform and shape the other two, and how they were all ultimately fitting together.

JC: One element of tension in your opening is Nina’s initial dependence upon her cellphone. She and her fiancée Ben have a reservation at the Black Horse restaurant in Moraine, Wyoming, their destination during a flight from Hollis, South Dakota in a Cessna owned by Jones, Ben’s former Montana Parks Department bunkmate who will be meeting them there. She expects Jones to realize they’re missing, and get them help. But that doesn’t happen. At first she can’t find a signal. She sees texts on her phone from her mother and a restaurant confirmation, but her return messages won’t send. She gets a call from the restaurant, but they can’t hear her plea for help and hang up. And, of course, the power is going to go soon. What was your process for sorting through this set of modern-day frustrations?

TO: A lot of what happens to Nina in those first few days after the plane crash is a projection of my terrors regarding my own ignorance and overdependence on technology. I’ve lived in Wyoming for years, but I wouldn’t call myself an outdoorsperson, and every time I head out for a hike, I am acutely aware of only being prepared for the best version of a worst-case scenario. Yes, I bring bear spray and extra water and snacks and layers and a first aid kit. But whenever that little satellite graphic appears on my phones screen, and I realize that I probably wouldn’t be able to search HOW MAKE FIRE? or HOW MAKE TOURNIQUET? if I really needed to, the dread gets very real. That dread was at the front of my mind when I started devising obstacles for Nina to show her the precariousness of her situation. One of the habits I’ve managed to shed over my years as a writer is the impulse to spare my characters—from harm, from terrible decisions, from their own insecurities and worst tendencies. So with Nina, it was largely a matter of committing to the fact that she wasn’t going to catch many breaks.

JC: Nina makes various mistakes in the hours and days during which she is trying to stay alive with minimal food (protein bars she rations to one a day, some trail mix and water). Is this because she’s a city girl, raised in Queens, juggling graduate school and working as a nanny on the Upper West Side, with no knowledge of life in the mountains and woods? Or is it an intrinsic part of her personality?

TO: This is such an interesting question. I think it’s a little of both. Nina is a city girl, through and through. She’s had very little occasion, in her life, to consider wilderness survival. That said, she has been a different kind of survivor, as the reader I hope will discover, and her skills lie elsewhere: she’s an immigrant taking care of her economically vulnerable mother, and she herself suffers from anxiety and OCD, and these are the adversities she has adapted to endure. Her relationship with her boyfriend Ben (who happens to be an avid outdoorsman) has led her to believe certain things about herself, and has shaped her inner voice. A huge part of her journey is overcoming the challenge of that inner voice, and discovering the parts of herself that could help her walk out of Sunrise alive.

JC: Nina is relieved after walking many miles to find a town, expecting it to be her salvation, until she discovers it’s deserted, and can’t offer much in the way of sustenance. She finds a sleeping place in a stable, and beneath a trapdoor discovers a satchel crammed with papers-research files, newspapers dating back to 1872, a book, a manuscript, and a corpse, which freaks her out. She calms herself down, retrieves a jacket from the corpse (the label is “property of LT Hawley”) and ultimately begins reading the “old-timey” book in the satchel, An Incident at Greyrock, which introduces Anton Vargas and his crew (Fred Kipley and Doctor Maclean), who save Sadie during a robbery at a snowed-in telegraph station. Nina is not impressed (“just her luck that the only reading material in this godforsaken place is the kind of ancient dreck that forces you to get through fifteen pages of general wilderness description before a human being even makes it onto the page”). What sort of research was required for this scene, which sets up the rest of the novel?

I’m fascinated with the Western as a genre, as theatre, as propaganda, as a vehicle of nationalism.

TO: I did two very different kinds of research for this novel. The first kind was a lot of on-the-ground sensory immersion, especially for Nina’s sections. Because she’s not an outdoorsperson, and because she struggles to interpret a lot of what she encounters in the wilderness, I spent a good deal of time standing around ghost towns and abandoned homesteads with limited supplies and inappropriate gear, asking myself: how does this feel? What do you see? What do you smell? What would it be like to realize too late that the storm over there is about to drench you? How hungry would you have to be to take a chance on those berries? If you were cold, tired, and terrified, would you have the sense not to start a fire in that area there and accidentally torch this whole place? And the other kind of research—the polar opposite of the first—was the obsessive reading of dime novels for the backstory and legend of Anton Vargas.

I’m fascinated with the Western as a genre, as theatre, as propaganda, as a vehicle of nationalism. There’s a lot to unpack in the dime novel origins of the Western, as well as the dime novel to Wild West show pipeline, which was instrumental in creating global legends out of folk heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody. Under all that pomp and fanfare, there’s such a particular seedy, gaudy, garishness to these spectacles of white frontier heroism, which often had people dressing up as themselves to reenact murders and gunfights and even atrocities against Indigenous people. I wanted to capture the very specific grotesquerie of this as accurately as possible without letting Vargas off the hook for the fact that this is an aspect of his youth for which he is, despite everything he knows, extremely nostalgic.

JC: Your second section is LT Hawley’s September 2003 novel manuscript, “Sunrise.” It’s a sequel to The Incident at Greyrock, describing Anton Vargas’s return to Sunrise twenty years later. (And another mystery: How did Hawley end up dead?) All tucked carefully into your novel called Sunrise. How did that happen?

TO: I’ve been taken with the notion of a book within a book for as long as I can remember, and I was so thrilled to realize that the story of Anton Vargas, this thing I’d been working on for more than a decade, was failing to stand on its own because it didn’t have the benefit of intertextuality. Vargas’s story had to exist as an actual book within the novel, with the possibility of impacting other characters in multiple ways. For Coll, the official account of Vargas’s life is a foundational myth. For LT Hawley, the revisionist version is a source of identity and fulfillment. For Nina, the actual copy of LT Hawley’s manuscript is a literal lifeline.

JC: The possibility that Nina could be eaten by a bear, or wolves, is omnipresent. At one point she witnesses a pack of wolves “swarming” a bull elk. Your descriptions of the landscape, the thunderstorms, the changing leaves of the trees as fall approaches, are rich with detail. How do you know so much about Wyoming’s wilderness?

TO: I visited Wyoming for years before eventually moving there with my family, drawn by its natural beauty, as millions of people are every year. It’s been my privilege to learn, from scholars and thinkers and writers far more deeply rooted than myself in the American west, about its realities and relentless contradictions. For Sunrise, I found myself erring on the side of restraint more often than not, because so much of the knowledge that I do have couldn’t be conveyed through Nina’s perspective. She doesn’t know anything about bears, or the storied conflict between ranchers and land conservationists, or the targeted persecutions of the Northern Cheyenne people after America’s historic defeat at the Little Bighorn. Her interactions with the landscape are sensory and in the moment. Love of the land and the brutal history of the region both had to come from Vargas and Coll’s sections (a different kind of challenge, because they themselves are operating under the veil of myth, and are limited in their respective desires to look beyond it). This leaves at least part of the book in the reader’s hands, subject to the reader’s own knowledge, whether folkloric, historical, or natural.

JC: How did your ending evolve?

TO: Early on, it became clear to me that the book’s structure was going to be a kind of descent into the heart of the story, and then an ascent back out again, and that this inherently meant that the reader was going to end up with more information than any of the characters had until the final pages. It was the first time I’ve written a book without knowing ahead of time what the ending would be. I wrote into and through it when I reached it, so what happens to Nina in those final pages was just as surprising for me as I hope it will be for the reader. It remained pretty much unchanged as the drafts evolved around it, which I took to be a good sign.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

TO: I’m in the very early stages of my next novel, which I’m squirrely to say much about, save that, for now, it seems to want to follow three sisters as they navigate the death of their famous mother, and attempt to fulfill her final wishes. While I wait for the details of it to come into focus, I’m working on a few short stories, which I’ve finally moved to the front burner after many years of scribbles and notes.

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