[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. Tommy Orange fell in love with reading after college when he started working at a local bookstore. That's also when he got obsessive, his words about writing. It helped him lay the groundwork for his first novel There There. Published in 2018, Orange's first novel features a cast of indigenous characters who convene at a local powwow. The book skyrocketed him to literary fame, earning him the American Book Award in 2019, and that same year, he was also a finalist for the Pulitzer.

His follow-up is Wandering Stars. Orange calls it part sequel, part prequel. This much-anticipated novel brings readers through one Cheyenne family's story across several generations. We meet characters like Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, who makes a monumental decision, which I won't spoil for you. We also meet Orvil Red Feather, his descendant. He's a young man in modern-day Oakland who survived a shooting at a powwow which was featured in the first novel.

In this story, characters grapple with pain, addiction, loss, and Tommy Orange captures their journey with the same honesty, lyricism, and wit that readers fell in love with the first time. Tommy's going to be speaking with Roxane Gay at the Union Square Barnes & Nobles tonight at 6:00 PM. The New York Times called Wandering Stars a pure, soaring beauty, and with us right now to talk about it is Mr. Tommy Orange. Welcome to the show.

Tommy Orange: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Wandering Stars, it's part prequel, part sequel to your first book There There. We meet characters again, like Orvil Red Feather in Modern Day Oakland. When did you know you wanted to continue Orvil's story?

Tommy Orange: A few months before There There came out, so I finished There There not thinking it was going to go on, and then a few months before it came out got the title in a single moment. The song Wandering Star by Portishead was playing where I was, and for some reason, I knew in that moment that I was going to write the sequel and it was going to be called Wandering Stars.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow. Why did you decide to trace Orvil Red Feather's family history that way, all the way back to the 1800s? What was that process for you?

Tommy Orange: At first, I was writing a straightforward sequel, and the family and other characters were what I was writing into. I was at a museum in Sweden for the translation of There There into Swedish, and I stumbled into this history that we go into. I didn't even know at that time how it was going to connect to a sequel or to the Red Feather family.

In 1875 to 1878, there were these prisoners of war kept at this prison castle called Fort Marion. I found out that that was basically the blueprint for the Indian boarding school system that ended up being started a year after in 1879. I was doing research about this period and about the prisoners of war there, half of which were Southern Cheyenne, and that's my tribe. I had come up with this title, Wandering Stars, and was convinced of it for some reason.

Found out the prison castle was shaped like a star, also one of the prisoners there was named Star, and another woman's name was Bear Shield, which is one of the families from There There. I realized I was going to write a generational thing, and the family line would lead all the way up to the aftermath of what happens at the end of There There.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. It was going to Sweden you said you were in, and then finding that history that you didn't know existed before, right?

Tommy Orange: Yes. They wanted to show me that they had my tribe's stuff, basically. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Tommy Orange: They felt bad, but they didn't really know what to do, but they thought I might want to see it.

Kousha Navidar: How did it feel for you going to this place? That would be unexpected to find that in that place. How did that feel?

Tommy Orange: It felt weird. People overseas, they're judgmental of America and easily point at colonization like this is so something that only we did, but a lot of other people colonized a lot of other countries. [laughs] Sometimes the proof of that is sitting in a museum behind glass.

Kousha Navidar: You also mentioned the way that the school was shaped like a star. I wanted to go into the schooling a little bit because education is an interesting theme in this book. We see characters struggle with education throughout. We learn about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the first off-reservation boarding schools in the country, which you mentioned, characters like Charles and Opal Viola are indoctrinated at boarding schools and Sean Price in later chapters detests online schooling. Why did you want to explore how education shaped these characters' lives across generations?

Tommy Orange: I think a lot of people don't know about the boarding schools and how devastating it was for native people for our languages, for our culture, and this went on for decades. After 1879, these schools were probably going on still in 1979, where basically native people were taught that their ways were lesser than, and earlier than that they were punished for speaking their language.

Native people have one of the highest dropout rates currently in the country. There's a connection here between not trusting institutions and not-- there's a lot of other reasons for that dropout rate, but I knew there was some way that I could tie history to the present, and so that's I have Orvil dropping out of school. Also, just history speaking to the present in the book is something that I wanted the past part to talk to the present part.

Kousha Navidar: Speaking of the present, you're from Oakland, right?

Tommy Orange: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: What value did education have in your life growing up there?

Tommy Orange: I didn't really do well in school. I didn't even start reading, as you said in the introduction until after college, which sounds weird because college is usually [laughs] a place that you read. I went to school for sound engineering, so I was in studios and we were recording to analog and I was twisting knobs.

School, I felt like I wasn't that engaged. I also didn't really feel that seen by any teachers. I never felt like I had a favorite teacher, but we also had a lot going on at home that made it hard to excel in school.

Kousha Navidar: After college, do you remember the first book that you really got into?

Tommy Orange: There was two novels that really turned me on to fiction, Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I was reading a lot of other weird fiction, I really got into Borges and Kafka at that time, and then a little bit later, Clarice Lispecter, Robert Walser was really important to me for a while.

Kousha Navidar: Let's talk about Charles Star for a second, one of the characters in the book. He has a white mom and a Cheyenne dad. He hates his freckles and struggles to fit in both native and white spaces. I understand that you're an enrolled member of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and your mother is white. How did your own questions about identity help flesh out Charles's character?

Tommy Orange: Well, I pull from myself pretty generously for all my characters. It's weird to be writing personally about a character in the 1920s, or in the 1910s, but I write from the inside out. The interior lives of my characters is what I always start with. I'm generally pulling from stuff that's related to me, the stuff that I feel and think, or it's somehow inspired by my experience.

Kousha Navidar: Can you touch to something there right now with Charles's character that you felt came out from you?

Tommy Orange: Sure. I have freckles, [laughs] and I feel like I don't belong in either space; in native spaces and white spaces. Growing up in Oakland that can be okay because it's a very diverse place, and I grew up on a block with a bunch of bicultural kids, but sometimes being in strictly white spaces or in strictly native spaces, it can be alienating.

Kousha Navidar: Sure. Characters in your novels experience addiction to various substances like painkillers and alcohol. How did you want to approach the topic of addiction in this story that may have been a departure in your own novels or stories you've read about indigenous folks?

Tommy Orange: Yes, because you don't want to write the stereotype, especially with alcohol, there's a myth that native people have a weakness for it. It's a tricky subject to write about. It's also something that's been devastating to a lot of native families and it's been a big part of my family life, so I was writing from a very personal place.

I wanted to write about addiction in a complex way and in a compassionate way. I think sometimes it's seen as a black-and-white issue, or it's simplified, or seen as a moral failing of some kind, or you can point at something that's easy to point at that that's bad. I wanted to write with nuance about something that a lot of us experienced or have family members who experienced addiction. It's a really tough subject for a lot of people and writing about it was a way for me to think and feel about it in ways that I otherwise wouldn't have.

Kousha Navidar: One character describes addiction passing through his family and family came up. You write, "He came from addict blood. His mom's brain had been wired wrong." Is this something you've heard people say in your life?

Tommy Orange: No. No, that just came from the writing process.

Kousha Navidar: You write in the stream of consciousness style. That really gripped me in at least, like when Opal Viola speaks to her daughter Victoria telling her about her own life, and gives her advice as she navigates an abusive white family. Here's a quote that really stuck with me, "You will go back to the library to learn about the massacre, take in what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. You will understand another form of inheritance then. Feel it."

How does inheriting a massacre mean to the characters who live generations after the Sand Creek Massacre in the 1800s?

Tommy Orange: I grew up hearing one of the stories, probably the story I heard the most that my dad told was about the Sand Creek Massacre. He grew up hearing it, he heard his grandmothers telling this story. I didn't quite understand as a kid why we heard this story a lot. I thought maybe it's like, never forget because it was so devastating for our tribe, never trust the US government, essentially, but later realized it's a naming story.

It's a story about a young man who saves a baby on the day of the massacre. That's where my father got his Cheyenne name from. He was telling a naming story and I didn't realize it till later. That's also where I start the book, it's a young man running away from the Sand Creek Massacre. In a way, Orvil is running away from a shooting, and so the present is echoed, or the past is echoed in the book.

Throughout, you have people-- and I grew up feeling the weight of what that story meant. It was mostly women, children, and elders the day of. I think there's a deep distrust that it's sowed in a lot of native people and a lot of Cheyenne, but a lot of people from my tribe. There are massacres just like it that happened throughout history. It's a long war that went on against native people. The weight of it and the significance of things like it, I think I wanted to write about that across these different generations, despite being not necessarily directly descended from it.

Kousha Navidar: Right. Another element that transcended throughout the book was dreams. Several characters have intense dreams throughout the story. Opal tells her daughter to welcome family members who appear in dreams, and Orvil has intense nightmares that haunt him. How do dreams play a role in your characters' decision-making?

Tommy Orange: I don't know if they play a role in decision-making. I wanted to include dreams in the book because they're a big part of my life. Most writing teachers will tell you not to write about dreams, people will tell you not to tell you their dreams. I think it's a little crazy the way that our culture ignores dreams.

We spend a third of our lives asleep, and it's something that people cringe at or joke about how boring it is to hear somebody's dreams. It's a part of people's lives and different cultures have different views of the importance of dreams. I think native people have a different view of dreams than white America maybe. I wanted to include that in the characters' lives because it's been a big part of my life.

Kousha Navidar: That's a piece of advice that you get as a writer when you learn how to write, is don't include dreams?

Tommy Orange: I don't know that I've gotten it directly. It's just one of those pieces of writing advice that just is in the ether.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. That's interesting. Writers of color often talk about feeling boxed into writing solely about their community's experiences. How do you find a healthy middle ground where you can honor your community's history without feeling pigeonholed?

Tommy Orange: I wrote there, they're very much like the absence was so palpable of urban native stories. Was not necessarily going to write a similar book or sequel because I didn't want to-- You have to write what compels you because you have to sit with your own work for a long time and really look at it over and over to try to make it better.

This piece of history and the continuation of the story is what I was compelled to write. I wouldn't want to feel pigeonholed into writing about trauma, but I would never feel compelled enough to write at length just because I felt some pressure to represent my community. I do it out of passion. I'm working on a third book and it's different. I don't feel pressure to necessarily do what I did in the first two books.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, there are so many more Indigenous stories coming out right now. I'm thinking of Killers of the Flower Moon, I'm thinking of Reservation Dogs. What do you hope to see more of when it comes to Indigenous stories?

Tommy Orange: I think we're 574 federally recognized tribes, and almost 400 that aren't federally recognized but there's state recognition and it's almost a thousand nations of people. Diversity, historically the way we've been represented is flat. It's like a vaguely feathered image or a sad guy on a horse silhouette. We have a lot of diversity to express. The fact that we're getting a lot of these stories, I just wanted to continue.

Kousha Navidar: I want to leave you with this one quote from the book. It's from a section where Opal tells her daughter about her own history. You write, "You are from a people who survived by making their surviving mean more than surviving, who did their best to stay together." What does survival mean to you both as Tommy Orange, the writer, and as an individual?

Tommy Orange: I think it changes all the time. I think healing is about reducing harm to yourself and to others, and eventually moving toward helping yourself and others.

Kousha Navidar: When you think about how you're going to take this work into the future, what lessons did you draw from this book that really are going to stick with you?

Tommy Orange: I hope I learned a little bit more about how to write a book because I don't want to spend another six years writing the next one.

Kousha Navidar: What's your target there? What are you looking for? What's the cadence?

Tommy Orange: I'm looking to finish a draft by August 15th. I don't know how long the journey will go from there because it depends on what my editor thinks.

Kousha Navidar: Totally. Today, actually, you're talking about your current book tonight at the Union Square of Barnes & Noble tonight at 6:00 PM. How's it for you to go and interact with fans when you get to have those opportunities?

Tommy Orange: It's great. Anybody who loves books enough to go to these events, they're always very generous and kind, and it's nice to interact with people that are passionate about books.

Kousha Navidar: Tommy Orange is a novelist. His second novel, Wandering Stars is out now. Tommy Orange will be speaking, like I mentioned, with Roxane Gay at the Union Square, Barnes & Noble tonight at 6:00 PM and Wandering Stars is out right now. Tommy, thank you so much.

Tommy Orange: Thank you so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely.