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Stories
by Carrie R. Moore
Book Reviewed by:A debut collection of stories set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories. How can you love where you come from, even when home doesn't love you back?
In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life, despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess, who falls for a new church member, wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate.
Artfully and precisely drawn, and steeped in place and history as it explores themes of belonging, inheritance, and deep intimacy, Carrie R. Moore's debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present―and how our present choices will echo for years to come.
When We Go, We Go Downstream
In the restaurant's fading light, he tells the story to his woman. Warily, the way his father told it to him:
There once lived a man named Elijah. A man who, among many other things—blacksmith, singer, lover of russet pears—had been born a slave. In those days, Texas had yet again changed its mind about what it was. It had belonged to Mexico, then became its own fearsome land, then joined Polk's America, then splintered off with the rest of the rebellious South. Texas dreamed of cotton and the hands to pick it. Elijah dreamed of Evaline, whom his master forbade him to call wife.
On that plantation by the Brazos River, they met by night, Elijah approaching the women's cabin and unfolding the back of his throat to announce his arrival. Evaline heard the low, guttural trill of a nightjar and came out to meet him. They must've talked in that starry darkness. Perhaps she confessed that on the nights he did not come, she heard hundreds of such birds in ...
New 5 Under 35
The National Book Foundation has revealed their list of 5 authors under 35 whose debut novels "leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape." I haven't heard of any of these writers, but they're ones to watch. https://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm/author_number/x17909/megan-kam...
-kim.kovacs
Make Your Way Home is a collection of eleven short stories written by Carrie R. Moore that illuminate southern settings and family bonds. It is a passionate and lyrical thesis of the deep connection black Americans have to southern land and community. And the granular details that can unravel those ties...What the collection does not do, to its credit, is amplify the white gaze. Race as a social construct with institutional legacies is implied but rarely mentioned. This is a collection about the southern places of black attachment and the identities of those who live there. Most of the stories are lengthy, hovering near the thirty-page mark, which benefits the reader by allowing the characters to breathe and create a presence off the page. Moore's titles are poetic and enticing. "When We Go Downstream." "All Skin Is Clothing." "In the Swirl." "Happy Land." "How Does Your Garden Grow?" Befitting the craft of short story writing, Moore isn't interested in happy endings and tying a sweet bow but rather interior landscapes...continued
Full Review
(1214 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Carrie R. Moore's arresting Southern stories pulse with the kind of intimacy, beauty, and intensity that the best art conjures. Her characters and their voices linger and arouse, long after their final moments on the page. Make Your Way Home is a deeply satisfying, glorious debut. Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book
Each story in Carrie R. Moore's Make Your Way Home is remarkable, gorgeously written, complicated, deep, continually surprising―and each a page turner, too, propulsive and heartbreaking in all directions. Her characters are so real you come to know them, body and soul. Make Your Way Home is a collection that is much more than the considerable sum of its beautiful parts. It is a book that has the force of life itself, all its hurts and love and betrayal, the little intimacies, terrible mistakes, reconciliations, moments of transcendence, the ways we can and cannot change. It is an astonishing debut. Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
Carrie R. Moore's stories are gorgeous, resonant, and startling. It's rare for a new writer to have such profound emotional wisdom; in Make Your Way Home, a single small ripple in a character's interior life can build strength to become a huge wave that crashes over them. What a thrilling new talent, and what a beautiful collection of short stories.On the slave ship The York, nearing St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast, Igbos and other West Africans were below deck and chained to one another like property. They were to be auctioned off once they reached land. The Igbos were from the region we now know as Nigeria but that in the early 1800s was a series of independent states, kingdoms, and empires. They were resistant to slavery. Their three-month voyage from West Africa to St. Simons Island had been excruciating.
Somehow, about 75 Igbo slaves took control of the ship and drowned their enslavers. The ship was grounded in Dunbar Creek. The Igbos' captors' deaths only solved one problem. Traders were on shore waiting to take them to slave markets. That's when the Igbos started ...
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