Introducing our new fiction series

A story by Morgan Talty: “You are who you are, even if you don’t know it.”

Welcome to SG Fiction, our new newsletter featuring an original piece of fiction from a different author around the world. It’s part of our set of expanded offerings. At least once a month, you’ll receive an original short story from a different part of the world, introduced by a member of our fiction advisory board. Today’s selection is by Morgan Talty, presented by Stranger’s Guide editor Emily Nemens.

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What gets put on a map? In the days of paper-based navigation, mountains had to rise to a certain elevation to be noted as such, the waterways had to be so deep or so wide to count as rivers. Towns required a population threshold to merit a mention. The paper could only get so big, the fonts could only go so small.

Of course, in the zoomable world of Google Maps, I can go from the few shallow feet of what my neighborhood counts as Little Shabakunk Creek to the Delaware River in three clicks (Washington's army ventured into both in winter 1776, but only one crossing begot an iconic painting); four more gets me the whole state of New Jersey. Two more and I’m looking from there to Maine, where Morgan Talty’s “Fire Exit” takes place.

This story, which is from Talty’s celebrated debut novel Fire Exit, opens on the river-bound edge of the Penobscot Reservation. There’s a bridge somewhere offscreen (cars leave one side and show up on the other), and later in the novel, you learn the watery distance can be traversed by canoe easily enough. But for Charles Lamosway, the narrator of the story, that river might as well be an ocean studded with ice floes. It stands between him and the truth.

The river in Talty’s story isn’t named, but clicking deep into Google Maps, zoom and zoom again, I see it could be Mattamiscontis Stream or Johnny Ayers Brook or somewhere else entirely, a river of the imagination, just as wide as Fire Exit needs it to be. What’s important is that it’s an edge, a border between here and there, between Charles’s tiny hand-built house and the life his daughter is living without him.

Yi-Fu Tuan, the late humanistic geographer, once said, “People think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so on… But it is also about place—its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential.” And here is the heart of place-based storytelling, the sort of fiction that Stranger’s Guide has been featuring since the jump. It expands the definition of geography beyond places on a map, zoomable or not, to places that matters. In “Fire Exit” and in the stories to come in this occasional newsletter, we’ll start charting out a new geography not of so-wide rivers or big-enough towns, but of how place can and does tell a story, how it can and does shape a life.

—Emily Nemens

Wooden elephants. 1932. Photograph by Keystone-France. (Getty Images).

Fire Exit

By Morgan Talty

I wanted the girl to know the truth. I wanted her to know who I was—who I really was—instead of a white man who had lived across from her all her life and watched her grow up from this side of the river.