CANR

• Old School Indian - 2025 Hillman Grad Books, New York, NY

• Aaron John Curtis website - https://aaronjohncurtis.com/

  A mixed-race member of the Akwesasne Nation, Turtle Clan- half his mother’s Mohawk Indian (Kanien’kehá:ka) and half his father’s Scotch-Irish.

  He was born in Syracuse, NY and attended Syracuse University as a Musical Theater Major when the program was ranked third in the country (he was in a Minorities in Theater group with Taye Diggs and did lights for Vera Farmiga’s one-woman La Vie En Rose). He didn’t want some academic program teaching him about his first loves, writing and art, because he didn’t want to conform. He told himself he chose Musical Theater as a challenge. Little did Aaron realize he was scared. What if he put actual effort towards learning writing and art techniques, but it turned out he had no talent?

  At SU’s Musical Theater program, Aaron couldn’t keep up with the actors, singers, and dancers who had been working on their skills since they were children, and he was booted from the program. He was devastated. Even fooling himself into choosing a major far from his heart, it still hurt to be called a no-talent.

  There was a fiscal reality as well. He’d taken a year off after high school, saving money working at Leo & Sons Big M Supermarket and Bonwit Teller. Despite the rumors of free college for Natives, his Native blood was worth $500 a semester. Between the saved money, continued work at the supermarket and the department store, the $500, a small academic scholarship, a job delivering pizzas, and a work-study job as an usher, Aaron managed to pay for two years of college. The money ran out just as he was told he was unfit to perform.

  Reading in Costa Rica
  Reading Charity Shumway in a Costa Rica treehouse
  Because he didn’t know what else to do, he kept working at Bonwit Teller during the week and Leo & Sons on weekends. In his downtown apartment that had been a women-only youth hostel a hundred years before, he wrote and painted into the wee hours of the night, filling ashtrays with Camel cigarettes. He also dabbled in sewing, cooking, and creating found art from roadside trash. And drugs. He dropped hundreds of acid tabs. Maybe he ruined what was once a lightning-quick mind, and had to rebuild his brain from the sluggish dregs left to him when the hallucinogens ran dry. Maybe he compressed dozens of years of therapy breakthroughs into a few years of bending the space-time continuum living inside his head. Hard to tell from the distance of decades.

  Looking for a job he could leave when he clocked out, Aaron quit everything to become a dishwasher at Bennigan’s. Of course, clean or sober, exhausted or rested, he always prided himself on doing a good job. In two years, against his better judgement, he took twenty-five cent raises to learn every new backroom station and was eventually tapped for the management program. Needless to say, his creative side shriveled.

  He moved to Miami in 1997, the year the Marlins won their first world series. Cars and trucks inched along the roads, blaring music. Passengers danced out of sunroofs and in truck beds, banging pots and pans together. For a kid from a staid college town in the northeast, it was one hell of an introduction to the 305.

  For the first time in his life, his dark eyes and hair made him blend in rather than stand out. Miami allowed him to find himself in a lot of ways, growing more confident in himself and in his voice. He took classes at FIU and U of M and realized that everything he wanted to explore in life – all the careers and hobbies – could be plumbed through characters he invented.

  It was a long, winding road back to the writing life.

  Reading while brushing my teeth.
  Reading Lauren Oliver while brushing my teeth

  Who is Aaron John Curtis?

  After twenty years as an independent bookseller at Books & Books in Miami (and four years at Borders before that), my debut novel, Old School Indian, is being published by Hillman Grad, Lena Waithe’s imprint of Zando Publishing. It’s an incredible feeling.

  I hope to inspire people to continue to create art, despite capitalism’s best efforts to destroy it. Especially art which defies capitalism… even as I want to sell millions of copies and leave retail forever. What can I say? I’m complex.

  I hope to support ongoing language revitalization efforts on my family’s reservation, Akwesasne.

  I hope Old School Indian is my first book of many. Thanks for stopping by.

  Selected work
  Old School Indian, Lithub – excerpt
  “Cooking for One,” The Selkie – nonfiction essay
  Badass: Lip Service, True Stories (The Double Album) – nonfiction essay collection
  Coral Gables Love – Miami blog collective
  “World Book Night 2014 – ebook, nonfiction essay collection
  Lip Service: True Stories Out Loud – videos

• Ingram Content Group - https://www.ingramcontent.com/libraries-blog/author-spotlight-aaron-john-curtis

  Author Spotlight: Aaron John Curtis
  April 1, 2025
  Ingram Staff
  Author Spotlight: Aaron John Curtis
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  We are delighted that Aaron John Curtis made time to chat with us about his new novel Old School Indian, which will publish on May 6. This debut novel has already received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Learn more about how the author’s own experiences impact the story and why he thinks libraries offer a guilt-free opportunity to read new books.

  Ingram Library Services: Can you give us your elevator pitch for Old School Indian?

  Aaron John Curtis: A Mohawk dude living in Miami gets diagnosed with a terminal illness, so he goes home to his Reservation on the border between New York and Canada for a healing.

  ILS: What inspired this novel?

  AJC: About 1.5 million people in the US have Rheumatoid Arthritis; it has identifying markers and a prescribed course of treatment. Six people have the autoimmune disorder I have, and the history on it is sparse, which means it took months to diagnose me and treatment was a lot of experimentation.

  In the book, Abe complains that Johns Hopkins and the National Organization for Rare Disorders can’t even agree on a name for his condition, and this was also true of mine. All my fear and frustration came out in a short story I brought to my writers’ group, and they encouraged me to go full autofiction. While I expanded the story, an image came into my mind of an Elder winging a tomahawk like he was hitting a homerun. In writing towards that image, the narrative started to break away from my life story and my family’s stories and become its own thing, a mix of real life and fiction.

  ILS: You’re a longtime bookseller and have been a judge for multiple book awards. What was unexpected about writing your own novel?

  AJC: The length and back-and-forth of the editing process. For more than a year, post-sale of the manuscript, I had a new editing deadline coming up. As a bookseller, I’ve always wondered what the differences are from a bound manuscript to an ARC to a preview edition to the final book. Now I know.

  ILS: There’s a rich cast of characters in Old School Indian, not least among them Abe’s poetic alter ego, Dominick Deer Woods. How did you bring Dominick to life?

  AJC: The early drafts were angry and hostile towards the reader. I imagined an audience who had never thought of Native issues, and in doing so had made my protagonist’s life harder. My own fear of dying didn’t help. I started playing with point of view, then Dominick stepped in as a liminal narrator between first person and third person. Dominick was like, “How about we express these things in a way that’s not bumming everyone out?”

  ILS: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

  AJC: Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. Publishing, Hollywood, financial struggles, the artistic process, motherhood, marriage – there are so many layers, and she makes it all seem effortless. As a bonus, it’s funny. Jane is a messy protagonist, and her decisions are confounding, but damn if she doesn’t make those pages fly.

  ILS: What’s next?

  AJC: I have a few projects I’m excited about, but I’m afraid discussing the work will make it something I talk about instead of something I do. For now, I’m going to be present and grateful during my book tour, try to channel my inner extrovert, and enjoy the ride.

  ILS: Can you share a favorite memory of, or experience with, a library?

  AJC: Whenever I move, the first thing I do is get a library card. I always promise myself I’m going to stop buying new books and focus on reading the books I already have, but authors keep putting out great work and foiling my plans. Libraries are a loophole in the system – I can read as many as I want without feeling guilty for my overflowing shelves.

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• pagesofjulia - https://pagesofjulia.com/2024/11/25/maximum-shelf-author-interview-aaron-john-curtis/

  Maximum Shelf author interview: Aaron John Curtis
  Posted on November 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia
  Following Friday’s review of Old School Indian, here’s Aaron John Curtis: The Punch Is Real.

  Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Since 2004, Curtis has been quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. His debut novel is Old School Indian, a spirited, funny, and gravely serious story about a man who travels from his longtime home in Miami back to the reservation in New York State where he was raised, to process a serious medical diagnosis. It will be published by Hillman Grad Books/Zando on May 6, 2025.

  Abe’s story closely mirrors your own. What are the pros and cons of writing autobiographical fiction?

  Aaron John Curtis (photo: Cacá Santoro)

  The hard part is trying to disguise people who don’t want to be recognized. [I’ve been told] that if you change someone’s physical description, they never recognize themselves, because no one is aware of their own behavior. So I kept that in mind. But I was lucky in that for all the stories, I got permission. The hard part is some of the stuff goes to some pretty dark places. Hot-topic cold-prose is one thing, but it’s easy to go surface, to just say, this happened. My editor was so good at “drill down here, dig a little deeper,” and you do, and it’s emotional, and you lose that day being sad. That’s hard. At the beginning the hard part was actually doing it. Because I had in my mind if you did autofiction, it didn’t count as a real book, like I wasn’t a real author, it wasn’t legitimate.
  Because you didn’t make it up?

  Exactly. But this is all true and it’s all made up! It’s this weird mix. My writer’s group was really like, just go for it. Once I had the first draft, I was like, oh, this is how I want to write books from now on.

  Why this story now?

  I did not realize it at the time, but I had been having symptoms for a few years by the time [my illness] started to present. I was in the mountains of northern California, harvesting pot actually, and I had this mark on my leg. Oh, I’ll get that checked out when I get back to Miami. And because I’d been in the mountains, they thought it was MRSA. They treated it like MRSA, and it started to spread, and it was months of them trying to diagnose it. Dermatologist, rheumatologist, dermatologist, rheumatologist… they lived in the same high-rise… all this is in the book. They would have dinner and call me at like 10 at night, sounding like they were tipsy.

  They have that sheet of paperwork where they check off what they’re testing for. That second time they were testing, the doctor checked off the whole sheet. And when we got back the results, they were all negative. They didn’t tell the doctor anything, and she just stared at me and said “you’re fascinating.” And I was like, “yeah, fascinating.”

  Just trying to deal with that anxiety–whatever I’d been trying to write before didn’t matter. Just to get through my day to day, work a job, support my wife, and all that stuff–I had to get it out somewhere. And it was going toward the page. At the time I still wasn’t diagnosed; I didn’t know what was going to happen to the protagonist, either. And someone in the writer’s group said, well, what if there was a healer? And I was like, oh my god. A Native healer. Thanks for that trope. In my head, I was like, that’s borderline offensive. But then it was like, oh. Hmm. I know a healer. I’m related to a healer. Okay. Yeah. Imagine what getting him involved would look like.

  How did you come up with Dominick as narrator? Seems like he was fun to write.

  He’s got a little attitude. In my first draft, the narrator was first person, and was pretty hostile toward the reader. I don’t know if that was anger toward the disease or all these issues that had been on my mind about just being Native in life. I imagined a white reader and I had a lot of anger to take out. [Author] Diana Abu-Jaber kind of runs lead on my writer’s group, and she suggested I do it third person, see what that unlocked. That group is mostly older, middle-aged professionals, and then I had a second writer’s group that was younger and all women of color but for one guy. And they had read the first three chapters in that first person, and then the next were in third person, and they said it lost something. One person said, if I read that first book, I’d be running around telling everyone this is the best book ever. The second book, it was still good, but I wouldn’t have had that same reaction. Oh. Hmm.

  But I was really digging what the third person was doing. I don’t know exactly when Dominick started. Maybe it was when I was doing the poetry.

  Also, I don’t live on the reservation, I never have, and I wanted someone who’s a little more authentically Mohawk than Abe is. I hoped that would address the fact that I’m not born and raised there.

  You operate as both novelist and poet. Which is your home?

  The fiction comes a lot more naturally. I noticed, as I was editing the book, I was getting better at doing the poetry. And my original thought was, because Abe is working on it as well, as you read the book, the first set of poems would be kind of bad. And by the end you’d be like “wow, he can really do it now.” By the time we came to the final draft of the book, each poem was as good as I could make it.

  Poetry is something I want to do more of, definitely a challenge.

  What haven’t I asked?

  Did Tóta really do a split when she was 72? Yeah, she did. And [her] punch is real.

• BookPage - https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/aaron-john-curtis-interview-old-school-indian/

  May 2025
  Aaron John Curtis’ alter ego
  Interview by Alden Mudge
  Debut novelist Aaron John Curtis found power in telling his protagonist's story through "the voice of the rez."
  Share this Article:

  Old School Indian, Aaron John Curtis’ audacious first novel, is poised to grab readers’ full attention. The release has been highly anticipated, and there’s an intriguing breathlessness to the early reviews. But on Zoom, Curtis appears unperturbed, his expression, at first, unreadable.

  Curtis’ demeanor might convey the grateful exhaustion that follows an ultimately successful 10-year creative effort. This novel began as a short story, then, with feedback from his writing groups, grew into a novella and then blew up into drafts twice the book’s ultimate length.

  “I’m an easy edit,” Curtis says with a laugh. Like the novel’s central character, 43-year-old Abe Jacobs, Curtis is an enrolled member of the Kanien’kehá:ka—specifically, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, whose land lies between Ontario, Quebec and New York, though he now lives in DeBary, Florida, with his partner, Michi. It was advice from a woman in his writing group that turned the page on his struggles with his roman a clef novella and opened the path to this revelatory novel. “I still had it in my mind that fiction had to be 100% fiction, or it didn’t count. So instead of Abe living in Miami, he lived in Tampa. Instead of being a bookseller, he worked in insurance. Everything was just a little different. She said just go full autofiction with it, just hit the gas! . . . It became the easiest thing to use my life as the template.”

  Curtis seems to be a born and bred storyteller. “Last trip up north,” he says, “my niece complained, ‘Ask anyone in your family a question and you don’t get an answer, you get a story.’” And how the stories do flow, in both book and conversation!

  “The characters sort of pop up and start talking to you. There’s magic in those moments. You feel like a conduit.”

  In Old School Indian, it is 2016, and Abe has left Miami and returned to his family home in Ahkwesáhsne, along the Saint Lawrence River. He has been diagnosed with a fatal autoimmune disorder called Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis (SNiP), which bodies forth as suppurating skin sores and loss of sensation.

  SNiP is an invention, but a similar disorder, Polyarteritis Nodosa, is real, rare, nasty but not fatal and, in Curtis’ case, now in remission. As Curtis tells it, some years ago he and his ex-wife went to visit her aunt in northern California. She lived in a geodesic dome on a steep piece of land, used solar power and connected her plumbing to a spring. She grew pot. “We were there 10 days. The plants had already been harvested and bag-dried, so we spent the time removing stems and leaves and re-bagging. I think we noticed the first lesion on day three.”

  Writing about his illness was its own kind of pain, and in early drafts, written in the first person, “there was a lot of anger coming out.”

  “I guess the picture in my head was a white reader,” Curtis says. “I don’t know if I was worried about that or if I was worried that I was going to die, and I would have all of these thoughts that never got to be expressed or acknowledged or listened to. So . . . it was very hostile to the reader. The people in my writing group, except for one, were all white. And they were saying, ‘Oh we don’t think like that! That’s not what’s going on when we read.’ One of them suggested I change it to third person to see what it unlocked.” But when a different, younger group of readers saw the change, they missed the “anger or passion” that the first person provided. Curtis found a way to have both: He created a new character to narrate in first person, a man named Dominick Deer Woods who is an alter ego for Abe, and possibly for Curtis himself.

  “Dominick just popped out,” Curtis says. “I needed some distance. Abe has been in Miami so long he’s kind of lost his way. Dom is the voice of the rez.” In his telling, Dominick references depictions of and by Indigenous people in books, films and history, providing context for Abe’s experiences and challenging the reader on their assumptions.

  Curtis’ character Abe works in a bookstore in Miami, and like so many booksellers, baristas and bartenders, he has artistic aspirations. Likewise, Curtis has worked at Books & Books in Miami since 2004, though he’s now on leave to focus on his novel. His job title is Quartermaster, and he explains, “There was a time when any book you touched at Books & Books was a book I bought. My friend JC said, ‘You’re like the guy in the Army every soldier goes to when they want to requisition something, the quartermaster.’ In indie bookstores, we all wear a lot of different hats. Anytime someone takes on a new project, they add it to their business card and they end up with these little paragraphs on their cards that are just kind of silly. And it still doesn’t encompass everything you do. So, Quartermaster. It just stuck.”

  While visiting his family on the reservation, Abe gets terrible news from his doctors back in Miami. His family urges him to go see his great uncle. Uncle Budge is an earthy recovered alcoholic, a bit of a reprobate, a bit of a jokester, and a healer. He has a deadpan sense of humor, and his relationship with Abe deepens as the healing progresses. Maybe Uncle Budge is the titular old school Indian? Maybe, Curtis says.

  “The idea of a healer wasn’t in my first draft. Someone in my writer’s group said, what if there’s a healer, and I thought my God, that’s such a trope. Then I remembered that we have a healer in the family, and I thought I’d try to upend that stereotype of the mystic shaman sitting there burning sage by a fire. My Great Uncle Louis Burning Sky ‘Butch’ Conners was a healer. I’ve seen him in action twice but have never availed myself of his services. Since talking about Medicine dilutes it, I couldn’t depict healing as it actually happens, so Abe’s Uncle Budge had to have his own way of doing things. I will say Medicine is almost mundane.”

  Abe and Uncle Budge have three exquisitely described healing sessions. In each there is an exchange, a kind of spiritual payment, the final one being a poem by Abe that encapsulates the trauma of Uncle Budge’s life.

  “I wanted people to get the idea that the richest Mohawk is the one who gives the most away, that you take the same herb to treat constipation or diarrhea, the same herb because it’s just treating your intestines. I hoped to get the smells, the sounds, the inner thrum of the heartbeat. As you’re tooling along writing, the characters sort of pop up and start talking to you. If I were only writing about my life, I’d just be taking dictation. But there’s magic in those moments. You feel like a conduit.”

  “Sometimes you’re saving your emotions even if you’re not doing it on purpose. You need to dig deeper and find the truth.”

  His autoimmune disease isn’t the only threat to Abe’s well-being. His marriage to his wife, Alex, is faltering. We learn about the ups and downs of their long relationship, beginning when they were students at Syracuse University, through funny, poignant flashbacks, including scenes of polyamorous sex—of which, Curtis says, “A lot of that was cut out in the editing!”

  “It’s funny, I got a message on Instagram,” he adds. “I guess that happens. I would never go ‘Oh, John Irving has a new book out,’ and email him and be like, ‘Hey!’ but it happens now. The person wanted to recommend the book to her reading group at work and wondered if it had graphic sex in it. And I was like, 10 years of putting your life and soul into it, and the question is about graphic sex? First of all, my version of graphic might not be the same as yours. And when you don’t portray the sex life of a character, you risk not portraying them as fully human. . . . My God, there is suicide [in the book], there’s childhood sexual assault, there’s involuntary sterilization! Awful, awful, awful stuff! To boil it down to a question of explicit sex just blew my mind.”

  And here’s the nub of Old School Indian. For all its humor and drama, for all the powerful storytelling, for all the wonderful scenes of love, sex, healing and a brilliant depiction of the Jacobs family’s Thanksgiving, beneath the novel’s shimmering surface flows the anger and sorrow of a history of cultural trauma and erasure.

  These emotions are felt the strongest in poems by the narrator, Dominick, which are inserted between the chapters, and tell very hard truths about oppression and white supremacy. The effect is electric, but Curtis says they were “the most difficult thing to write.”

  “The desperation, the anger, the [fear] that my family stories would die with me just came out. It was my reckoning. I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to get the white supremacists.’ But I learned that sometimes a poem that arrives fully formed is a lie. It’s a roadblock sitting in front of the real poem. I had a poem that everyone liked. I thought it was good. I thought it was strong. At the last edit, it just didn’t feel right. Sometimes you’re saving your emotions even if you’re not doing it on purpose. You need to dig deeper and find the truth. I rewrote the entire thing and just sat there bawling.”

  Read our starred review of Old School Indian.

• PEN America - https://pen.org/aaron-john-curtis-the-pen-ten/

  Why The Windows Have To Be Open When Writing Poetry
  Writing as Craft
  The PEN Ten
  Amanda Wells
  July 18, 2025
  A man with short dark hair, glasses, and a suit, smiling slightly, is pictured beside the colorful book cover of Old School Indian: A Novel by Aaron John Curtis, featuring a stylized portrait with sunglasses and a bandana.
  Aaron John Curtis | The PEN Ten
  The restorative and revelatory journey in Old School Indian, the debut novel by Aaron John Curtis, explores the impact that culture, community, and history have on an individual. Two decades after leaving the reservation where he was raised, Abe Jacobs, now a part-time poet in Miami whose marriage is about to collapse, is diagnosed with a rare disease that doctors believe will kill him. Returning to the Rez, where he grew up, Abe agrees to undergo traditional healing by his Great Uncle Budge despite his skepticism, and finds a new path forward with writing, healing, his family, and his relationship. (Zando – Hillman Grad Books, 2025)

  In conversation with Digital Safety & Free Expression Program Coordinator Amanda Wells for this week’s PEN Ten, Curtis explains the importance of oral histories when researching, why illness is an impetus for change, and which significant aspect of Kanien’kehá:ka identity didn’t make it into the novel. (Bookshop; Barnes & Noble)

  The “you” or, the audience, is very present in this novel. What reader did you have in mind as you were writing, and how did that guide the choices you made about what aspects of Abe and his culture to explain, and what to leave up for interpretation?
  I normally write to entertain myself. Later, I trust my writers groups to tell me what’s working and what’s not. There are Easter eggs specifically aimed at Akwesasne Mohawk readers, but I assumed a mostly non-Native audience. I didn’t want to push anyone away, so I explained as much as I could. If there are gaps, then they’re either where I wanted to protect my family’s privacy, or they’re where my knowledge ran out.

  Something that comes up often throughout this book is a sense of frustration and futility at trying to translate Native words into English–like the scene where Abe’s teacher tries to correct his translation of the word “Ionterahkwawehrhohstáhkhwa” as “umbrella.” Do you ever feel similarly about trying to capture Native experiences, traditions, and sentiments in your writing?
  Writing about how Abe’s Tóta gave him an Indian name, which happens to be how I got my Indian name, I felt very conscious of the white gaze. Even though it was an authentic experience in my life, it felt like a performance of Indigenousness. So I wrote that into the book, how being Mohawk in America can sometimes feel like I’m wearing a costume. I had to include that so I could be authentic to my experience and my family’s experiences without feeling like I was playing into stereotypes.

  What was it like to do research for this novel? Did you learn anything unexpected in the process?
  Most of the research was keeping my ears open around family. I’ve amassed plenty of reading over the years to stay connected to the Rez while living in Miami –small press, self-published, or university press titles Haudenosaunee leaders and activists have written – and I’ve re-read some of them so many times I think the sociology and history just sticks. I used my nephew’s textbooks from when he took language classes for the Kanien’kéha (Mohawk language) I use. My mother gifted them to me. She’d been trying to remember the language which white schools had taken from her but it wasn’t working, so she handed them to me and said, “I hope you can do something with these.” I knew Tóta, the word for grandparent, was gender irrelevant but I was surprised the words for mother and aunt were the same, the words for father and uncle, for husband and wife.

  So I wrote that into the book, how being Mohawk in America can sometimes feel like I’m wearing a costume. I had to include that so I could be authentic to my experience and my family’s experiences without feeling like I was playing into stereotypes.
  You write in the Author’s Note that SNiP, which Abe is diagnosed with, is a fictional disease–but that PAN, which you are in remission from, is not. How did your own experiences with illness shape the novel?
  The fear I had of dying young and anger at the team of specialists who couldn’t diagnose me for months informed the early short story and novella. About halfway through writing the novel, doctors found a long-term treatment which worked for me. I kept my and Abe’s symptoms the same, but I changed the name; writing about my proxy going through the worst of it while I was finally on the mend felt like tempting fate. To portray Abe’s desperation, fear, and various physical symptoms, I relied on my diary a lot.

  SNiP encourages Abe to move back home, reconsider his relationship to Native medicine, and begin writing once again. What makes illness and disability such a powerful catalyst for change?
  Everyone born knows we owe a death. Since we have no way of knowing when that debt will come due, it’s an abstraction, easy to push from our day-to-day thoughts. Illness makes death a reality. It’s rushing towards Abe, so he stops procrastinating and starts using his talents. Of course it did the same for me. I stopped dabbling in various stories and focused on this one.

  One of my favorite scenes in Old School Indian is when Dominick chases poems around a field to catch them and bring them to Abe. How representative is this “chasing” of your own writing process?
  To me prose is fairly workaday — just get up in the morning and push that cursor across the page until you have enough to work with, then chip away the excess as the shape of what you’re writing reveals itself (ideally with insight from other writers who can help you see clearly). I do it at 5:00 AM because my inner critic is still asleep at that time, which helps a lot, and instead of writing until inspiration runs out I leave a little gas in the tank for the next day, which helps even more.

  Everyone born knows we owe a death. Since we have no way of knowing when that debt will come due, it’s an abstraction, easy to push from our day-to-day thoughts. Illness makes death a reality.
  How did the process of writing the poetry for this novel differ from writing the narrative?
  Poetry feels much different, the practice of being open to the world in the hope that some spark will show up. I kept all the windows open while drafting the poems. It seemed perfectly sane to do at the time because it worked, but in retrospect I think the Miami heat broke my internal thermometer and I’ve never quite managed to cool down. It doesn’t happen for me exactly as it does for Abe, but the poem about Elizabeth II did sit down next to me at an airport and present itself fully formed. After that, it tried to hide. Editing at the airport bar, I used it to replace a weaker poem, sent the draft off to my agent, and told her it included “my favorite thing I’ve ever written.” When I got her notes back, I realized the airport poem wasn’t there, and I couldn’t remember a word of it. It also wasn’t on my backup drive. I panicked until I remembered I was on the road, which is a different backup drive. When I looked on the travel drive and found it, it was there but not in the poetry folder. I wanted to capture those feelings, of an invisible guest, and of chasing the words of a shy poem down. Likewise, in the difference between a poem in your mind versus on the page, the line that sometimes all you’ll get is the struggle to capture it. An indie bookseller in Rhinebeck told me she has poems present themselves to her exactly as they do to Abe in the novel, so I think I got it right.

  One of the things I most admire about this novel is how many threads about Native identity it manages to weave together–like, for example, Abe’s Native-Irish cousins, the family’s Thanksgiving traditions, and the divisiveness of religion in Abe’s family. Is there anything that you didn’t get the chance to write about that you would have liked to?
  Dreams are important to Kanien’kehá:ka. I dropped out of college because of a dream. I was partying way too hard, and a dream told me to quit drinking and leave Syracuse University. A different parent might have gotten angry, but my mother understood completely. The first draft of Old School Indian had two or three pivotal dreams for Abe, but I couldn’t capture the significance on the page so they got cut early on.

  It’s common advice that writers must “kill their darlings” as they edit their work. What is one thing that didn’t make it past the editing floor?
  The flashback scene where a young Abe and Cheryl Curly Head kiss originally started with a star-crossed lovers story between a Mohawk woman named Mary Smoke and an Odawa man named Eppa Minocotab. They died on the shore of the Ahna’wate river, what became the bridge over the Raquette River. The story turned out to be just a means for me to get to the kiss, which was the important part I kept in. Mostly I miss it because I liked my quick descriptions of Mary Smoke as a “wide-hipped wonder” and Eppa as “tall and slim as a blade.” Plus finding an old-timey name like Eppa Minocotab and not using it stung.

  Poetry feels much different, the practice of being open to the world in the hope that some spark will show up. I kept all the windows open while drafting the poems. It seemed perfectly sane to do at the time because it worked, but in retrospect I think the Miami heat broke my internal thermometer and I’ve never quite managed to cool down.
  As Abe comes back into his being as a writer, he often laments time and the idea that he thought he would have more of it for his writing. How long has this novel lived inside of you, and how long have you been writing it?
  I wrote the original short story in May of 2015 and the last draft in October of 2024, with a full-time job, domestic duties, the aforementioned health issues, a divorce, and four moves in between. There’s a story from 1979 about growing up as a Lost Child, the third-born into an alcoholic family, so parts have been inside me for a good long while. I found a picture of myself at that age, which helped me see why people consider this plot point tragic. Looking back I put myself there, not the child I was. After seeing that picture, I like to tell myself I’m taking that Lost Child on the book tour.

  Debut novelist Aaron John Curtis is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Akwesasne. Aaron has judged for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance prizes, the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Since 2004, Aaron has been Quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. He lives in Miami.

Curtis, Aaron John OLD SCHOOL INDIAN Zando (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 6 ISBN: 9781638931454

A Native American man returns home to heal wounds both literal and metaphorical.

Abe Jacobs, the hero of Curtis' finely tuned debut, is 43 and seriously ill. He's taken a break from his job as a bookseller in Miami (and from his wife, Alexandria East), to visit family on a Mohawk reservation in upstate New York. He's suffering from chronic fatigue and lesions on his legs that baffle his doctors; while he waits for a formal diagnosis, he skeptically but desperately accepts some folk treatment from a great-uncle. Otherwise, he spends his stay reconnecting with friends and family, attempting to make sense of his various past struggles: a depression that led to a suicide attempt, a difficult open relationship with Alex, and a stalled career as a poet. That last challenge gives the novel a poignant, lyrical lift: An alter ego of Abe's, Dominick Deer Woods, regularly intrudes on the narrative, sharing excerpts of Abe's poetry and generally serving as his snarkier, more confident self. ("Abe? He's just the guy with the rotting skin who panicked and fled his wife, friends, and job in Miami. Why should he need to know what's going on? It's just his sanity.") Some of those sidebars deal with Native American life, from food to tribal relationships, to the bigotry that informs Abe's skepticism of traditional medicine, to forced sterilizations, and more. A formal diagnosis, when it finally arrives, pushes the narrative into a deeper, more soulful, and in some ways more surprising territory. Thematically, the novel contains echoes of Leslie Marmon Silko's classicCeremony (1977), which also dealt with themes of trauma and Indigenous paths to healing. But Curtis' voice is his own, and its ending, while a left turn, feels wholly earned.

An affecting tale of loss and healing that thrives through its seriocomic style.

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"Curtis, Aaron John: OLD SCHOOL INDIAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785258/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9bc948bd. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025.

Old School Indian, Aaron John Curtis' audacious first novel, is poised to grab readers' full attention. The release has been highly anticipated, and there's an intriguing breathlessness to the early reviews. But on Zoom, Curtis appears unperturbed, his expression, at first, unreadable.

Curtis' demeanor might convey the grateful exhaustion that follows an ultimately successful 10-year creative effort. This novel began as a short story, then, with feedback from his writing groups, grew into a novella and then blew up into drafts twice the book's ultimate length.

"I'm an easy edit," Curtis says with a laugh. Like the novel's central character, 43-year-old Abe Jacobs, Curtis is an enrolled member of the Kanien'keha:ka--specifically, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, whose land lies between Ontario, Quebec and New York, though he now lives in DeBary, Florida, with his second wife, Michi. It was advice from a woman in his writing group that turned the page on his struggles with his roman a clef novella and opened the path to this revelatory novel. "I still had it in my mind that fiction had to be 100% fiction, or it didn't count. So instead of Abe living in Miami, he lived in Tampa. Instead of being a bookseller, he worked in insurance. Everything was just a little different. She said just go full autofiction with it, just hit the gas!"

In Old School Indian, it is 2016, and Abe has left Miami and returned to his family home in Ahkwesasne, along the Saint Lawrence River. He has been diagnosed with a fatal autoimmune disorder called Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis (SNiP), which bodies forth as suppurating skin sores and loss of sensation.

SNiP is an invention, but a similar disorder, Polyarteritis Nodosa, is real, rare, nasty but not fatal and, in Curtis' case, now in remission. As Curtis tells it, some years ago he and his ex-wife went to visit her aunt in northern California. She lived in a geodesic dome on a steep piece of land, used solar power and connected her plumbing to a spring. She grew pot. "We were there 10 days. The plants had already been harvested and bag-dried, so we spent the time removing stems and leaves and re-bagging. I think we noticed the first lesion on day three."

Writing about his illness was its own kind of pain, and in early drafts, written in the first person, "there was a lot of anger coming out."

"I guess the picture in my head was a white reader," Curtis says. "I don't know if I was worried about that or if I was worried that I was going to die, and I would have all of these thoughts that never got to be expressed or acknowledged or listened to. So . . . it was very hostile to the reader. The people in my writing group, except for one, were all white. And they were saying, 'Oh we don't think like that! That's not what's going on when we read.' One of them suggested I change it to third person to see what it unlocked." But when a different, younger group of readers saw the change, they missed the "anger or passion" that the first person provided. Curtis found a way to have both: He created a new character to narrate in first person, a man named Dominick Deer Woods who is an alter ego for Abe, and possibly for Curtis himself.

"Dominick just popped out," Curtis says. "I needed some distance. Abe has been in Miami so long he's kind of lost his way. Dom is the voice of the rez." In his telling, Dominick references depictions of and by Indigenous people in books, films and history, providing context for Abe's experiences and challenging the reader on their assumptions.

Curtis' character Abe works in a bookstore, and likewise, Curtis has worked at Books & Books in Miami since 2004, though he's now on leave to focus on his novel. His job title is Quartermaster, and he explains, "There was a time when any book you touched at Books & Books was a book I bought. My friend JC said, 'You're like the guy in the Army every soldier goes to when they want to requisition something, the quartermaster.' In indie bookstores, we all wear a lot of different hats. Anytime someone takes on a new project, they add it to their business card and they end up with these little paragraphs on their cards that are just kind of silly. And it still doesn't encompass everything you do. So, Quartermaster. It just stuck."

While visiting his family on the reservation, Abe gets terrible news from his doctors. His family urges him to go see his great uncle. Uncle Budge is a recovered alcoholic, a bit of a reprobate, a bit of a jokester and a healer. He has a deadpan sense of humor, and his relationship with Abe deepens as the healing progresses. Maybe Uncle Budge is the titular old school Indian? Maybe, Curtis says.

"The idea of a healer wasn't in my first draft. Someone in my writer's group said, what if there's a healer, and I thought my God, that's such a trope. Then I remembered that we have a healer in the family, and I thought I'd try to upend that stereotype of the mystic shaman sitting there burning sage by a fire. My Great Uncle Louis Burning Sky "Butch" Conners was a healer. I've seen him in action twice but have never availed myself of his services. Since talking about Medicine dilutes it, I couldn't depict healing as it actually happens, so Abe's Uncle Budge had to have his own way of doing things. I will say Medicine is almost mundane."

Abe and Uncle Budge's three healing sessions are exquisitely described, and each includes an exchange, a kind of spiritual payment. "I wanted people to get the idea that the richest Mohawk is the one who gives the most away, that you take the same herb to treat constipation or diarrhea, the same herb because it's just treating your intestines. I hoped to get the smells, the sounds, the inner thrum of the heartbeat. As you're tooling along writing, the characters sort of pop up and start talking to you. If I were only writing about my life, I'd just be taking dictation. But there's magic in those moments. You feel like a conduit."

His autoimmune disease isn't the only threat to Abe's well-being. His marriage is faltering. We learn about the ups and downs of his long relationship with his wife, Alex, beginning when they were college students, through funny, poignant flashbacks, including scenes of polyamorous sex--of which, Curtis says, "A lot of that was cut out in the editing!"

"It's funny, I got a message on Instagram," he adds. "I guess that happens. I would never go 'Oh, John Irving has a new book out," and email him and be like, 'Hey!' but it happens now. The person wanted to recommend the book to her reading group at work and wondered if it had graphic sex in it. And I was like, 10 years of putting your life and soul into it, and the question is about graphic sex? . . . My God, there is suicide [in the book], there's childhood sexual assault, there's involuntary sterilization! Awful, awful, awful stuff! To boil it down to a question of explicit sex just blew my mind."

And here's the nub of Old School Indian. For all its humor and drama, for all the powerful storytelling, for all the wonderful scenes of love, sex, healing and a brilliant depiction of the Jacobs family's Thanksgiving, beneath the novel's shimmering surface flows the anger and sorrow of a history of cultural trauma and erasure. These emotions are felt the strongest in poems by the narrator, Dominick, which are inserted between the chapters and tell very hard truths about oppression and white supremacy. The effect is electric, but Curtis says they were "the most difficult thing to write."

"The desperation, the anger, the [fear] that my family stories would die with me just came out. It was my reckoning. I thought, 'Oh, this is going to get the white supremacists.' But I learned that sometimes a poem that arrives fully formed is a lie. It's a roadblock sitting in front of the real poem. I had a poem that everyone liked. I thought it was good. I thought it was strong. At the last edit, it just didn't feel right. Sometimes you're saving your emotions even if you're not doing it on purpose. You need to dig deeper and find the truth. I rewrote the entire thing and just sat there bawling."

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Curtis, Aaron John, and Alden Mudge. "ALTER EGO: Debut novelist Aaron John Curtis found power in telling his protagonist's story through 'the voice of the rez.'." BookPage, May 2025, pp. 12+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835362566/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8fa82565. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025.

Old School Indian. By Aaron John Curtis. May 2025. 352p. Zando/Hillman Grad, $28 (9781638931454).

In Curtis' sharply comic and touching debut, middle-aged Abe Jacobs returns in 2016 to the Mohawk reservation in upstate New York where he was raised, in the desperate hope of curing the painful, debilitating, and potentially fatal autoimmune disease that has been afflicting him. Abe left home at 17 with the aim of becoming a poet, but settled for selling books in Miami and enduring an unsatisfying marriage with his college sweetheart Alexandria, who frequently gets involved with other lovers. Back on the reservation, Abe reunites with former friends and relatives, and attempts--with considerable skepticism--a course of healing led by his great-uncle Budge, who tells Abe, "Your body went old school Indian and conjured its own death." Curtis' most compelling creation is his narrator, Dominick Deer Woods, an alter-ego Abe created to give him courage during his first college poetry readings. Dominick is bright, angry, politically and historically aware, and generally the polar opposite of schlubby Abe, who is the target of some of the narrator's most caustic comments. The evolving relationship between the narrator and the anti-hero he observes and interferes with gives the novel its considerable power.--Margaret Quamme

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Quamme, Margaret. "Old School Indian." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211593/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ebbe4cba. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025.

"Curtis, Aaron John: OLD SCHOOL INDIAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785258/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9bc948bd. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025. Curtis, Aaron John, and Alden Mudge. "ALTER EGO: Debut novelist Aaron John Curtis found power in telling his protagonist's story through 'the voice of the rez.'." BookPage, May 2025, pp. 12+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835362566/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8fa82565. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025. Quamme, Margaret. "Old School Indian." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211593/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ebbe4cba. Accessed 20 Aug. 2025.

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