Interview with IAIA Alumni, Tommy Orange, author of "Wandering Stars" by Rey M. Rodríguez

Tommy Orange is the author of the bestselling There There, a thrilling multi-generational story about the lives of urban Native Americans. Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for There There and was longlisted for the Booker Prize for his latest novel, Wandering Stars. The Washington Post in a review said, “Tommy Orange is building a body of literature that reshapes the Native American story in the United States. Book by book, he’s correcting the dearth of Indian stories even while depicting the tragic cost of that silence.”

Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and I had the pleasure of interviewing him on January 12, 2025, while he was driving home. 

Tommy Orange. Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed for the Storytellers’ Blog of Chapter House, the literary journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). We are honored to get to know you. 

I'm happy to be here for it. And I'm excited that the lit magazine has come back to life.

Let’s jump right in. How did you get into writing?

The summer after I graduated from college with a bachelor’s of science degree in sound engineering. I just needed a job. So I got a part-time job at a used bookstore and a part-time job at the Native American Health Center in Oakland. I was not a reader of any kind. When I got the job at this bookstore I wanted to read more. I was figuring out religion for myself because I was raised Christian. So I was reading a lot of psychology, spirituality, and religious texts. While working at that bookstore, I stumbled into fiction and never came out of it. And pretty soon after I realized how much I loved reading fiction. I wanted to try to write it, so I did it in private for many years. That was in 2005, and I didn't start the MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts until 2014. So nine years of doing it on my own while doing other work. Knowing all along, that I was behind. You hear writers talk about how they've known they wanted to be writers from a very young age, and that was not me, so I knew I had a lot of making up to do.

And how did you find out about IAIA?

I was teaching a digital storytelling workshop at the end of 2013 and at that point I was writing There, There. I also applied to different artists in residency programs. During one of these workshops, I found out that I got into the MacDowell Colony and a poet who graduated with an MFA overheard me share with my coworker that I got into this residency, and she was like, “Oh, my God, you have to get an MFA.” At the time, I was anti-MFA because I was reading a lot of new contemporary fiction. It was safe and boring. Then I would read the biography of the writer, and I would see that so and so came from this or that MFA. And I felt like the MFA was killing voice and it was not producing the kinds of books I like to read so I was kind of anti-MFA. And this poet knew that I couldn't afford it. I also couldn't move my whole family to whatever MFA I got into. So she googled a query in front of me. She googled “low-residency MFA.” Somehow she knew that this was a thing, and one of the first results was IAIA. So it was a random Google search from a poet who happened to overhear me share something about being accepted into an artist in residency program. And the IAIA program was super brand new. I was in the second class. So I  applied from the MacDowell Colony that next January, and I started at IAIA in the summer.

Can we step back a little bit? Some folks may not know what the MacDowell Colony is.  How did you start thinking about that?

I copied it from another Native author’s book cover letter. I saw it, and I was like they let this Native person into the program. Maybe I have a chance? I don't remember who it was. I knew that such a thing as an artist in residency existed, and I knew if I wanted to write a novel I needed time. I happened to be working a job that was flexible enough. I knew I could do something like that to put in a bunch of time to try to get the novel going but I didn't know about the MacDowell Colony, either. I found out later there was some prestige to it. But it literally came from copying somebody else's resume.

That's great. And what was your experience?

Oh, it was amazing! The timing was good because I'd done enough work on the novel that I could put in solid and purposeful work. It wasn't like I was in the wandering sort of super generative beginning part of writing the novel. I'd been writing it long enough that I could start to give it some legs and a body and figure out the structure.

How long were you there?

30 days.

So they fed you well, and you had good conversations with interesting people.

Yes, they bring you a picnic basket for lunch and they serve you breakfast and dinner in the dining hall. I was working some days for 13 hours straight.

From MacDowell then you get to IAIA. And how was that for you? 

Oh, it was incredible! I loved the whole experience. The idea of being in an MFA I didn't love, but being around all these Native students and not having to explain yourself or the context of what you're writing about was a huge gift. Besides working on There, There while I was there, one of the stories I was working on was this weird one about a guy who has an extra hand growing out of his chest. In 2019, I ended up publishing that in Zoetrope. I just found out that it's going to be made into a short film. I felt that at IAIA I had the freedom to write a weird story like that one. The main character was Native, and his friend who died in the story had a Sami background. There wasn't much they had to do to show how Indian they were. That just happened to be their background. And it was a story about their friendship and this weird guy with the hand that came out of his chest. I felt like the program was nurturing and open, and I was able to do something like that. Maybe if I was at a different MFA I would have felt more pressure to perform Indianess or something in a way that was over-explained or had to do something to prove that I was either enough for them. There's a whole schema to the way that we are perceived in the world as artists, as Native people. A lot of perceptions are brought to the table before we even start speaking. And so I just felt the environment was open. It was powerful to be around other Native writers just thinking about writing and what writing can do.

Yes, it's a very sacred place. It's so small. And it's a place where you can just be yourself so it is a very special school. So, who were some of the folks that you worked with?

I worked with Manuel Gonzalez, who's no longer there. I was there at the time, and this isn't the most popular subject to talk about, but Sherman Alexie was one of the co-founders. Everyone wanted to work with him. This was before now, and everything that's happened in the past 5 years, or whatever. I did not work with him. I worked with Pam Houston. I feel like Pam was one of my strongest writing teachers. But I benefited from my peers, the residencies, and the craft talks. The whole school and the students were really what did it for me.

Yes, it's a great package. So is There, There finished when you graduate?

No, it was my thesis, and I had a solid 120 pages. The following October, I won't go into all the details, but I ended up with an agent. She was like, “Where's the rest of it?” And I was like, give me a month. And I wrote the second half in a month.

Was it relatively easy to get an agent, or was it hard? What was that process like?

No, I had been trying in various ways. For instance, I entered a short story contest with Zoetrope. I believe it still runs with the same offer. If you get first, second, third, or an honorable mention, they will send your short story to an agent.

Interesting.

And so I entered that contest for seven years and in the seventh year, in 2013, I got an honorable mention. And nothing happened with that agent. Then, when I was at the MacDowell Colony, somebody heard me read, and they hooked me up with their agent, and that agent was very lukewarm about my work. And then, I got another person who sent my manuscript to their agent, and this one happened to be a good fit, and the timing was kind of crazy. There's no way I could say it was an easy process because it was over many, many years.

Fascinating.

By the time it happened, it felt easy because it was also related to timing. It was three days after Trump got elected and my now agent was reading my manuscript at four in the morning, with anxiety about the Muslim ban and feeling like the prologue of There, There was speaking against what was happening with Trump getting into power. So the timing had everything to do with it. I don't think I would have become agented, or I don't think the author who sent my manuscript to her agent would have done it with the same kind of urgency had Standing Rock not happened and had Trump not gotten elected. So much has to do with timing, luck, and hard work. There's no way to talk about it in a way that's simple or that it happened easily. It was a very weird series of circumstances.

Well, that is helpful, especially for students, to get a sense of the process.

It's so totally a process. And honestly, the lesson is that there is no publication or getting agented without the rejection and the silence. They are two sides of the same coin. One doesn't happen without the other. There's probably 0.1% of people who go out on their first try and get published or get an agent. The rest go through a series of submissions and a mixture of hard work, luck, and timing. And you know all these different things end up because so many people are trying to do it. And there's no way for it to happen in any other way than to just throw everything at it.

Yes, that's why we are so interested in making sure that Chapter House is the best journal it can be so that we're giving voice to Native voices that maybe would try us out as opposed to other journals. And so I appreciate your time telling your story.

Yes, I was barely published before There, There. One of the first publications I got was the Yellow Medicine Review. There are barely any Indigenous publications out there. And I think it's really important to give people that experience of being published so that they can carry that hope with them that they can keep getting published. And that's really what it takes. By the time you go to an agent, it's good to have credits that I was published in many places so that they will take your work a little bit more seriously. So it's important to keep trying to get published along the way.

That's helpful advice. There's a reluctance to submit. It is a hard process, but we're pushing folks to think about it and find their favorite authors and poets. And then try to follow their path by submitting to the journals that they are published in. Let’s get back to your work. Okay, so There, There just hits the stratosphere of literary popularity. What's the origin story of Wandering Stars?

I started writing Wandering Stars in March of 2018 and There, There came out in June of 2018. So I started writing it before I knew what was going to happen with There, There.

Interesting.

I knew the publisher was setting up the first book up nicely. But there are lots of books that flop that people don't want to flop. Anyway, I got this idea for a sequel to There, There, and I started writing into it in March of 2018, and it took six years to get it all written and edited. It went through lots of different changes. And there are probably three or four books written along the way and lots of pages that did not get used. There was a whole subplot about the filmmaker from There, There. I had Dean going with a German film crew to Germany to document the fascination Germans have with Native American culture, and how they dress up. Anyway, there were lots of different parts that didn't make the cut. But There, There ended up taking six years, and so did Wandering Stars.

Again that’s good news, for all the suffering writers who must know that they are not alone and that it's going to be a long process. Were you at any point wanting to do anything like what Kiese Laymon did in terms of having two books in one book?

I did. There was a book within the book at one point but it was not quite as creative as Kiese when you get to the middle and you flip it over. Nothing like that. But there was a book I was writing that was a book within the book, for sure.

Did you feel like it was going to be too complicated?

Yes, I think sometimes, as a reader, I like it when there's a book within a book. My editor probably was discouraging me. And eventually, I agreed with her. One of the things that I try to keep in mind is readability, and my editor is good about keeping in mind readability and wanting to not lose the reader.

Makes sense.

She cut a lot of characters from Wandering Stars that were continuing from There, There. She wanted me to focus on more of a single-family story toward readability and keeping the reader interested in this one story, and not having this fragmented piece. And so eventually, I agreed with her. I don't have any regrets. I don't. I don't wish I would have done something else. The part of working with an editor is not like taking direction and obeying. They're authoritative remarks on the side of your manuscript. At least with my editor, the suggestions are open, and I end up landing on the answers myself. She's not supplying answers. She's asking big questions and asking me to write toward readability and focusing the story. So I agree with that approach. The idea is that a writer is writing toward the reader's experience not in a way that compromises vision, but in a way that there is no book without the reader. There is no writing without the reader. I want to honor that experience. So I look at the page and structure. I want to keep in mind as much as possible what this reading experience is like for the reader. Is it making them want to keep going, or am I losing them because I have this vision of the way my novel should be?

That's interesting because we had a poet, Chen Chen, who gave a lecture. And he talked about “resonant sources,” meaning, the sources underneath what you're writing. I'm wondering in your particular case, what are some of those sources that resonate through both your books in terms of this need to write them?

Well, for There, There, I worked in the Oakland urban Native community for many years. I was born and raised in Oakland, and I am an urban Native person. I am Cheyenne and Arapaho, and we would go back to Oklahoma. I'm aware of that connection, but most of my time was spent in Oakland. I came to know the community, the history of relocation, and the history of urban Natives all over the country. And so I wanted to write that story. All I kept seeing in literature and the media were historical Natives. That is the way that the general American wants to remember us. And, generally, that’s the way we're depicted. So the urgency for There, There and writing their urban native story was from that place.

Wandering Stars took on this big historical piece by accident. I was in a museum in Sweden. And I'd been writing a straightforward sequel to There, There. While I was there, I saw a newspaper clipping about Southern Cheyennes, and I'm Cheyenne and Arapaho enrolled. But I'm Southern Cheyenne within that. And it said Southern Cheyenne Florida 1875. I came to find out that half of the prisoners at Fort Marion Prison Castle, where Richard Henry Pratt was the jailer, were Southern Cheyennes, and this was the origin of the boarding schools. This was a heavy fact to find out about. And when I was doing initial research about that prison castle, Fort Marion there was a list of the prisoners, and one of the names was Bear Shield. And that's one of the family names from There, There. And I realized in a single moment that I was going to write something generationally, and I would start way back in history and then end up in the aftermath of what happened, what happens at the end of There, There.

It's also important because so few people are reading this history without reading your book, right? Because they're not going to get it in high school, or they're not going to get it in their college history books.

It was just acknowledged by Joe Biden in some official way in Arizona not too long ago as in an apology about the boarding school history. But generally, it's not something that anybody teaches.

Tell me what we should know about Pratt in terms of what you came away from after writing this history. I mean there's this sense of anger and grief that I feel when I read it, and it must have been difficult to write this part of the book.

I wrote from Pratt's perspective and that happened because I realized in doing all the research that Pratt was not the worst of the men around him. I wasn't trying to rewrite the way we think of Pratt because he still did not think of Native people in a way that gives us our humanity. But he was better than most, and he's better than Teddy Roosevelt and I wanted to try to capture where he was coming from. I thought it would be an interesting perspective to write from. I don't write about him in a way that glorifies him in any way. But I also don't make him a simple monster.

Yes.

That's what fiction tries to do, I think is to bring dimension and humanity.

Yes, that portion between Roosevelt and Pratt is fascinating. How do you do your research for your book?

It was a long six-year process. I try to research as much as I can, knowing that I'm not going to end up using that much. But I need to be convinced that I can write from a historical perspective. So this is the first time I wrote anything historical if you don't count the Alcatraz part of There, There. I'd never written any historical fiction. So a lot of the research I was doing was really to help convince me that I could write from that perspective and do it convincingly. And then, whatever weird stuff I find along the way that is compelling enough to include. I'd make sure to try to get it in there.

And then I'm sure you've gotten this question before, but how do you decide which point of view you are writing in? You're writing in first, second, and third. Or does it just reveal itself to you?

No, I usually try out all my characters from different points of view during revision. I will change their POV and see what it reveals and that's part of my revision process.

Oh, that's helpful.

Yes, eventually, I'll see what I land on and feel that's the right fit. But I usually will play around quite a bit before I land on it.

On Wandering Stars how did you start structuring it? Was that a different process than There, There?

It was because in There, There, I knew that everyone had to end up at the powwow. And so I could always refer back to how something relates to them getting to the powwow or how they're connected, and how that relates to the powwow. So there was an organizing factor that I could rely on, for There, There that did not exist at all for Wandering Stars. So there were a lot more moments in the middle of writing it where I didn't know how to structure it. Eventually, I landed on this before an aftermath structure based on the pictures that they took of the prisoners. And then of the students. Sort of how they looked in traditional regalia versus how they looked in military uniforms with their haircut and all that stuff. But it's a messy, messy process, and part of why it took so long is because it's so messy. And I know some people outline and some people use Scrivener.

Yes.

And I'm working on my next novel and trying to move a lot faster on it. But I tried to use Scrivener, and I just can't. The way that my process works is just the way that I've found and I don't have any answers that I can fit into this kind of format where I can be like this is what I do for structuring because it takes years, and I'll just work piece by piece, and eventually

I'll tell you what the structure is. One thing that I do do is on long runs I find that once all the pieces are written my brain will start doing structuring work and the pieces will start fitting together. And I'll take notes on my phone to make sure I understand what I'm thinking about Outside of that, it's working a little bit at a time.

Well, that makes perfect sense about the runs, because then you're just letting your brain relax.

Yes, totally, because when you overhandle it and you think that you're thinking is doing everything you're not doing as good of thinking as the brain can do when you're not in total control.

Yes, that's helpful. How does music come into this? Because I know you have this musical training. There are references to music in your work. How does that help you, and do you listen to music while you are writing?

I do. I listen to music, probably 98% of the time while I'm writing.

Hmm.

When I'm not is not listening to music then I am reading out loud. I do read out loud a lot. And sometimes I'm listening to music when I read out loud, and sometimes I'm not. But I'm always listening to music, and it's more of just that. I love music, and the way that it comes into the work is more related to my love for it. That is an inevitable thing that you end up writing about what you're obsessed with and that's one of the things. Oh, but I don't think there's more to it than that.

I see but there is a certain musicality to the words in your writing.  I'll read them and sense a musical element to them.

Yes, definitely. When I read out loud, I'm listening to the sound of the sentences, and there's definitely a rhythm involved. But I don't know that I can go beyond describing it as anything else than the sound of the sentences and making sure it sounds right to me.

Jennifer Foerster, who's a poet, was at the IAIA Winter Residency, and . . .

Yes, she formally was our fearless leader at the MFA.

She gave this talk on listening that was just so profound. I'm still wrestling with and thinking about it, but I'm curious in terms of how you listen to your characters. Do they guide you in the process? What's your practice for listening?

There are a lot of different camps around this topic. How real are the characters? And how much space do you give them to be real? I don't know that I'm in the camp that's like these are real people. They're definitely beyond me. They are coming from deeper parts of my conscious imagination which are connected to deeper parts of humanity and what it means to have consciousness. So I'm not saying that stuff's not real, but I'm not necessarily one to be letting the characters speak, and they have that kind of real dimension. I don't go down that path. I'm not saying I don't believe it. It's just not my process.

Well speaking about real folks like Kaveh Akbar and Kiese Laymon. What's your relationship with these extraordinary authors?

I've never shared pages with Kiese. We have shared early versions of our work. Like, on the whole, and he gave me some amazing words and a blurb eventually.

But with Kaveh, we were trading pages the whole time I was writing Wandering Stars, and he was writing Martyr. The two relationships are a little bit different.

I sort of waited at a North Dakota airport for Kiese to land, because I knew he was at the same festival as I was, and I made him autograph a book of essays of his, “How to Kill Yourself and Others in America.” I sort of stalked him, and we just became friends.

I respect and love him but we don't have the same page trading relationship.

So for Kaveh, we met at Purdue in 2019, when I went to visit and we became fast friends. I realized we share a lot in common like music and writers. Just a lot of things that were kind of crazy. I loved his poetry before I met him. So we're super close now, and it helped along the way. 

Especially after the MFA, it's good to identify people in your group who you will continue to trade pages with, even after there's no structure in place, and you've got your MFA. It is good to have somebody that you're accountable to, and because the MFA is only really made for a thesis and a thesis is not a book. It's important to keep the momentum and that was true after I graduated, but it remained true after finishing There, There, and getting the next book going. It was a huge part of being able to keep momentum.

Any additional advice do you want to give some IAIA students?

When I first started teaching there I had a big emphasis on not believing too much in authority and people, and the writing advice that you get from teachers or other students or craft books, and instead relying on figuring out what you love about writing and reading. What are the sentences that only you could write? What's the story that only you could write? Try to get at that because that's the most valuable piece.

That's what we're looking for in terms of finding our voice and not worrying about the selling of the book, story, or poem. One of the beautiful parts about the program is that folks are there because they must be there. They don't have a choice, and they're writing things that they must get out in the world. Debra Magpie Earling during the last residency gave an impassioned speech in which she expressed how moved she was by seeing how many Native students were in the room. When she was starting there were so few. She expressed this gratitude for so many being in the room and the need for so many more stories to be told because otherwise they're not told. No one else is going to tell them.

Yes.

I would like to ask you about Oakland and your thoughts about the future of Indigenous people there. And what are some things that we could be doing at IAIA that would support Native folks living in cities?

There's a lot of posturing around who's the authentic one and who who gets to belong. And there's a divide. There's a reservation and urban divide that still exists. And even in the minds of non-Native people who aren't ready to hear the story about Native people living in cities, because those stories are not widespread. I was at a Warriors game. Lindy Waters III, who grew up in Oklahoma and played for the Thunder, is now playing for the Warriors. He's the 5th Native basketball player to ever play in the NBA. A foundation did this thing on Native American Heritage Night and after the game, he was there to speak to whoever wanted to come from the Bay Area Native community and hundreds of people ended up showing up after the game to hear him, and I'd never seen the entire Bay Area Native community in one place in that way. So there's a lot of people doing cool stuff here. I don't know what kind of support I could name. The work that's happening at IAIA is helpful. In a broader sense, around getting these stories out and changing the landscape, and having people understand the depth of humanity and nuance of our communities. That's helpful work. 

Well, Tommy, thank you so much. We are so proud of all that you have done and the success that you have had. We wish for you much more.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall, his poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.