Morgan Talty, author of the short story collection Night of the Living Rez, is a quarter Penobscot. The idea for Fire Exit came while he was studying tribal Indian law, and in a recent interview he said he wanted to explore the “weird situations federal Indian law has created for Indigenous people”. He writes from experience – his wife isn’t Native, so their son cannot be enrolled in the tribe.
Talty’s narrator, Charles, grew up on the Penobscot reservation in Maine with his white mother, Louise, and Native stepfather, Frederick. Tribal rules force Charles to leave the reservation as an adult, and Frederick helps build him a house across the river from his childhood home. When Mary, Charles’s Penobscot girlfriend, falls pregnant, she leaves him and returns to the reservation. Only by claiming another Native man as the father can she ensure their child is given tribal membership.
