To the Moon and Back: a novel by Eliana Ramage
In 2009, I wanted to know how to write a novel. I was 18 years old, in my first year of college in New Hampshire, and I wrote about young Cherokee women.
I was a young Cherokee woman myself. But my writing was often set a couple of hundred years ago, in a time I knew little about but worried might be “more authentic” than my own Cherokee life. One day, I was hanging out on campus with several other Native American friends. And someone said this: “If one of you were to become an astronaut, that, too, would be part of the story of your people.”
I needed to hear that. In that moment and in my mind, I met Steph Harper. She was a young Cherokee woman, absolutely determined to become an astronaut. If I learn how to write a novel, I thought, I could finish this one by graduation?
I would write about Steph Harper for the next 15 years.
The Gaeltacht
In 2011, I was 20. While studying English literature at Trinity College in Dublin, I found myself more interested in Irish. I took an Irish language class, went to events put on by An Cumann Gaelach, and visited the Gaeltacht I couldn’t stop reading about.
Back home, I started studying the Cherokee language, this time with more dedication and more hope. I wrote a novel about seven generations of an Irish family and seven generations of a Cherokee family, which did not work. But a couple of years later, when I was ready to return to Steph Harper, she now came from a family of Cherokee language activists.
Cherokee Identity
In 2014, I was 23. I had a job as a high school teacher, far from my family and any other Native people. What would happen if I lived my whole life like that?
Enter Della Owens. Della was raised by white adoptive parents, and is now struggling to reconnect with her Cherokee identity. She is Steph’s best friend.
The Dakota Access Pipeline
In 2016, I was 25. I left my teaching job for the gift of two years in an MFA program in Iowa City. From Iowa, I took two road trips with friends to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. There were several thousand people there, camping out in tremendously low temperatures for months on end. It was the largest gathering of Indigenous people I’d ever been a part of, and I knew I’d never forget it.
Enter Kayla Harper, Steph’s younger sister. Kayla spends much of the novel as a mother, an artist, an activist, and a social media influencer—all while living in a protest encampment on a volcano in Hawai’i.
Maybe Queer, Maybe Not
In 2017, I was 26, and maybe queer, but maybe not?
In the novel, Steph and Della fall in love.
Four Novels
In 2018, I was 27. I finished graduate school with another draft of a book that wasn’t working. All in all, since leaving home at 18, I had written four novels that didn’t “work.”
I moved. I came out. I got divorced. I worked from 6am till 8pm, but writers manage difficult schedules all the time. What matters here is that I felt sad and discouraged. I felt very far from the person I’d intended to be. For two years, I did not write.
Time to Finish a Novel
In 2020, I turned 29 in the first week of the COVID lockdown. I flew home, moved in with my parents, and started over.
I had a room of my own in the house I’d grown up in. I had a new virtual job that didn’t start till 9am, and the time and calm to talk to old friends on the phone.
Eventually, my friend Angela asked if I was ready to write again. Would I join Four AM Club? Four AM Club was four friends who texted at four am for a writing session fit in before work. I said yes.
I did not finish the novel in Four AM Club. I wrote another draft, read it, saw the problems in it, cried, wrote a cli-fi book about Steph and Della in a sovereign Cherokee nation-state during wartime about 200 years in the future, read it, saw the problems in it, cried, returned to the original astronaut novel, read it, cried, and so on!
I told myself, over and over, to let go of the idea of a final product, of outward success I couldn’t control and wouldn’t know how to measure. I told myself: If you finish this novel, and you love it, wouldn’t that make you proud?
A Novel to be Proud of
Much life has happened, in the years since my return to writing. After four rounds of IVF, I had a daughter. Three weeks ago, she took 15 steps. Last week, she took another ten.
As a new parent, I try not to google ahead too much. Which means that a month ago, I thought walking was something that happens in an instant. Your baby toddles over to you, once, and from then-on she’s a toddler; she toddles off into the horizon! Four months ago, similarly, I thought I was waiting on a Momentous First Word. As it turns out, that’s not a tearjerker of a moment but the constant hum of a “mama mama mama mama mama” that somehow doesn’t mean “mama,” a “dada” that does mean “dada,” and the poetic choice to point any time we say “light.”
I did finish the novel. And it did make me very proud.
When that novel did, in the end, bring me to my agent Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, and then to my editors Margo Shickmanter and Bobby Mostyn-Owen, I continued to find joy in big changes to the work. Three new people had been invited in. Here were three deep and smart and kind and interesting viewpoints on life. The world of the book deepened and expanded from my knowing and caring for these three people. My real world did, too.
To the Moon and Back
On my 35th birthday(!), my debut novel will be published in the UK and Ireland. It’s called To the Moon and Back. When I started it, I thought I’d learn how to write a novel, start writing, and finish it before Steph and I turned 21. By that age, I thought I’d be more certain about the world and my place in it.
Instead, the story carries us through three decades. It holds many versions of Steph, as she learns and relearns who she might be. The same is true of the women Steph loves most dearly: her sister, her mother, her girlfriend, and her niece. That openness to change is something I now treasure.
Writing a Novel
Writing a novel is not the straightforward task I thought it would be. It’s filled with other people, other books, and the good and bad discoveries we make in our real lives. There are steps forward and backward and sideways.
Lately, in the early days of writing a second novel, I fantasize about skipping past uncertainty. What if you could tell me how to write a novel?
There is comfort in answers. But there’s much, much more, I think, to what we can’t know. I remind myself that no direct path would lend itself to the kinds of books and characters that have always had my heart. People who are not afraid to surprise themselves. People who allow their worlds to expand, both outwardly and inwardly. People who welcome other people, and go together to learn what comes next.
(c) Eliana Ramage
Author photograph (c) Leah Margulies
About To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage:
The astounding and expansive coming-of-age novel about a young woman whose quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most.
Steph Harper is on the run.
When she was five, her mother ran – with Steph and her younger sister in tow – from an abusive husband into the arms of a small Cherokee community, where she hoped they might finally belong.
But Steph soon sets her sights as far away as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing interfere with her dream to become an astronaut, and ultimately, to go to the moon.
In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with the three women who know and love her most dearly: her younger sister Kayla, an artist whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; her college girlfriend Della, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her family as a young girl through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and her mother Hannah, who has held up her family’s history as a beacon of inspiration to her kids, all the while keeping the truth about her own past a secret.
Told through these women’s interwoven lives, and spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive coming-of-age novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths one woman will go to find a little space for herself.
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