A Texan fighting a family curse for love, a pregnant preteen defying expectations, two sisters fleeing north for freedom and climate stability: Austin-based author Carrie R. Moore's Make Your Way Home, released July 15, weaves together past and present, myth and reality, to explore how Black people in the South navigate generational legacies.
Moore's short stories and nonfiction have been published in various literary magazines and journals, including For Harriet, One Story, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. However, the new collection is her debut in the format.
Make Your Way Home presents 11 stories following characters across America as they search for their version of belonging. The collection spans Florida swamps, Virginian peaks, and winding Central Texas roads.
“My book is asking ‘How do you try to love the place you come from, even if that place doesn’t love you?’” Moore shared in a press release announcing the book’s arrival. “Writing this book has taken years of research and reflecting on the different Black people I know, how our diversity is as vast and varied as Southern geographies. … I hope these characters feel real to readers. My hope is that their stories feel like full, warm places to inhabit.”
Moore draws on the interconnectedness of the past and present, showing that even events that feel distant in place and time remain intimately connected to our lives. Her stories speak to the complex histories that exist in all of our spaces and how people move through them.
The author has a gift for creating fully realized characters in short story format. From Ever, a thirty-something man grappling with family curses and love during his sister's wedding preparations, to the summer Twyla and her mother are pregnant at the same time. Each story feels like peering through a window into a complete, lived-in world.
The story of Damonia, an 84-year-old grandmother caring for her grandchildren the night after the 2017 Charlottesville rally, stands out as a powerful meditation on generational trauma and resilience. Late at night, Damonia tends to her garden, her hands working the soil as she confronts both the physical limitations of her aging body and the uneasy realities of the world outside. The looming presence of white supremacy, both outside the family’s doorstep and within Damonia’s recollections, creates a tense atmosphere.
The quiet is repeatedly interrupted by snippets of conversation drifting from the street — people making the choice to anxiously gather. Inside the house, recent memories of a conversation with Damonia’s daughter-in-law linger. She recalls Stella’s desire to shield the children from the details of local violence, clashing with Damonia’s convictions that even the youngest should understand the world’s dangers. Yet, she ultimately agrees to Stella’s request for silence, tucking away the truth for the sake of uneasy peace.
“A man’s laughter reaches them from the street, from the front of the house. Nemy yelps. Howie slides open the screen door, as if to usher Damonia in. ‘Yeah, bro, I’m on the way,’ the man says, his baritone bobbing through the dark. Then silence. Howie’s shoulders relax as he closes the door again. Nemy pulls her pajama top down and over her knees. Damonia feels silly as she smooths the hairs that rose along her neck.
The scariest things in her life have always come slow.” Moore writes, exposing how every sound and gesture is laden with anxiety.
Even in the absence of an explicit threat, these unspoken fears shape the way each character moves through the night.
As Moore explains in the press release, she was raised near the Atlanta metro area in Georgia, but it wasn’t until she moved to California as an early adult that she could reflect more fully on her Southern upbringing.
“Distance from the South enabled me to see it in complicated ways,” she said. “For instance, the South is where my grandmother once heard the Ku Klux Klan marching outside her childhood home—yet also where she danced and played bridge with close friends. The South is where my cousins and I lived in neighborhoods shadowed by legacies of white flight—yet where we ran through the woods until our limbs trembled in pleasure.”
The collection promises to be an exploration of how people create meaning, safety, and connection across generations, examining both the weight of inherited stories and the possibility of writing new ones.
Make Your Way Home is published by Tin House. The book is available in many major book sellers, including Barnes and Noble, Hudson Booksellers, and BookPeople.
