Kyle Kellams: In the novel To the Moon and Back, we meet Stef Harper, her younger sister and her mother as they leave an abusive situation and head to Tahlequah for a new life. Stef is determined to become the first Cherokee astronaut, but that’s just one element of the story that explores mother-daughter relationships, repercussions of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Indigenous identity.
To the Moon and Back is the debut novel from Nashville-based writer Eliana Ramage. She’ll discuss the book with writer Andrea Rogers at Underbrush Books in downtown Rogers on Monday, Oct. 6. The book has been selected as the Reese’s Book Club pick for September. Eliana says the book involves different kinds of travel, and Stef’s desire to be an astronaut is just one example of that.
Ramage: The fact that she’s interested in space, I think, does represent kind of an escape for her. And like, the widest range of possibility, far beyond leaving her hometown. The first time we ever see her, she’s in the back seat of a car. She’s picking shards of glass out of her little sister’s hair, and her mom is actually moving the family back to Oklahoma. This place that she’s not grown up. So she looks up at the moon as it follows them, and she understands it to be a place to escape to.
And for me, as a Cherokee person, I can appreciate that sometimes the dominant story that’s told about us, from the outside and sometimes from inside the house, is our past. So there’s like one point of authenticity and then everything from that is loss.
So, for example, we talk a lot about the Trail of Tears, really, really dark period of history that involves not only the loss of ancestral land and the death of a quarter of our people, but also the destruction of that particular way of life as it relates to place. But I was interested in place because I think that for the future and for the Cherokee future, it’s a thing that asks us to keep looking. It asks us to look forward at change and possibility.
And that’s what I wanted the story to be about. Like, not only what it means to be Cherokee today, but what it’s going to mean in the future, a thousand years from now. If there are Cherokee people on Mars, which I think there would be if there’s anyone on Mars, then the primary shaping force for them is going to be belonging, whether or not a character like Stef initially realizes that.
Kellams: I’m glad you brought that up, because you’re right. So many times the Cherokee story is about the Trail of Tears or is historical, but it’s so wonderful to have a contemporary and forward-looking story that’s about people and dreams and more than just the narrative that is often assigned. Was that important to you to put in this novel?
Ramage: That was very important to me. And that was actually from the very first moment that I imagined anything from this book. There was this moment that I couldn’t, this image that I couldn’t get out of my head. I was 18, in a room with friends from all different tribal nations, and we were all talking about our people. Like, within that historical context, there was one person in the room, Winter Fox, who out of nowhere said, like, “You know, if any one of you were to become an astronaut, then that too would be part of the story of your people.”
He was a sophomore when he said that. So it really just, time stopped when he said that. And up until that point, I suddenly realized that I had been thinking about us in that historical context of like we have like some imagined point in history that’s like authenticity. And then everything is a loss.
And when he said that, like just mentioning that astronaut flung me into the future. I think it was good timing to hear that, because I was a new adult and a new Cherokee adult who’s about to spend her adulthood in non-Cherokee spaces. So I felt this enormous sense in that moment of optimism and possibility and hope for us.
That image stayed with me for years after, and it made me question over and over again, like, what is it that we can hope for ourselves, for one another, and for future generations? I really wanted that to be something I could sit with for like a decade, a decade.
Kellams: So why was it you mentioned a 12-year project? Would you set it aside and then come back, or was it a pretty steady evolution?
Ramage: It was not steady. It was my first novel. It is my first novel. It was so hard because writing is hard. Learning how to write a novel for the first time is hard. But also these ideas. I have all these different Cherokee people who are wrestling with what that means to them. And I’m wrestling. I’ve always been wrestling with what that means to me. I think we all are figuring that out for who we are and what we want for the future.
So I think the rockiest point of it was the fact that I wanted to include so much, like so much life in this book meant that there were many different drafts of different versions, different ways into this book. And at one point in 2018, I just gave up on it for two years. And I was like, I can’t, I can’t get, I want it to be all of this, to hold all of this, and it’s just too hard. So I didn’t write for two years. It was a very difficult two years. And then the pandemic happened, and I came back to it.
Kellams: You mentioned that your friend Winter Fox, I think that’s who—
Ramage: Yes.
Kellams: —mentioned this when you were a new adult. Do you think about relatively new adults reading your novel and perhaps getting maybe the same kind of boost in some way that you got?
Ramage: I would love that. I would love that. And I would hope that they feel… Oh gosh, there’s so much I wish for people who are younger than me. Same as I’m sure there are people who are older than me who wish so much for me. But one thing that’s clear is that I don’t have this figured out.
I recently became a mom, and so it’s now become like more complicated in another, like, very beautiful way. I’m understanding the mom’s perspective in a totally different way in the last few months. So I just think it’s really exciting that when I wrote this as a young person, I thought like this is a coming-of-age novel. And like when she gets to age 24, when she gets to age 27, she’s gonna be like fully formed. And like, 34 now. And that’s not how it works. And I think that’s a good thing.
If you get to an age where it’s fully formed and you’re confident, let me know. I would love to know what that age is.
Kellams: We’re almost there. So we’ve talked a little bit about Stef, and you mentioned her mom too, who is also escaping. Leaving?
Ramage: Yes.
Kellams: How did you come up with her?
Ramage: With her mom? Well, I knew as a daughter, even before I was a mother, I knew I wanted to talk about the mother-daughter relationship, that sometimes tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. And in this particular relationship, which is not like my own, I wanted to capture how these are two people who are trying really hard to love each other, but at the same time, their deepest beliefs can bring them into conflict over and over again.
So Stef is all about pursuing her dream of going to space like nothing else matters. Her mom, as you said, she’s escaping a really dark, dangerous past, and she is taking the family back to where her grandparents were from, back to this idea of like being connected to your roots and understanding your history and revering your history is going to save the next generation. That rubs Stef the wrong way, because she doesn’t want to understand herself as bound to anyone or anything but space.
Her dream, she knows, is going to take total dedication and freedom of movement. And her mom’s interpretation of the Cherokee story, I think, is that it can only exist in a certain time and place, that that time and place is fragile. It’s Earth-bound in some ways. The way they see it, the way her mom sees it, is that it’s already almost lost. A really sad way of understanding that change over time.
So in a larger sense, I wanted to write about mothers and daughters, and I wanted to write about that tension because it was part of a larger vision of writing about different kinds of families, the ways families can be made, queer families, tribal families, adoptive families, people who don’t have children, aunts and uncles. And the bottom line here is that connection can come in so many different forms. And sometimes it’s from people who we choose, and sometimes it can be from people who we thought we might have lost.
Kellams: There’s movement. There’s going somewhere else. There’s a theme of this novel. Now, you’re in Nashville right now, correct?
Ramage: I am, and I was born in Nashville.
Kellams: Grew up in Nashville?
Ramage: Yes.
Kellams: But you have lived away from Nashville?
Ramage: I have, yes, yes.
Kellams: So were you able to dig into any of those feelings when you were leaving Nashville, when you were leaving your home? Did that inform at all how characters in To the Moon and Back feel?
Ramage: Yes. I definitely think this book is a product of that time in my life. And I think that time, especially living away from family, as I said a while ago, I’m still figuring it out. And that’s where I think a lot of the excitement was for me in this story.
But I grew up outside of Oklahoma and in a family where our Cherokee identity was really deeply rooted and it was nurtured for us. I didn’t have to do anything to feel a part of that. And when I started this book, since I was in college, my first time outside of my parents’ house, I felt for the first time this like, what’s next? Anxiety. I didn’t appreciate before that how much had been given to me.
And if I was going to continue this life of being like, oftentimes the only Cherokee person in the room, and I was going to have kids, I hoped then like, what is being Cherokee supposed to look like? Do I have to learn how to like weave baskets? Like I just was in this, like, kind of unfurling in my early 20s.
This book gave me a place to investigate that, not through myself, but through all these different characters who are asking that question of themselves. We have many different Cherokee women who are sort of taking different paths to answer that question, and they all land in the same place of belonging, inside and belonging to each other, despite what that looks like on the outside.
So when I turned in this book and I felt like I had arrived at like, oh, the answer is just belonging. Like, you don’t have to do anything. Like I still think no one has to show up in the world as who they are in a certain way. But it’s like overnight, I hadn’t studied Cherokee in years, since my early 20s, and overnight I was like, oh, I actually, you know, it’s not confining. It’s enriching. It’s a gift.
I want my daughter to feel like the world is expansive and like she has, you know, sovereignty over who she’s going to be. And now I relate to the mother character because I want to sing her songs in Cherokee. I want to like teach her the names of animals in Cherokee language. And like, that’s started. I have a new appreciation for that. That gift of a beginning that we give each other.
Kellams: I read for years before I ever had a piece of fiction in my hand that happened to have a Cherokee family or a queer family. It’s better now, right?
Ramage: Yes. It’s an exciting time.
Kellams: Yes. And so I’m wondering, you know, there’s a chance that your first novel might be one of the first that has a queer family or Cherokee family for a relatively new reader. Do you think about that? Or that you’re just writing the narrative, the story that you want to write?
Ramage: That’s an interesting question. I didn’t think about that in terms of there being a Cherokee character. I’d written many other things that had always had Cherokee characters before this book.
But I do think that with a queer character, the main character originally for the first couple years wasn’t. And then when I came out, it felt more urgent that I had these questions, especially as they relate to family building and like what makes a family, and queer family building, the family that I have today that I wouldn’t have known as someone in her 20s that I would be able to have. And so it felt important to me to get to explore that on the page.
Kellams: If you were given the opportunity to go to space, would you do it?
Ramage: No no no no no.
Kellams: That is the right answer, by the way.
Ramage: Never never never.
Kellams: Much of your tour, and I should point out you’ll be at Underbrush Books in downtown Rogers, Oct. 6 with Andrea Rogers. Many of your stops are conversations that you’ll have with other writers. That your idea?
Ramage: That was not my idea. I’m very, very grateful for it. Those are the events I always most enjoy going to.
Can I tell a story about my grandfather?
Kellams: Please.
Ramage: Okay. So this is relevant because the book is, it’s kind of in this gap between the past and the future. We’ve got this, like, Cherokee astronaut, like, future facing, but we have other characters who are really interested in the Cherokee past. And I ended up learning more about our history than I had understood before, and it really surprised me to understand how incredibly enduring it is to belong to one’s people and one’s history.
My brother just happens to be a Cherokee historian, which is very helpful for me. He took me to the archives and helped me out so much. And one thing he helped me understand is our grandfather’s story, the most recent or the last person in my family to grow up in Oklahoma. So before Oklahoma statehood, he would have been like his family members. So Cherokee citizen, not American citizen. Instead, he was born 1907. He was born not a Cherokee citizen. It had been nationalized and he was born an American citizen. So he was born just after that had happened.
And he ended up kind of roaming the U.S. for work. He lived all across the southern U.S. He went to Europe for World War II, where his job was to transport like trucks of young American soldiers to the front lines, go back and get more. And through all of that, he never forgot who he was. Cherokee Nation was at the center of his understanding of himself, and he raised his three daughters away from Oklahoma, made sure that was their understanding, too.
He died in the 1970s, which I now understand is interesting, because he died one year before Cherokee Nation was reconstituted. So one way that I now understand him is as part of this lost generation. His entire life happened in a gap of history in which Cherokee people had effectively had their political identity taken from them. I knew his story before that, but I didn’t understand the political workings under it. Or appreciate what it must have meant for him to feel belonging without government, without land. And how beautiful I think it is, despite everything, to feel a belonging to your people.
Kellams: Wonderful. I’m so glad you decided to share that.
Ramage: Thank you. Thank you. It’s so good to be here.
Eliana Ramage’s debut novel is To the Moon and Back, and it is the Reese’s Book Club selection for September. Eliana will discuss the book with fellow writer Andrea Rogers at Underbrush Books in downtown Rogers on Monday, Oct. 6. Our conversation took place via Zoom in August.
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