Author Eliana Ramage was born and raised in Nashville, and lives here today. But in her new novel Ramage takes readers through Oklahoma, Connecticut, the depths of the ocean and even outer space.
Her new release, “To the Moon and Back,” is out Tuesday and tells the fictional story of one young woman’s quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut. WPLN’s Cynthia Abrams sat down with Ramage before the release of her debut.
Cynthia Abrams: Your main character is a young Cherokee woman, who is, dare I say, obsessed with becoming an astronaut. What drew you to writing about space (or, at least, a character who thinks a lot about space)?
Eliana Ramage: It started with this one image that I couldn’t get out of my head. I was 18 in a conversation with a bunch of friends from all different tribal nations. And, all of a sudden, one of them, Winter Fox, said, ‘If one of you were to become an astronaut, that too would be part of the story of your people.’ And when he said that, time kind of stopped, because I was flung into the future. And I realized that up until that point, all of us had been talking about ourselves and our tribal nations as — we had been understanding ourselves through the lens of history. We’d been talking about ourselves that way. And so I felt this kind of burst of optimism and excitement and wonder. I could picture — for years after that — these Cherokee people living on Mars and I wanted to write about it.
Abrams: At it’s core, “To the Moon and Back” feels like it is exploring the idea of what it means to belong — to a family, or a community. You, yourself are a member of the Cherokee Nation. In writing, how much were you inspired by your own experience?
Ramage: So much. I would say that the science stuff — the science research — happened on the page. It happened by asking a lot of people for help. But the Cherokee research was mostly experiences. So, studying the Cherokee language with my friend Greg, traveling, whether to Oklahoma or to North Carolina with my family. There’s a tribal council meeting that we attended that shows up in this book. So, there’s so many things that were story-based that found their way into the book fictionally.
Abrams: While your book is a work of fiction, there’s a lot in there that’s true: from astrophysics principles to Cherokee history. In fact, at the beginning of the book, you include an author’s note that says one character’s background, while fictional, is inspired by a case involving the Indian Child Welfare Act. How did you go about doing your research?
Ramage: The science research — I was originally interested in science because, as a kid, I was so excited about it. And then the math got hard. In college, I took these incredible classes that, again, I didn’t do that well in, but in animal behavior, in astronomy, in natural disasters and catastrophes. So I began to realize how much of science is story. And so I took that interest in kind of the group project of humanity that science is, and I found my way in through story.
Abrams: So the book really takes place all across the country — the one mention of Tennessee is a brief anecdote of President Trump visiting Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage back in 2016. Jackson is responsible for forcibly removing the Cherokee people from their lands via the Trail of Tears. How — if at all — did living in Nashville, and grappling with its history influence your writing?
Ramage: As a child, my Cherokee background was very much nurtured by my parents. And it was really special, after the fact, after I had left home, to realize that that was a gift that they had given me. That even though I was growing up in Nashville with my brothers — and the Cherokee people I was close to were related to us — that by the time I left home and my world opened, I had been given that foundation within a place as beautiful and diverse as Nashville.
My mother’s father was born in what had just become Oklahoma in 1907. Had he been born before, like his family, before that point, he would have been a Cherokee citizen, not an American citizen. Instead, he was born an American citizen, not a Cherokee citizen, because Cherokee Nation had been denationalized. That had just happened. He eventually left home, looked for work in Texas, Georgia, East Tennessee. And he served in World War II, driving trucks of very young men to the front lines and going back and forth. So that was his life.
And in that life, he felt like Cherokee Nation was at the center of who he was. And he passed that on to his three daughters, and my mom passed that onto me. I just had a child. I’m going to pass that onto her.
But I think what’s especially meaningful to me that I understand now, having written the book and learned more about those specific years and their history, is that he died in the 1970s right before, like a year before the nation was reconstituted. And that means that he is one of many people who lived their whole lives in this kind of gap of history where, almost like a lost generation, where you don’t have your political identity. Our family is Cherokee citizens. He never experienced that. And yet it was still so central to who he was. So, when I was writing this book and I was thinking about these characters who also return to a place where they haven’t lived, a grandparent lived there, I was thinking about what that means for me and for my child: That my grandfather was able to maintain connection and center that for his family. Even though he was living without his political identity, without land — when you don’t have land or government, the endurance of that wanting to belong and wanting to pass that on, it sticks out to me.
Abrams: You’ve taught before at places like The Porch, and MTSU’s Creative Writing Conference. Talk to me about the writing community here in Middle Tennessee — how has it supported or fueled your work?
Ramage: So supportive. I’m thrilled that we have the literary community here that we do. The Porch has been important to me. Parnassus [Books] is the first place — I’ve always loved Parnassus, but especially after I recently had a baby, it was the first public place (like the first place that wasn’t a friend’s house) that I could regularly bring the baby to for the events that they have that are open to the public. Vanderbilt has a reading series that I also love going to. And it’s felt like — there’s just so much happening with music, with art, with writing that’s made this feel like a place that, I mean, it’s where I want to be forever.
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