![]() ![]() “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. It wasn’t until later that I was like, okay, how do I make this into a piece of fiction?” And when I went home that day, I wrote everything from the beginning to when she had the seizure. And when I was there this one time, she had a seizure and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. “I would go and visit her, and she was always asking for cigarettes, so I’d bring her cigarettes. “My mom suffered from depression her whole life, and would go to crisis stabilization units to get better,” Talty, a 31-year-old writer based in Maine, shared to the Observer, describing the real-world event that inspired the story.
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