Today we’re talking to Carrie R. Moore, author of One Story Issue #283, “Naturale” and the short story collection Make Your Way Home (Tin House).

The eleven stories in Make Your Way Home are set throughout the American South and explore how history intertwines with the present. The characters grapple with infidelity, family curses, grief, and first loves, all while reckoning with hometowns that seem to betray them simply because they are Black and alive. Although the betrayals constantly seek their compliance and attention, these tenacious characters ground themselves in the comforts of home: family, love, and the fact that everything, for better or worse, is constantly changing. With insightful prose, Moore’s collection asks the questions: where is home, why have I abandoned it, in what ways has it both consoled and abandoned me, and, when I inevitably return, how will it welcome me?

—Sara Bastian

Sara Bastian: Where were you when you found out Make Your Way Home was going to be published? How did you celebrate?

Carrie R. Moore: In truth, I was at home, recovering from surgery. My husband was taking care of me as I toddled around the house, and when I wandered into my study, there was an email from my agent, saying that Tin House wanted to speak with me. I shouted and he came running in, thinking I was hurt. I’d often been told story collections didn’t sell, so in a way, someone caring about my work felt like a celebration in itself.

SB: In the galley letter for Make Your Way Home, you state that “[p]lace allows history to accumulate layer by layer, every story written atop another, the ink showing through.” The collection lives, ultimately, in the American South—even if some characters leave it behind. How did you decide which towns and cities were best to set these stories and characters in? And were there any towns or cities that you wanted to spotlight in the collection that simply didn’t make it?

CRM: The South is so large, so full of various histories. The only way I could attempt what I did was to make each story’s setting speak to some emotional reality already affecting the characters. For instance, Twyla in “Cottonmouths” is determined to lay her own path as a young mother, which felt imagistically linked to the construction of coastal railroads in Southern Florida. Similarly, Gideon in “The Happy Land” yearns to possess all of his joys, pleasures, and identities in the home that made him; he desires utopia, which brushes against the history of the Kingdom of the Happy Land in western North Carolina. Certainly, there are cities, towns, and states that don’t get their own stories in my little book. There’s also much more to say about the places that are included. I could’ve written an entire collection about Louisville, New Orleans, or St. Simons alone.

SB: In an interview with Hayden Dunbar for The Sewanee Review, you discuss the characters Grace and Natalie in “Surfacing” overlapping/mirroring one another, both looking to reclaim their bodies and freedom during a summer on the Georgia coast. Overlapping narratives are present throughout the collection—Ever and Leela in “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” siblings hoping for enduring love despite family history; Twyla and her mother in “Cottonmouths,” sharing pregnancies and fears; Claire, her mother, and Sofia reckoning with growths in their uteri and a health care system that seems intent on disregarding them in “How Does Your Garden Grow?” And yet there are stories like “Gather Here Again” and “In the Swirl” where the protagonists’ inner conflicts seem entirely their own, despite the universality of these conflicts. How early on in the writing process were you able to decide how much a character’s story would overlap with another’s?

CRM: As a Black woman writer, I’m keenly aware of how some readers treat characters solely like symbolic representations of “the Black community,” despite how multidimensional we are as a people. This awareness that I have might even be called a fear, since I can’t seem to shake it when I’m writing. The last thing that I want is for somebody to view Black people as a monolith—or to use my characters to “learn something about race,” instead of feeling their individual experiences as human beings.

One workaround I’ve developed is to contrast Black characters with one another, so that their behaviors can’t be defined by race alone. Ever and Leela share the same family curse, yet Ever resists the myth that Leela believes in wholeheartedly. Twyla and her mother are both pregnant, but Twyla believes in a more unconventional, matriarchal family structure while her mother pushes her to find a father for her child.

My insistence on making my characters foils for one another appears in “Gather Here Again” and “In the Swirl” too. Damonia and her daughter Stella have conflicting ideas about what to tell the children about white supremacist violence. The protagonist in “In the Swirl” believes deeply in emotional vulnerability; her coworkers do not.

I always try to make my characters overlap in some areas, in order to call attention to the places where they differ.

SB: Make Your Way Home took over a decade to come together, and I can understand why. You were intent on understanding the histories of these different places. That understanding then allowed you to weave the impact of the past throughout your characters’ journeys. Which story’s research process was the most time consuming? And how did you decide what to bring to the surface and what to keep humming in the background?

CRM: It may be surprising, but the research phase is the easiest place to linger. I love learning about different places and histories, and I often use that process as a way of delaying the work of getting the story down, of letting it take shape. This is especially true of histories that have become more publicly available with the passage of time. For instance, compared to when I first began writing, there’s more accessible information about the Kingdom of the Happy Land in North Carolina and the history of Black railroad workers in Florida. Sometimes, my stories have to wait for what they need, and I could keep seeking more knowledge forever.

Still, the most time-consuming work is figuring out how to integrate painful histories into the lives of my characters. Always, I want these fictional people of mine to transcend limitations. If I have to write a difficult scene—whether it features gun violence, child abuse, or religious homophobia—I make sure there’s intimacy and warmth elsewhere in the story. The darker moments have to be set at a lower volume than the brighter ones. “When We Go, We Go Downstream” has passages of humor and pillow talk, despite how it details punishments for runaway enslaved persons. “In the Swirl” is a summer romance, despite its connections to segregationist pool closures in Birmingham. My hope is that this approach makes my characters feel bigger than the conflicts they face. They aren’t vehicles for historical or contemporary violence; they have a full spectrum of experiences.

SB: The final story, “Till It and Keep It,” is set in the future, which surprised me. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the way the South is and will continue to be impacted by climate change and the political climate. What was the process of creating that world? What was the first image that came to you?

CRM: The first image that came to me was Brie holding up a white towel to shield her sister, Harper, as she bathes outside. Here were these two women in a green, idyllic landscape, who nevertheless felt in danger, who needed to protect their bodies in more ways than one. I knew it was the future, though the image in my head resembled a more agrarian past. I kept thinking about climate change and destructive technologies, how we can’t carry on like this without moving toward a future that has fewer resources than what we currently possess.

The trick was to create a world that didn’t feel hopeless or despondently apocalyptic. I went through several drafts, always trying to bring back more light, more focus on the pleasures these characters possess in the present. Yes, the electricity is unstable, but Brie can savor a peach. Yes, these two sisters aren’t sure where they’ll end up, but they can dance at a harvest party. To weave in the story’s grimmer events, I used references to what some people living today have been blessed to survive—such as Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted the world of the story to be recognizably frightening, yet full of what we’ve been forced to respond to.

SB: Many of these characters are grieving—not just people lost by death, but by distance. How do the undertones of grief across the collection coincide with your chosen epigraph—a quote from Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped—and the overall theme of searching for and reckoning with home?’

CRM: My collection is a love letter to the Black South. This is at the core of every story, whether my characters are leaving their respective states or trying their best to stay, despite the harms they’ve experienced at home. There’s grief in leaving and there’s grief in remaining; either way, the South has worked its roots into you and there’s no extracting them. Ward articulates this feeling so beautifully in those lines from Men We Reaped.

SB: Lastly, what are you most looking forward to at the One Story ball?

CRM: I can’t wait to dance! So much of this book is serious, and now it’s time to be silly and uninhibited!

Sara (sah-ruh) Bastian is a Bahamian writer based in Chicago. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami. Her work has been featured in PREE, The Rumpus, and Unstitching Silence (Peekash Press, 2025).