Carrie R. Moore is interested in life’s most difficult decisions and most knotted relationships. Her debut short story collection, Make Your Way Home, out July 12 via Tin House, tells 11 tales set in different Southern states. Her characters, guided by their familial histories and richly embodied emotional worlds, grapple with the relational decisions that form our contemporary lives in places pockmarked and overgrown with centuries of troubled history.
After growing up in Atlanta, Moore flew to the West Coast for her undergraduate degree before acceptance into UT’s Michener Center for Writers drew her to Austin and, thus, back to the South. Moore traces her collection’s interest in Southern stories to her own trajectory.
“I was pretty determined to leave Georgia when I was a teenager,” Moore says. She had a great experience at the University of Southern California, but away from her home, the South took on a new shape. “I didn’t really think about the South very much until I was in California, because people had all these preconceptions,” she says.
Encountering the region’s reputation anew on the West Coast, Moore found herself feeling defensive and struggling to describe her experience of its complexities in a way that resonated with her new community. “The South kept showing up in the work that I was producing,” she says. “Part of me felt I should be writing about home in different ways because some people had this one idea of what it was.”
“One of the goals of the book is to write about the diversity in the South geographically, in terms of different Black cultures,” Moore says. After living in Georgia and, now, Texas, she acknowledges the ties that bind the South together amid plurality. “What I feel is unifying is that [wherever] you are in this region, you can be walking around in your life, and then you learn something about the place you were. You see a historical marker. You’re like – wait, what? I walk by here every day.”
Gather Here Again
Moore’s interest in place and history is evident throughout Make Your Way Home. In the opening story – “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” which takes place in Austin – the protagonist’s generations-old family curse is passed down beside Hill Country wax myrtle scents and nightjar calls, while the contemporary characters lunch at Victory Grill – now Victory East – and discuss Texas’ changing nature. In “Surfacing,” the protagonist’s family home in St. Simons, on the Georgia coast, is draped in Spanish moss, awash in a wave of vacation gentrification eroding the history of the Gullah Geechee people, emancipated slaves who called the area home.
The settings of Moore’s stories act as characters in their own right, their tangled pasts forming the backdrop for daily living – as well-worn plaques and as physical realities that inform where characters live and how they grow. Moore moves fastidiously through her Southern road trip with characteristic thoroughness, leaving no stone unexamined.
“I am an avid researcher. I like to read a lot about place, historical contexts. I will read a lot of political discourse online and try to strike a balance between the ways that certain communities have been frustrated about their depictions in art and literature,” she says.
Fiction’s fraught relationship with the truth circles around Moore’s empathetic writing. She resists the autofiction-borne idea that her life is mirrored in the collection, and often turns to experiences beyond her own to guide her plots. Despite, and because of, this, Moore thinks often about what fiction owes to the truth. As the collection took shape – a process that took over a decade – Moore and her husband roadtripped to many of the plot locales. Moore asked natives of represented states to read earlier drafts of her work and speak with her about its representation.
The final pages of Make Your Way Home contain a sources section expected more in a collection of essays or nonfiction works. Moore’s tales are firmly fictitious but inevitably products of her experience. She’s no stranger to the issue of misrepresentation and works diligently to avoid it. Reading criticism regarding the depiction of experiences her characters have, the places they inhabit, and the identities they hold often prompted her to reframe a draft.
“I understand the frustration. I, historically, have been very disappointed and frustrated by the way Black people are depicted in art,” Moore says. “The relationship with the truth is: If I’m honoring my character’s lives, I also have to honor the lived experiences of people who actually existed.”
Moore minored in American Studies at USC, delving into the laws and city planning policies that governed parts of her childhood in Atlanta, like her long bus commute to school. History’s persistent impact on modern life in everyday realities like this are present for Make Your Way Home’s characters, without relegating the work to the realm of historical fiction. The author’s storytelling is intentionally contemporary, rooted in intimate conflicts and experiences. At its heart, the book is about the homes built through friendship and family.
“History is hard. I think what you have is your community. All of my characters have very specific and concrete relationships, because that’s how they make it through,” Moore says.
Moore’s first memories of the South revolve around her own family. “Specifically, my grandparents’ house,” she elaborates. “They would keep me while my parents were working, and so it was a lot of time hanging out with my cousins playing games in the basement, running around outside.” She smiles as she recalls being mistaken for a cousin she no longer resembles and the kinds of things that a child’s eye casts into memory.
Moore’s characters, then, breathe in the world of simultaneous difference and cohesion that can feel uniquely Southern. They drink lemonade “so sugary it prickled [their] tongue” and stare into the “gummy white caves” of cottonmouths; they uncover colonoware – ceramic vessels built by enslaved women – and craft expensive heirloom-quality end tables “with legs round as a greyhound’s haunches.” More than that, their relationships run deep, and are often charged with contradiction and misunderstanding. Parents and their children in “The Happy Land” and “Cottonmouths” struggle to come to terms with each other’s identities and life choices. In “How Does Your Garden Grow?,” the protagonist’s white friends don’t understand her frustration over an interaction with police, and in “Morning by Morning,” two women deacons become more distant while trying to grow closer, as they realize how their worldviews diverge.
“When I am reflecting on the conflicts that the protagonist is going to have with other characters, I try to write the thing that is hardest,” Moore says. In “Surfacing,” tensions around sex stress a loving marriage. “Naturale” finds another relationship similarly strained, this time by an act of infidelity. Her characters bear the evidence of emotional conflicts physically – lifelong knee pain in “The Happy Land,” a spell of trauma-induced muteness in “All Skin Is Clothing,” fretting over hair loss in “Naturale.”
“In fiction, everything has to be embodied. Otherwise it reads like an essay. Sometimes the only way to talk about memory is to locate it in someone’s physical plane and [in] her ideas,” Moore explains. “I also think a lot about, if not trauma, then certainly stress. My body will tell me when I’m stressed: I’ll wake up and my shoulders will be around my ears,” she says, demonstrating, before pulling her shoulders firmly back into her pin-straight posture.
In the Swirl
As diligently as Moore worked to create characters unlike herself, her relationships invariably lent shape to the collection, prompting questions about chosen family and molding the text with thoughtful edits. Moore dedicates the collection to her husband, Jonathan Wilson, and her best friend, Hannah Friedland, who make up her informal team of first readers.
“Talking about fiction stories is a huge thing in our household and a big part of our relationship,” Wilson says, a smile evident in his voice. Throughout Moore’s time at the Michener Center, Wilson watched her confidence grow and her relationship to writing evolve. In the final drafts, he can see the proof of her dedication to writing characters with different lived experiences, and her increased comfort with the parts of herself that show up in them.
“I think she always had the ability, but she had to convince herself that she was going to do it right,” Wilson says. He points to a mention of Beyoncé, whom Moore loves and admires artistically, in “How Does Your Garden Grow?,” stating that it took time for Moore to feel comfortable tucking aspects of herself like that into her stories. “She knows [now] that she can do it in a way that is honest to what the characters are experiencing,” Wilson says proudly.
Fellow Michener Center alum and friend Brynne Jones elaborates on Moore’s development during her MFA: “Carrie’s work has always been extremely precise and emotionally insightful. I’ve watched that deepen over these five years,” Jones says. “She’s very rooted in what her characters are feeling at every point of the story.”
Jones and Moore formed a somewhat unlikely editorial partnership during their time as students.
“We’re very different writers,” Jones says, pointing to her own proclivity for speculative fiction. “But we appreciate some of the same things about fiction. We don’t compromise on plot or story.”
“She’s very direct,” Jones says of Moore with a laugh. “We debate. I love that about our friendship.” Over their time at the Michener Center, trading drafts of their respective upcoming manuscripts, the two found ways to push each other across genre differences through their shared dedication to straightforward language – in speech and in writing.
Author, teacher, and Michener Center Director Bret Anthony Johnston became a mentor to Moore during her MFA. At American Short Fiction’s Stars at Night Gala in May, where Moore was awarded the organization’s Constellation Star, Johnston introduced Moore wearing a Beyoncé T-shirt under his suit and joked that Moore asked him to wear it – a claim she staunchly denies. Their rapport and ease, steadily shared between two serious-appearing people, is evident.
“Carrie works as hard as almost anyone that I’ve ever encountered and so I think she and I clicked in that way of having this pretty intense, devout work ethic,” Johnston says. Moore’s arduously revised drafts can number more than 40, and always begin with pen and paper. Johnston helped Moore find the patience and trust assembling this collection required.
“I feel like my biggest fear as a writer has always been not being edited, so I do a lot of revision in my own work, but I also am always seeking a reader or editor or somebody who will be honest and tell me if there’s any way something can be better, whether it’s on the line level or it’s a larger structural issue,” Moore says. “I feel really grateful to have gotten that with Bret.”
How Does Your Garden Grow?
As revising her characters’ lives consumed the author’s own, she found herself needing to move physically through mental roadblocks. Many of the stories in Make Your Way Home took shape as Moore walked the trail surrounding Lady Bird Lake.
“When I do that, usually something arrives or there’s suddenly space to hear something that you couldn’t hear before,” she explains. In the pandemic, Moore and Wilson lived close to the lake, and walking its shores was one of the few activities available beyond their home. Years later, the flora of the lakeshore and the bends of the trail serve as a physical roadmap for Moore’s literary journey through finishing the collection.
It was along these trails during the pandemic that Moore began to reimagine and expand Make Your Way Home’s final story. “Till It and Keep It” is her only work to date set in the future. In it, Moore paints a scene of a South dried by the sun but still dimpled with peaches and green beans in nurtured corners – “a temporary Eden,” she says. At the center of the tale are two sisters faced with questions about how to form family in such a precarious world.
“I felt like the crazy storms that we were having – that we continue to have – were letting me think about the world transforming. Then I thought about the Book of Genesis, which, of course, has the flood,” Moore says. These ponderings led her to consider the impact of a changing environment and inconsistent access to lessons of the past on her character’s relationships: “If there was a formation of a new world, would there be a new formation of family?” she asks.
As in all of the stories in Make Your Way Home, readers watch the sisters in “Till It and Keep It” walk the narrow cliffside path of life’s hardest decisions, peering nervously over the edge as they attempt to assess what will let them keep going. Moore is adamant about the ambiguity of her characters’ choices, pushing them to land places that feel real, beyond the confines of a neat, allegorical resolution.
“Often when I write, I’m trying to get readers to interrogate their own decisions as I’ve interrogated my decisions,” Moore says. No matter when and where her stories are set, the dilemmas at play in her characters’ lives are timeless.
Make Your Way Home is a series of these kinds of life-forming decisions, composed of many smaller choices Moore made to shape the book’s plot and prose. Talking to Moore about her process, the variations of her stories that have existed over the years, and the choices she made to configure this collection, she breezes through versions of the tales discarded or magnified by modest changes. Leaning on her literary intuition and her deep love of rigor and process, Moore shapes her stories through meticulous attention to detail. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that she has looked to one of the greatest artists of our time for inspiration in making the kinds of minute decisions that construct impactful work.
“Looking at Beyoncé’s work has really made me see how much effort and thought and intention has to go [into] creating something really powerful,” she says. “I will get really fussy about an adjective or a comma or researching articles again and again and again, or being willing to throw things away if it makes the end product better. I think that’s what I like about Beyoncé: She doesn’t take the easy way out.”
Moore doesn’t either, that much is obvious, and neither do her characters. Peeking behind the curtain of her prose, her consistent revision and earnest dedication to classically American concision is clear. In between her carefully considered characters and their often messy emotional lives, Moore’s rigidly wielded pen and sharp eye to detail unravel life’s complicated questions with precision.
Carrie R. Moore will read from Make Your Way Home at Lark & Owl Booksellers on Saturday, July 19.
This article appears in July 18 • 2025.
