In line with Native American Heritage Month, we’re thrilled to welcome Caskey Russell and share his beautiful article on writing his debut novel THE DOOR ON THE SEA. Before we hand you over, let’s learn more:

When Elān trapped a salmon-stealing raven in his cupboard, he never expected it would hold the key to saving his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders plaguing their shores. In exchange for its freedom, the raven offers a secret that can save Elān’s home: the Koosh have lost one of their most powerful weapons, and only the raven knows where it is.

Elān is tasked with captaining a canoe crewed by an unlikely team including a human bear-cousin, a massive wolf, and the endlessly vulgar raven. To retrieve the weapon, they will face stormy seas, cannibal giants and a changing world. But Elān is a storyteller, not a warrior.

As their world continues to fall to the Koosh, and alliances are challenged and broken, Elān must choose his role in his own epic story.

The Door on the Sea is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org or from retailers linked here

Saving the Butterflies

by Caskey Russell

In Ray Bradbury’s famous short story “A Sound of Thunder,” a time-traveling safari company allows wealthy trophy hunters from 2055 to journey back to the Mesozoic era and shoot dinosaurs.  The company claims that the dinosaurs have been carefully pre-selected: they were about to die anyway, so killing them won’t alter the future.  Several hunters and two guides travel back to the past and walk along an anti-gravity walkway that hovers above the landscape to prevent the hunters from destroying flora and potentially altering the future.  The pseudo-protagonist of the story, however, panics while fleeing a tyrannosaurus rex, steps on a butterfly, and returns home to discover that the future has been subtly altered—complete with a dictator for president.

When I began writing The Door on the Sea, which is my debut in a trilogy about a group of shapeshifting villains seeking to conquer and enslave the Indigenous inhabitants of an Alaska-like world, I felt that Bradburian impulse, common I’m sure to all Indigenous people, to travel back in time armed with contemporary knowledge (and maybe a few powerful modern or futuristic weapons) to help my ancestors rewrite the future.  As I was plotting out the arc of the novel, I imagined handing my Tlingit ancestors modern steel weapons and armor. I even dropped a weapon called the dzanti into the novel, the user of which can control lightning and destroy ships and incinerate armies.  Let the colonizers think twice about colonizing Alaska.

But I was also writing under the strict scrutiny of two small but powerful tyrants of literary criticism: my first and fifth grade sons.  I wrote the novel to entertain them, and they were as relentless and demanding as any editor or reviewer.  They issued daily deadlines, required nightly readings, and were effuse with their criticism.  And they had demands.  A lot of demands.  The book needed swords, armor, pizza, cannibal giants, a wolf named after one of their stuffed animals, pubs with massive stone fireplaces like the one we visited on the Hobbiton filmset in New Zealand, pewter mugs sloshing with ale and root beer, a small dog named Chich (after a chihuahua they once dog-sat), and humans who lived like black bears and protected the bears during hibernation.

“Because who protects bears when they’re asleep?” my son Aiden asked.  I guess the correct answer was my novel.

To decline any of these requests risked tears or, worse, late-night protests.  More than once I woke past midnight to see a small silhouette standing beside my bed, whispering, “Dad, I’ve been thinking about my character, and I think…”

I drew the line at shrimp guns.  My son Chet envisioned characters firing lasers from the mouths of jumbo shrimp—just squeeze the shrimp and zap.  I refused.  Lasers?  This wasn’t Star Wars.  And what underwater organism has the anatomical means to generate high-energy laser beams?  My children were appalled by my lack of imagination.  Aiden, now twenty, still refuses to read the trilogy until it contains shrimp-based weaponry.

Eventually, I surrendered to my young critics’ demands and moved the story out of 18th-century Alaska and into an alternate speculative world.  In this world, traditional Tlingit foods such as smoked salmon, herring eggs on spruce branches, hooligan oil (which is an oil rendered from the eulachon fish) could sit comfortably and even complimentarily on the same table as pizza, fry bread, and clam chowder.  Tlingit villages could have longhouses with plumbing, and castle-like forts built from stone could crowd the shorelines of this imaginative world.  The invaders were no longer Europeans but aliens, armed with strange futuristic technologies that gave my sons plenty of opportunities to suggest improvements.  (My sons had notes. They always had notes.)

Letting my elementary-school critics shape the narrative also solved an internal struggle I was having: how “authentic” to make the representation of Tlingit culture.  I was caught up, in my mind, in debates over what is or isn’t culturally authentic and whose definition of authenticity I should follow.  Even my great-grandmother, who was the oldest relative I knew who spoke to me about Tlingit tradition, was born in 1890, long after colonization had rearranged our world.

By relocating the story to a fantasy universe, I freed myself. Authenticity became less about recreating and recapturing the past and more about carrying forward its spirit, its humor, its resilience, its sense of community, its respect of the natural world.  I could honor both tradition and my sons’ notes on what was lacking in the novel.

Now, with the novel published, I can see that, given diversity of my family tree, it was appropriate that the novel take place in a fantasy world. Like many Indigenous people, I come from a complicated lineage.  Shake my family tree and Europeans tumble out including, I am certain, some unwashed soldier of fortune who once leaned over the gunwale of an 18th-century sloop lusting for the wealth of Lingit Aaní (the Tlingit term for our homeland).  Shake it again and out fall Tlingit warriors trained to make sure that that soldier of fortune reconsiders his life choices.

Hell, you don’t even have to go that far back in my family tree to find conflict.  My grandfathers famously got into a fistfight on my parents’ wedding night!  Part of the conflict was religion (my father’s family Catholic, my mother’s Lutheran), part of it was race (Dad’s side is German and Irish; Mom’s side Tlingit and Irish), and part—probably most—was booze. Both of my grandfathers loved the drink.  After the fight, the two sides of the family had to be kept apart.  They were never again allowed in the same room.

Maybe speculative fiction is one of the few places where people who couldn’t or shouldn’t be together in real life can meet peacefully, or at least without as many punches.

Returning to Bradbury: would I take a time machine full of weapons back to a Tlingit Alaskan past and try to rewrite the future?  No.  Probably not.  For one, I might have the kind of luck that would guarantee I’d step on a prehistoric butterfly and return home to find everything subtly wrong.

But I would go back in time to stop the spread of disease.  I’d bring vaccines and warnings about pathogens to help the ancestors avoid the catastrophic losses that reshaped our history during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.  No one can learn about the horror and devastation of those epidemics and remain neutral.  Such knowledge is haunting.

Maybe that’s why speculative fiction matters.  It doesn’t let us change the past, but it does let us speak to it.  It lets us imagine a world where our ancestors had lightning weapons, where our grandparents didn’t have to fight at weddings, where Indigenous futures are open to imagination and full of possibility.  And it lets us save the butterflies.

The Door on the Sea is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org or from retailers linked here

Caskey Russell is from Seattle Washington, and has lived in Washington State (Bellingham, Seattle, Kirkland) Oregon, Iowa, Wyoming, and New Zealand. He is a father, a professor, a musician, and an enrolled member of the Tlingit Nation (Eagle / Kooyu Kwáan) of Alaska.