Carrie Moore’s debut collection, Make Your Way Home, concludes with an annotated bibliography. I’m talking full on MLA-format: Hanging indents, alphabetical organization. Every story gets at least three citations, and some as many as fourteen, along with a short explanation of why the author felt moved to perform research for this particular piece. Knowing this, a reader might expect something erudite and postmodern, a Pynchon- or Wallace-esque collision of fact and fiction, the kind of book that might include scatter plots and physics equations—something far from the subtle, emotionally-grounded realism on offer here. Moore’s stories study characters in the midst of change: new relationships, breakups, infidelity, losses of faith. The action is almost entirely internal, emotional climaxes often taking the form of a minor gesture: a brush of the hand; the grasping of a sleeve. These are not the types of stories that authors typically feel the need to research, at least not so thoroughly and formally. That Moore does so regardless is indicative of her work’s greatest strength: an attention to detail on every level; an insistence on getting things right. It is imperative that her characters respond realistically to real social, historical, and ecological conditions. As Moore herself says in the Works Cited, “This story might be a work of fiction, but I wanted to be as precise as I could be.”
Take, for example, “Surfacing,” a story that deals with sexual dysfunction, abuse, and repressed trauma. Moore avoids the lurid and shocking presentation to which this subject matter easily lends itself not by shying away from detail but by employing that precision. Central character Grace’s memories of her foster mother are buoyed by research on Gullah Geechee culture, giving the reader insight into the stories she grew up around, the changes she witnessed, the habits she observed. The culture itself is not central to the tensions of the story, but Moore’s specificity makes the memories feel lived rather than written.
Research also informs the emotional throughline of the story. At its core is Grace’s struggle with vaginismus, which Moore based on medical literature about that condition, its causes, and treatment. This is not an extraneous detail; it is the story’s shape. It contours itself to the arc of recovery from sexual trauma; form follows fact.
Moore’s research is particularly interested in the histories and unique struggles of Black communities in specific parts of the country—in her own words, “exploring how Black people live fully, despite painful histories.” “All Skin is Clothing” details a middle-class family relocating from a low-income neighborhood after their son Brayden is nearly hit by a stray bullet entering his bedroom. “What was so different, across a few painted lines and sidewalks, new zip codes?” he wonders—a compelling depiction of how decades of redlining might impress themselves upon a child. “Gather Here Again” draws parallels between the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in North Carolina, giving a direct, real-world referent to the characters’ tensions and anxieties. As the collection’s title, not given to any one of its stories, suggests, it explores the complexities and difficulties of making a place into a home.
As concerned as she is with historical and sociocultural context, Moore is also keenly attuned to the power and meaning of gesture. A grandmother insists to herself that “[d]ropping a teacup every now and then doesn’t mean she can’t take care of her grandbabies.” A hairdresser remarks upon her “fingers gone stiff from nurturing other women.” A character’s “father palm[s] his beard’s stubby hairs, though the looseness of the gesture [doesn’t] match his eyes.” These are details that cannot be gleaned through research, but they point to the same care and attention as Moore’s citations do. Her precision creates the space for these gestures and provides the context that suffuses them with meaning. In “Gather Here Again,” grandmother Damonia sees two Black teenagers walk down the street at night and fixates on “how they must have walked with their backs straight as they passed through the streetlamp light. A good thing, for young people to feel so brave.” The passage is deceptively simple: Damonia’s childhood memory of the Klan burning down her family’s house and the contemporary surge in far-right violence are both integral to how this character interprets gestures. The understanding is elegant and natural, the only evidence of its careful construction is how seamless it feels.
The collection is not flawless. “In The Swirl”’s use of second-person feels more like the product of a writing prompt than something demanded by the story itself. It is a close character study of the “you,” whose experiences are far from universal (and, again, deeply rooted in the culture and history of specific regions). Second-person—which scans as experimental no matter how many times a reader encounters it— is effective when an author aims to create a numbing, depersonalizing effect, but this character is no more alienated from herself than Moore’s other subjects. When the story culminates in her understanding of herself as a “dangerous thing, in how easy you were to love,” it feels as though the point of view, rather than enhancing this understanding, has withheld it from us.
Moore employs experimentation much more successfully in the concluding story, “Till it and Keep it.” Up to this point, Moore has engaged only in the strictest realism, with the possible exception of the sweltering Southern Gothic of “Cottonmouths.” This story, however, is speculative; a work of near-future cli-fi that sees its central characters navigating a world of constant pandemics and natural disasters, as well as a hinted-at political schism between North and South. What’s remarkable is how in line it feels with the rest of the collection. Moore’s interests remain consistent: the recurrence of Black history; the effects of place on culture and relationship; the mutability of home. Rather than a departure, the genre shift gives Moore access to more avenues to explore these ideas. The character Brie wonders whether her sister “had been wrong when she said Low America was finished, that—if the cities would not let you in—you had to get north to have a home that would flourish and last.” The precarity of resource and shelter allows for a world where home is in greater flux, where the ultimate dream is “[t]o be safe and headed nowhere, for once.” The story is perhaps the most impressive in all of Make Your Way Home for how fully it encapsulates the collection as a whole despite its obvious outlier position. In every piece Moore reminds us that, whether by personal struggle, historical trauma, political reality, or future cataclysm, self and home are never quite as stable as they appear.
