When We Were Feral, the debut novel from Shasta Grant, is a restrained, deeply affecting debut novel that asks profound questions about grief, loss, and the ways society assigns blame. Through Maggie, a young girl whose mother abandons her family the same summer another teenager drowns, the novel explores how communities often shun or marginalize those who exist on the periphery of tragedy. As Maggie witnesses the fallout of both losses, she observes who is allowed to grieve openly and whose suffering is considered legitimate.
Maggie balances resentment and longing for her absent mother with an emotional intelligence beyond her years. She recognizes many of the contradictions and injustices around her, even when that insight cannot shield her from her own pain. The novel also examines the lingering effects of trauma through characters such as Sarah’s mother, whose desperate attempts to protect her daughters from an unnamed threat create a claustrophobic atmosphere. In focusing so intensely on preventing future harm, she becomes blind to dangers already present in their lives.
The simplicity of the prose allows tenderness to emerge throughout the story. While the narrative clearly belongs to Maggie, her friends Sarah and Erin feel less like supporting characters and more like different facets of a shared adolescent experience shaped by loss. Their prepubescent uncertainty, intensified by circumstances beyond their control, exposes the fragile connective tissue holding their friendship together.
When Erin’s mother goes missing, Maggie throws herself into helping her friend, transforming the search into a personal mission. Her determination reveals a deeper motivation, like a lost child crying out for a parent in a crowded department store, Maggie is, “calling everyone and no one” – trying to conjure a mother – any mother. She’s searching for the possibility of a mother who might answer her own longing. That exploration of grief becomes not simply a story about absence, but about the universal desire for connection, protection, and belonging.
Rita Hickey: The girls’ age is a pivotal place from which to build their story, as they are all desperately in need of maternal love and guidance while also needing to defy it and claim their independence. How was it to balance the heaviness of the losses with the everyday of tan lines, boy attention, flat stomachs, and the ever-present need to be taken seriously as growing adults?
Shasta Grant: They are at such a tender age, beginning to pull away from their parents, as we all must do, to become our own, autonomous selves. And you feel everything so deeply— if that boy doesn’t like you, if you don’t make the team—everything feels like it could be the end of the world. In this novel, Maggie and Erin are carrying real loss but they are still thirteen-year-old girls who want to do normal girl things. So, I wanted to show both sides of that – the desperation as losses compound but also the normality of wanting to wear a bikini and get a tan. It was certainly something I paid attention to balancing, both in terms of reflecting the emotional truth, and also keeping the reader in mind. If it tips too much into the heavy emotions, it could become too much for the reader to bear. But if it’s all sunscreen and bikinis, the grief won’t be believable.
RH: Your novel is structured around the four elements—water, earth, fire, and air. How did you decide what each element would symbolize emotionally and thematically within the story?
SG: The manuscript was divided into four parts early on, but the titles were added later, maybe during the second or third revision. The four elements tap into the witchy vibe the girls create in the woods. Deciding which element would symbolize which section of the novel happened organically. The water naturally ties to the drowning that the girls witness and all their time at the lake in part one. The earth section (part two) is when the girls take to the woods to look for Erin’s mother. The fire in part three is when things begin to really heat up both in terms of action and emotion, and part four – air- is when they can finally release that emotion and begin to let go.
RH: Water appears immediately alongside Rachel’s death and the beach setting. What drew you to use water as both a physical setting and a metaphor for grief, memory, and danger?
SG: I’ve always had a complicated relationship with water. I love to be lakeside or oceanside but I’m not a strong swimmer, so there’s always an undercurrent of fear. My grandmother’s youngest sister drowned when she was eleven or twelve at the same lake that appears in the novel. I think, maybe, I’m carrying some generational trauma around that. In the novel, this was also a way to highlight class differences around who knows how to swim and who doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s true now but when I was growing up in rural New Hampshire, swim lessons were something you’d have to pay for privately or you’d learn at summer camp. It wasn’t part of the PE program and there were no public pools nearby. I did go to summer camp as a child on Lake Champlain in Vermont (the water is frigid there). I failed the initial swim test and got a red cap. The next level was green cap and I tried so hard to become a green cap, which unlocked the ability to participate in other activities like canoeing. Every night at dinner they announced who was moving up a cap level. And every night I thought I’d hear my name, even though I hated putting my face in the water and was a terrible swimmer. I can’t remember now if I ever did get a green cap. So swimming, water, the beach, these are all complicated for me and it felt natural to use water as a metaphor.
RH: What was the first kernel of this story?
SG: The novel grew out of a couple of unpublished short stories, both about a mother who takes off, leaving her family behind with no explanation. As I started working on the novel, that wound was the center from which everything grew: Maggie’s mother taking off and the damage that created.
The foundational scene is a flashback: Maggie’s mother packing up the things that matter most to her into boxes she got from the liquor store. The details in that scene are the heart of the story — the trailer they live in, the car her mother drives, the specific objects she chooses to take. Each one says something about who her mother is, what she values, what she’s leaving behind. This scene became the source of motifs for the entire book.
RH: Did you write out of sequence?
SG: I do write out of sequence sometimes, particularly in revision. As I’m discovering more about the story—the themes, the characters—it sometimes requires writing new scenes out of sequence. In revision I wrote flashback scenes about Maggie’s mother and fleshed out her relationship with her father, and both were key to revealing more about Maggie herself. With the mother, Maggie is reaching back toward someone who is already half myth to her, so there’s a bit of a hazy quality. The scenes with her father are more grounded: they’re eating cereal, he’s swearing. Writing those scenes out of order gave me a better understanding of Maggie: the hole her mother left and the daily texture of life with her father.
RH: I desperately wanted them to confide all to one another but understood their reticence. What does silence communicate in your novel that spoken dialogue cannot?
SG: I wanted the girls to have secrets from each other. That felt accurate to me. In my experience, teen girls aren’t comfortable enough with themselves to share their deepest, darkest secrets, particularly when it comes to their bodies or sex. They don’t have language for it. It felt more authentic for them to be emotionally withholding from each other, to not want to reveal their true selves for fear of judgment. I also don’t love writing dialogue, so anytime silence can convey more meaning than words, I’m going to choose that — maybe that’s cheating.
RH: Adolescence and prepubescence are central to the emotional landscape. What interested you most about portraying that transitional age, particularly for girls navigating grief, shame, identity, and bodily awareness?
SG: I’ve always been drawn to writing about adolescence and a lot of my short stories circle this terrain. For me, there is so much heat in writing about characters this age. Everything is so intense, and everything is changing, including our bodies. There is so much shame wrapped up in that and you’re constantly comparing yourself to everyone around you, trying to find where the norm is.
This shame feels particular to girls because the stakes are different. The discourse around the female body is loaded in a way that it simply isn’t for boys: you’re asking for it if you dress a certain way, you’re not feminine enough if you dress another way. And in the early 90s, when this novel is set, there was even less language for what girls were navigating, less language for consent, for desire, for the difference between wanting to be seen and being taken.
Maggie has a moment where she watches the lifeguard and hopes he sees her as someone to touch rather than someone to save. That hope, that awakening, is innocent and natural. What the novel asks is what happens when the world responds to that awakening without care or language or restraint. These girls deserve so much more protection than the world gives them.
RH: Helicopter seeds and microfiche! How fun to revisit our own teen angst from our mature perch. When We Were Feral compassionately explores that struggle. How was it to revisit those times in the writing?
SG: This was the most fun part of writing the novel! For a while, it was as if I was living in this 90s haze, even though I was using the internet to research things like microfiche and the parts of trees. While I do remember using microfiche in particular, I wanted to get the details just right. And the research wasn’t just fact-based, it was sensory too. I set this novel in my hometown during the general time I was growing up, although the girls in the novel are a few years younger than me, so it was almost like time traveling. Every time I sat down to write, I was transported back. To those long afternoons where nobody knew where we were. We’d wander the woods or waste hours at Ben Franklin looking at nail polish and hair accessories, spritzing perfumes like Love’s Baby Soft on our wrists. These are the kind of details that live in the body. And of course, I listened to a lot of 90s music while writing, which didn’t hurt.
RH: When the girls suffer an assault, I appreciated that rather than focusing on the assaults, you cleverly use it to show how girls can turn in on themselves and then each other. In Maggie’s and Erin’s dissociation and need to feel something, they become cruel because Sarah “could never be fully feral with a real mom.” It shows them making an emotional, reactive choice, perhaps much like their mothers. How did you decide when to present tragedy directly versus indirectly, and what effect were you hoping that restraint would have on readers?
SG: Thank you for this thoughtful reading of this part of the novel. It was important to me that I get the tone of this just right – and it’s also the section that I worry most about how a reader will react. When you’re writing about trauma, I think one of the most effective methods is to pull back a little, present it as indirectly as you can without turning away from it entirely. This keeps the reader in mind. They don’t need all the graphic details – they can imagine it. So I decided not to linger too long here, either in terms of detail or page space. I got feedback from one editor at one point who suggested I “soften” this moment, make the girls less complicit, less knowing, but that didn’t sit right with me. Maggie and Erin are being cruel. They are making a terrible choice. I didn’t want to soften that. This should make readers uncomfortable, and I’ve done something wrong if it doesn’t.
RH: For those of us in the room working on our first novel, is your writing process different now based on what you learned about yourself in writing When We Were Feral?
SG: I wish I had some great lesson to impart! Each project demands its own process, so I’m not even sure I’ve learned anything useful for the next project. I wrote the first draft (which I’m now calling the “zero draft” after listening to ‘Pemi Aguda’s Debutiful podcast) of When We Were Feral during a three-month residency at the Kerouac House. I wrote 1,000 words a day, every day. That’s a great way to get a messy first draft but it means you’re going to face a lot of revision (years for me). I tried this process with a second novel, and it hasn’t worked as well. I’m still struggling to find the center of it and by that, I mean what it’s really about.
I believe we write to discover, so I know I need to just keep going. And that’s the best advice I can give to anyone working on a first novel: just keep going. Let go of perfection. That first draft is only for you anyway.
RH: Do you read fiction when writing? What are you reading now?
SG: For me, reading and writing go hand in hand. I can’t do one without the other. And I like to read books that are similar to what I’m working on, either in terms of style or themes. When I was writing the first draft of When We Were Feral some novels that were touchpoints for me were Marlena by Julie Buntin, History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, and We The Animals by Justin Torres. Right now, I’m reading Immersions by Kyle McCarthy and Skyland by Ann Joslin Williams.
RH: You acknowledge your journey with your agent, Saba Sulaiman, would you share a bit about that process?
SG: Saba was an absolute champ throughout the whole process. I came to her with a pretty messy version of the manuscript. There was a lot going on over a long period of time in that draft. I’d spent a year revising the zero draft and taken it as far as I could before querying. Saba saw something in it and understood what I was trying to do with the way girlhood and grief collide, and she saw the book as feminist in a way that felt exactly right to me. She took a chance on it — and me.
We went through several rounds of revisions over a couple of years. She basically gave me a crash course in how to plot a novel, helped me tease out Maggie’s character arc, pushed me toward a tighter time container, and I wrote an entirely new ending. In each revision, I discovered more about the story I wanted to tell. Saba never lost faith in the project, and because of that I never gave up either.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shasta Grant grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Indianapolis. An Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest winner, and recipient of writing residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home and her stories and essays have appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, wigleaf, and elsewhere.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Rita Hickey’s writing has appeared in Rum Punch Press and most recently she opened the Women in Noir reading for the 2025 Beacon LitFest. In past lives she wrote, produced and performed in an educational theater company out of Brooklyn and ran creative writing workshops on Rikers Island for women and men. She lives in Manhattan and is at work on her first novel.