Novelist Tommy Orange Shares His Wanderings with Riveted UC Santa Barbara Crowd

I picked up Tommy Orange’s second novel, Wandering Stars, after it was long-listed for the Booker Prize, having little idea of the concept of the book or the origins of its author. 

Lyrically written, the novel follows three generations of a family through a constellation of narratives that go from Oakland in 2018 back to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. 

This story of urban Native Americans is unlike anything I’ve read before. 

Listening to Orange speak at Campbell Hall last week, in a presentation sponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, I quickly realized that telling compelling stories that haven’t been told before is exactly what he set out to do. 

Mission accomplished — and Wandering Stars is a sequel to his first novel, There There, which is high on my to-read list. (And it certainly reads just fine as a standalone too.) 

Layering generations of addiction, trauma, and genocide into a horrifying but extremely readable narrative takes an incredibly impressive level of skill, especially from an author who says he rarely even read fiction — or much of anything — until he was out of high school. 

Now 43 years old, the Oakland born and raised citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma has a master’s degree in fine arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Orange’s presentation was excellently geared toward a primarily student audience, as he discussed his personal journey from being a budding roller hockey professional (for the hot minute when such a thing existed), a musician, and eventually a writer. 

Raised by evangelical Christians about which Orange said, “I sincerely tried with Jesus for a long time — and it just wasn’t happening — no offense to Christians,” he also confessed that he “made it through school without reading a single book.” And that the standards were such that “I was a golden child just by not doing drugs or dropping out of school.” 

Eventually he found a job at a used book store and was tasked with moving the entire fiction section from one area to another, which led to him reading fiction for the first time. He started experimenting with writing fiction and trying to find his voice and a way to represent the urban native experience in a way he hadn’t seen done.  

For his first book, There There, Orange said, “My wife was pregnant, and the idea that a whole bunch of people are going to end up at a powwow and things are not going to go well, was the seed for the book. And I knew I wanted to write a bunch of different characters, and I knew you would find out how they were connected by the end of the book.”

Eventually that germ of an idea became the pages that got him in the master’s program where he worked on the book. “Along the way, I think you have to make friends with doubt,” said Orange in sharing what he learned during that time. “Also letting go of the idea that your vision is precious. Publication and rejection are two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t happen without the other,” he advised.

“Writing is about taking imaginative leaps … but there’s certain kinds of pain that feels exploitative. I never have felt doubt about writing from pain, because it comes from a very real place,” said Orange. 

But there are “definitely details in both books that come straight from me,” he said. 

Orange said he’s currently working on a third novel and a screenplay, both of which are unrelated to his first two novels. 

In addition to his appearance at Campbell Hall, Orange also visited one of UCSB’s Ethnic Literature classes to answer students’ questions about writing and the creative process.