Indies Introduce Q&A with Carrie R. Moore

Carrie R. Moore is the author of Make Your Way Home, a Summer/Fall 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection. 

Nadi Hinojosa of Lark and Owl Booksellers in Georgetown, Texas, served on the panel that selected Moore’s book for Indies Introduce.

“I mean it when I say this book is breathing life into me,” Hinojosa said. “Each story is a slow burning tale set in the South, braiding history, love, family, and self-discovery together with crisp prose and honest storytelling. It’s as if Moore has stamped cut outs of life and laid them on the pages for readers to experience an exact replica of reality.”

Moore sat down with Hinojosa to discuss her debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion.

You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookED.

Nadi Hinojosa: My name is Nadi Hinojosa. I am a bookseller at Lark and Owl Booksellers in Georgetown, Texas. I’m here today with Carrie R. Moore to talk about her debut short story collection Make Your Way Home.

Carrie R. Moore’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. A recipient of the Keene Prize and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat. She earned her MFA in the Michener Center for Writers. Born in Georgia, she currently resides in Texas with her husband. Make Your Way Home is an Indies Introduce book. It publishes July 15, and I’m super excited to talk to Carrie about it. Carrie, how are you doing today?

Carrie R. Moore: I’m great. Thanks so much, Nadi.

NH: Of course, I’m so happy to meet you. I meant to go see you at BookPeople recently, but something came up, and I wasn’t able to make it, so I’m glad that we’re meeting today.

I’ll jump into my first question for you. In the opening story of the collection, a curse is placed on an entire bloodline — one that spans from Texas joining the Confederacy all the way to today. What does this curse represent to you? And do you think there’s any way to break a curse like this?

CRM: I love this question so much because it’s the exact thing I struggled with over the four-year process of writing this story, and it was because I couldn’t initially decide if I wanted the curse to be literal or if I wanted it to be a metaphor. You have the story of this enslaved woman, Evaline, who puts a curse on her lover because he’s run away from the plantation to seek his freedom and he’s left her behind.

I finally decided that I wanted that curse to be literal, because even though it’s invented, I was really wary of treating aspects of a painful history as symbolism or as a learning opportunity for the reader or someone else. I was hesitant to do that, but I found that if I made the curse literal, it would let me get a little bit closer to that very impossible task of trying to imagine life as an enslaved person. That experience would be so personal. What would it be like if someone that you loved left and did what you wanted to do too in seeking your freedom, but they left you behind? Where would you put that anger and that hurt? Would you put it on them? Would you turn it towards the systems and people who are responsible for putting you in that position? Would you turn it towards yourself?

By making it literal, I was able to give each character a different response. As that curse stays on that bloodline and goes through different generations, every character gets to interact with it a little bit differently and have some agency. Ever, the main character of the story, is actually able to break the curse, because he’s able to define that history for himself. That is where he can exert control in [some] areas (…) in contrast to other areas where he doesn’t have control.

NH: That makes so much sense, I love that answer. I liked the idea of making it this type of myth that a bunch of the family may or may not believe in because, as time goes by, it’s really easy to distance yourself to what may have happened in the past. Making it not an exact thing made it feel more real.

CRM: Yeah, and that’s how family stories work!

NH: Right? It’s like someone said, “It may have happened and I wasn’t there, so who knows?”

CRM: I can’t prove it!

NH: Yeah! “I can’t prove it but I can’t keep a relationship, so I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s me or them!”

Something I really loved about your writing is how vivid it is. There’s so much I can feel, hear, and taste. Some examples I have are two different beginnings to two separate stories.

The first one begins: “The bullet shattered the window. Moonlight fell in shards as the air split cool above their bed.”

The intro for another story is: “Memory settles over the house like salt blown in from the sea, or softly the way Spanish moss wilts over the drive.”

First of all, I think those beautifully set the tone for each of the stories. I can sense so much just from those few sentences. I was wondering what your process is for creating such textured prose? It’s not easy, and you don’t see a lot of that in a lot of debuts.

CRM: Thank you so much. I should say very briefly that I had to reread that sentence you just said about “memory settling over the house” a couple weeks ago. And I was like “Oh, why did I not cut this sentence?”

NH: This is an early copy, so I hope that makes it into the final copy.

CRM: Oh, it is! It’s in there. It just makes me feel good that you liked it. Because I was debating.

NH: Oh, I loved it.

CRM: I love language that is very vivid, and so to try to get there, what I’ll do is write longhand. All of my drafts exist first in a little journal that I carry around. That forces me to really slow down and inhabit the scene so I can see what my characters are seeing, I can hear them. That allows me to include as many details as possible, especially because I’m not looking at a computer, and so it doesn’t look final. I’m not editing myself; it’s just the little cursive that I have in my notebook. Finally, towards the end I’ll shave off details that don’t need to be there, but then a lot of that texture remains as a result of writing longhand. And then, of course, I have little tiny invisible rules for myself, one of them being I have to use a color in the first paragraph of everything that I write because that helps ground me.

NH: I like that! Are you a reader who can visualize? If you’re a reader who can visualize, or if you have a reader who can visualize, this is the perfect book to put into their hands because everything’s so vivid. I love it. I like the idea of writing on paper because it takes that backspace away which can be your biggest fear. I don’t write. I’m just guessing.

CRM: No, that’s right!

NH: Is there a specific short story collection or an author who inspired Make Your Way Home or your writing in general?

CRM: I wouldn’t say there’s a specific collection that inspired Make Your Way Home, but like every writer, I certainly have my literary influences. The one that most immediately comes to mind is Toni Morrison. I’m not trying to compare at all, but the way that she spoke about writing has inspired me for so long. She was really interested in capturing the interior lives of Black people without a white gaze, and she was writing within community, and that made me think about literature differently.

Given that this book is about the American South, which can come with a lot of hard topics, I really wanted the focus of each story to be about that character just being who they are and living their lives against this landscape, despite whatever hardships they faced. I didn’t want the stories to be defined by interracial conflict. Even though traumatic events happened, I didn’t want it to be defined by trauma and suffering, and so I really feel like reading Toni Morrison’s work and hearing her interviews taught me how to do that to the best that I can.

NH: You did a really good job about balancing like these painful histories with the suffrage of Black people, but also what’s going on within their family. I appreciate that a lot. I have yet to read anything by Toni Morrison, but she’s on the list. I’ve heard she’s extremely profound, so that makes so much sense that she’s your go-to author.

Every character is grappling with very different painful histories in this collection. They all come to find a different degree of peace. Which one of these characters was your favorite to write and explore?

CRM: I think that my answer to this question would probably change over time, but right now I would have to say Claire from “How Does Your Garden Grow?” because she was really hard [to write].

At different points in my life, I’ve experienced the types of loneliness that she’s experienced but our reactions to them are very different. She lets her friends off the hook for things that I personally would not let my friends off the hook for, she can be really hard on herself in an attempt to protect herself, she keeps lots of her emotions bottled in. It was really challenging and interesting to me to write somebody whose experiences I could relate to, but whose responses to them would be radically different from mine; it was a real challenge in empathy. She became my favorite in that way; I got to understand her a little bit better.

NH: Interesting! I’ve always wondered about how much self-inserting authors do whenever they write, especially for debuts, because (…) how much of my soul do I want to put in writing that potentially people I know would read? I like that.

You mentioned in your author’s note that this is a collection about simultaneous truths and I also think memory plays a big role throughout each story. I know the South as a whole can easily be shaded by slavery and its impacts that are still with us today, but I think creating space for Black joy is equally as important to bring to these conversations. Is there a happy or positive memory you have from your time living in Georgia that you would like to share?

CRM: Most of my memories of Georgia are really positive. I spent so much meaningful time with my cousins there. They are absolutely hilarious and wonderful, and we’ve gone to Beyonce concerts, and gone out to restaurants so I have a lot of love for them. My grandmother will also cook for my family every single Saturday, so I have a lot of cozy and intimate memories of being in her house and hearing her talk about her life. My most immediate family — my parents and my sister and I — would go for lots of drives so we would always be in the car singing along to musicals, most specifically Wicked. I think my whole collection was really trying to capture how I feel about Georgia and the South, which is that there is a lot of painful history there as you mentioned, and at the same time you’re still making your own life.

NH: Wow, I love that — I think growing up with cousins will make or break a childhood. I’m sorry to the people who don’t grow up with cousins.

CRM: It’s true!

NH: That’s an amazing answer. I did want to add whenever I sat down to first start reading this book, I was in the Austin airport.

CRM: Oh, wow!

NH: And I opened up the author’s note, and the first thing it says is:

“I’m trying to imagine where you are right now. Perhaps you’re standing in a crowded airport or in your favorite coffee shop, or outside your mailbox, a faint drizzle chilling your neck. At my writing desk in Texas. I’m thinking about place and how it touches us.”

I remember reading that intro. First of all, it was raining outside — it was just randomly raining that day! I read that one paragraph, and I was like, “Oh, this is absolutely going to make the Indies Introduce list. I just feel like she’s speaking to me. I have chills on my back just from reading that.” I just want to say I’m so excited for other readers to get this book in their hands. I think they’re going to love it. I think you have a lot more to come, I’m so excited to be a part of this little journey with you.

CRM: Thank you so much. I really appreciate everything you said about my work. It means a lot in this very anxious time.

NH: Yeah. Everything’s scary out here. Thank you so much, Carrie, for your time. I can’t wait for people to read [Make Your Way Home].

CRM: Thank you!

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Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore (Tin House, 9781963108286, Paperback, Short Stories, $17.99, On Sale: 7/15/2025)