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• Waiting for the Long Night Moon - 2025 Catapult, New York, NY

• Amanda Peters website - https://amandapetersauthor.com/

  I am a woman, a daughter, a sister, an Auntie, a cat mom, a dog mom, a friend, a descendent of a revolutionary war sailor, of accused witches and Mi'kmaq ancestors. A Canadian, a traveler, a wine drinker, an admirer of stained glass, a listener of jazz and old country, a reader of books, and a teller of stories.

  Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

• Muskrat - https://muskratmagazine.com/mikmaw-writer-amanda-peters-is-waiting-for-the-long-night-moon/

  Mi’kmaw writer Amanda Peters is Waiting for the Long Night Moon
  Posted by Shannon Webb-CampbellDate: August 20, 2024
  Mi’kmaw writer Amanda Peters is Waiting for the Long Night Moon
  Mi’kmaw-settler author Amanda Peter’s first book, The Berry Pickers (Harper 2024) was a critically acclaimed bestseller in Canada, and was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her second book, Waiting for the Long Night Moon (Harper 2024), is a short story collection comprised of 17 short stories spanning the Indigenous experience from first contact with European settlers to residential schools and the current realties of fighting for clean water.

  For Peters, the moon has always been her guide.

  “I have a deep respect and affinity for the moon. I didn’t intend to write a ‘fictional history’ but it came out that way,” she says. “These stories were written over a few years so they were inspired by so many different events and discussions and random things. The story ‘3 Billion Heartbeats’ came to me when I was flipping through an old physics text book.”

  The moon plays a central role in the short story collection. From the title of the book Waiting for the Long Night Moon to the various moon phases like “The winter moons start soon,” in the title short story, “the sliver of the moon,” in “The Birthing Tree,” “He could wander these woods on the darkest night, without even the moon,” in “The Virgin and the Bear.” Peters continues to be fixated by the moon.

  “I could look at it forever and it’s one of those things that every human can relate to. We all look at the same moon,” says Peters. “Short story writing is very different. There has to be an entire story in such a condensed space. You can’t leave your reader wondering what’s going on by leaving something out.”

  Many of the short stories like “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” deal with grief, but also how it informs joy and can be a pathway forward. Everyone has different ways of dealing with grief and some are explored in Waiting for the Long Night’s Moon. “Yet sometimes, people simply don’t want to deal with it, it can be something too hard to face alone,” she says.

  “I think a lot of the characters in this collection have someone to help them, whether it be a grandfather, a Bear, a deer, nature itself. Nature has such an ability to heal.”

  Much like spending time in nature, writing is another pathway to healing. Peters holds a certificate in creative writing from the University, and is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University and lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia.

  Currently, she is working on a new novel. She has a few drafts done, but there is still much more work to be done. For now, she’s trusting in the creative process.

  “I am not someone who can write in short bursts. I need hours to sit and think and write. I like to take my coffee first thing in the morning and sit down at my desk and write for as long as the inspiration is there,” she says. “Sometimes that’s 3 hours and sometimes it’s 12. Just depends. I can edit in short bursts so I can sit down for 30 minutes at a time and edit.”

  Peters believes all stories told by Indigenous storytellers are an act of resistance. For so long the stories have been told by other but now we are taking back story.

  “I think there are many other Indigenous writers who do it much better than me but each time we tell or write or sing our stories we are reminding the world that we are still here,” says Peters. “And we are not going anywhere. I think that is what I was thinking when I wrote “A Strong Seed” to finish the collection.

  “We are strong and we will continue to be.”

  Peters’ Waiting for the Long Night Moon (Harper 2024) publication date was August 13, 2024 when the moon was in its waning crescent phase.

• Authorlink - https://authorlink.com/interview/missing-indigenous-girl-inspires-peters-novel-2024/

  Missing Indigenous Girl Inspires Peters’ Novel
  Posted by Diane Slocum | Mar 1, 2024 | Interviews, Written | 0 |

  Missing Indigenous Girl Inspires Peters’ Novel
  The Berry Pickers

  By Amanda Peters

  (Catapult)

  Interview by Diane Slocum

  Joe and Ruthie are the youngest children in a Mi’kmaq family in Nova Scotia. While the family is on their annual trip to Maine to harvest blueberries, four-year-old Ruthie disappears. The family is devastated, especially six-year-old Joe who was the last to see her and is affected by it his entire life. For decades, Joe and the family continue to hope to one day find Ruthie.

  Norma grows up in Maine with strange dreams of a different life that are amorphous yet seem too real. Her affluent parents are emotionally distant, yet over-protective. As she matures, Norma realizes that there is something her parents have never told her. Sometimes hindered, sometimes helped by her beloved Aunt June, she struggles to unravel the mystery.

  AUTHORLINK: What gave you the idea for this story? What was the first scene you imagined?

  PETERS: My Dad and his family were Mi’kmaq berry pickers who travelled from Nova Scotia to Maine in the 1960s and 1970s. My Dad always thought I should write about them. I told him I wrote fiction and not non-fiction, but he was persistent. So, together in the summer of 2017 we took a father-daughter trip to Maine, and he showed me the fields and told me so many stories. That was the inspiration I needed. The first scene is the first chapter when Ruthie goes missing. The first line came to me when I was down there.

  AUTHORLINK: What made it so difficult for you to continue the book after the first chapter? Did you always plan to alternate between Joe and Norma?

  “I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to be a novel.”

  PETERS: I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to be a novel. For the longest time, I tried to squeeze everything I wanted to say into a short story but my early readers kept telling me it was a novel, so I thought I would try. Initially I thought it was only going to be from Joe’s perspective, but Norma demanded to tell her story. I did write them separately: Joe’s chapters were written first and then Norma’s and I put them together like a puzzle. I wanted to make sure that their voices were distinct and their own.

  AUTHORLINK: How did attending the Institute of American Indian Arts help you?

  PETERS: I loved my time there, despite the fact that it was during the pandemic, and I only actually got to go to Santa Fe for the graduation residency, but my fiction cohort and our mentors were and still are remarkable. I feel that being there, where I didn’t have to explain myself as a mixed-race woman and writer was such a relief. I feel like I found my place and became a more comfortable version of myself.

  AUTHORLINK: Did you want and expect people to realize almost right away that Norma is Ruthie?

  “I wanted the reader to care for them and try to understand the impact one act can have…”

  PETERS: Yes. I did have some pushback to make it more of a mystery. But I made the decision that I wanted the reader to know what happened but be invested in the characters’ journey. I wanted the reader to care for them and try to understand the impact one act can have on so many people for so long.

  AUTHORLINK: How did your experience of getting an agent and selling your first book go?

  PETERS: I feel I have been very lucky. When I started looking for an agent, I got a lot of “no thank yous” or no response. Marilyn, my agent, and I were kind of set up by a mutual friend. She signed me based on a few short stories and was extremely patient with me. She waited almost two years for The Berry Pickers. I wanted to make sure it was something I was proud of before I put it out into the world. Once she had it, she sent it out for consideration and a week or so later, we had an offer from HarperCollins Canada. I was so surprised and pleased.

  AUTHORLINK: Besides enjoying the story, what do you hope people learn from your book?

  …”there has been and continues to be an issue with missing and murdered Indigenous women…”

  PETERS: How one action can have such incredible consequences.

  That even amidst grief and struggles, there is also joy, hope and love.

  That there has been and continues to be an issue with missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that has largely been ignored. If people can think about that and consider the consequences of ignoring such a tragedy, and be compelled to at least think about it, then I would feel that the book has more purpose than just a story. Although, I also hope that people like the story, that people can relate.

  AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

  PETERS: I have a short fiction collection called “Waiting for the Long Night Moon” coming out in August 2024 in Canada and January 2025 in the US. I am also working on a new novel, but I like to keep that close. I have a fear that if I talk about it, the story might just go away. Silly, I know.

  About the Author: Amanda Peters drew from her father’s Mi’kmaq heritage for her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, which was the 2023 Barnes and Noble Discover Prizewinner, the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction, and a 2023 finalist in the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She has been published in the Antigonish Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Dalhousie Review and more. Her work has also won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose. She participated in the 2021 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program. She graduated from the Master of Fine Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and has a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She lives in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia.

Peters, Amanda WAITING FOR THE LONG NIGHT MOON Catapult (Fiction None) $27.00 2, 11 ISBN: 9781646222599

Seventeen stories that explore the joy and sorrow of the Indigenous experience.

Peters, winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her debut,The Berry Pickers (2023), returns with an impactful collection of short stories. The book opens with "(Winter Arrives)," which chronicles the arrival of the "pale ones" to Indigenous shores. The unnamed narrator's father tells them that the "pale-faced" people will leave like they have in the past, but the narrator is less sure: "I think they may stay." The devastating consequences of colonization--especially as it relates to the violent destruction of Indigenous families--are explored in the stories that follow. "In the Name of God" follows a pair of siblings as they navigate the horrifying reality of growing up in a residential school meant to strip them of their language, religion, and culture. In "Three Billion Heartbeats," a mother-daughter relationship breaks under the weight of the younger woman's abusive relationship. Before her daughter left for the city to study, her fearful mother told her not to forget that she is "a woman of the land. A woman of the trees and the lake, you belong to the grass." The essential connection between the Indigenous characters and nature echoes throughout the collection. In "Tiny Birds and Terrorists," a grieving mother becomes a water protector. When the local paper calls them "a ragged band of eco-terrorists," another protector says the term is used to make white people afraid of people like them: "People who know we need the earth more than it needs us." Many of the stories deal with grief--both spoken and unspoken; personal and generational; physical and spiritual--and how to survive in a world that's trying to erase you. If some of the stories feel less robust than others, Peters' sparse and striking prose more than makes up for it.

An impressive collection rooted in the grief, trauma, tradition, resilience, and hope of Indigenous peoples.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Peters, Amanda: WAITING FOR THE LONG NIGHT MOON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570266/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cbe3a406. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.

• BookPage
  https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/waiting-for-the-long-night-moon-amanda-peters-book-review/
  Word count: 485

  February 2025
  Waiting for the Long Night Moon
  By Amanda Peters
  Review by Cat Acree
  In these 17 stories from Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world.
  Share this Article:

  Amanda Peters’ bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers (2023), which received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is a story of significant tragedy, about Indigenous family separation in Nova Scotia. Similar abuses appear throughout Peters’ book of short stories, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which opens with a dedication “to all those who have shared their stories and planted the seed of imagination.”

  The 17 stories that follow are, for the most part, seeds. Many were practice exercises while Peters was working toward The Berry Pickers, and she had no intention of collecting them into a book. Because of their origins, some are little more than fables to be told around a fire, with guidance passed down from matriarchs, and simple axioms like town is a bad place, forest is good. Other stories explore plot elements, like how to deliver a shock of horror: a water cannon used by American government forces to assault the bodies of Standing Rock protesters; a girl’s tongue pierced with a steel pin at a Christian residential school; women jumping to their deaths or being murdered in the woods.

  All of Peters’ first-person narrators speak similarly, as if each voice—no matter the age, era or gender—were the same storyteller. But despite this, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world. Read individually, a few stories stand on their own. “The Virgin and the Bear” is a stunning piece about a woman learning her grandmother’s tragic history while placing it within the context of other genocides. The titular story is tender, lyrical and lovely, with forest scenes so lush that you can feel the earth underfoot, and the sharp pain of memory as an older man recalls his late sister. And the Dakota Access Pipeline story, “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” is the freshest premise in the collection, following a young woman who heals her grief through resistance.

  When it comes to contemporary Native fiction, the majority of readers—and likewise, the publishing industry—still focus on stories that whittle down the history and present life of American Indigenous people to colonization and trauma. As Terria Smith, editor of Heyday’s News From Native California, wrote in Publishers Weekly in 2023, “There is a real possibility that a lot of our own literature is unwittingly perpetuating the narrative that tribal people are tragic, but there is much more to us than this.” Peters’ best stories probe the possibility of venturing beyond those tropes.

• Sesaya Arts
  https://www.sesayarts.com/amanda-peters-story-collection-avoids-trauma-trap-in-favour-of-light-and-hope/
  Word count: 1187

  Amanda Peters’ new story collection avoids “trauma trap” in favour of light and hope

  By Arpita Ghosal September 26, 2024
  🔊 Play

  Bestselling author Amanda Peters’ debut short story collection Waiting for the Long Night Moon weaves traditional storytelling with her elegant, sparse prose to convey the dignity of Indigenous ways of life, the harsh realities of systemic racism, and the resilient spirit that endures.

  Amanda Peters (photo courtesy of the author)
  Spanning a vast range of times and places, the stories focus on situations that range from early encounters with European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children in the 1960s, to Indigenous communities’ ongoing struggle for clean water in the present day. A young man returns from residential school to find he can no longer communicate with his parents. An elderly man reflects on his life as he awaits death. A nervous young girl dances in her first Mawi’omi. And a young woman discovers purpose and healing as she fights for water rights. Peters’ stories are at times devastating and occasionally unsettling – but always absorbing. They remind us that where there is grief, there is also joy. And where there is trauma, there is resilience. And at the heart of it all, there is power.

  It’s interesting to note that these stories were written before her multi award-winning debut novel The Berry Pickers. (Read Sesaya Arts’ interview with her here.) And as she acknowledges at the end of the collection, they came to her “from so many people, and were inspired by so many different things. Dreams, stories told to me, other books, family history. I think I just wrote about whatever was happening around me at the time!” she recalls. As an example, “when The Acadians and the Mi’kmaw came together in 2017 to celebrate their generations-long friendship, I was inspired to write about that friendship. So the collection has a short story that explores that, albeit in a fictional sense.” This sense of creative freedom sprang from initially writing the stories for herself, and not for others. As a result, she explains, “I just went with whatever inspiration grabbed me at the time.”

  Peters’ dual heritage is a key influence on the themes and perspectives of her stories. “I think all writers are influenced by who they are, just as all readers interpret based on who they are. And I think that is beautiful,” she reflects. Peters’ father, who is Mi’kmaq, instilled in her a love for storytelling, while her mother, who is not Mi’kmaq, nurtured her love of the written word. This duality is reflected in the stories that she writes, where “the themes are predominantly Indigenous in nature. I didn’t intend on doing that when I started out writing, but these are the stories that came to me, and the stories that I love to tell.” Peters is quick to note that her future work may not focus on Indigenous themes, but for now, “those are the stories that are speaking to me”.

  Image courtesy of HarperCollins Canada
  Given that the collection’s stories are grounded in both historical and present-day concerns, they touch directly on key issues of systemic racism, neglect, and trauma, while also celebrating love, joy, and resilience. And Peters speaks candidly about the emotional challenges of navigating this wide range of experiences in her work. “It’s so important when writing about the Indigenous experience in Canada to be careful that you don’t fall into the ‘trauma trap’ and focus solely on that,” she explains. “We are loving, funny, resilient people, and this needs also to be highlighted. We cannot ignore the injustices, but we can find joy.” Striving for such a balance, Peters ensures that her stories do not shy away from difficult truths, yet also uplift the strengths of Indigenous communities. One particularly harrowing story titled “3 Billion Heartbeats” kept her up at night, questioning whether it upset that balance due to its violent content. In the end, she chose to leave it in, and “let the reader decide if it was a good decision or not”.

  The collection’s structure was carefully considered, in order to arrange the stories in a way that maintains both variety and interest. “I went back and forth with my editor, ensuring that thematically similar stories were separated so that the reader would not become bored,” she recalls. Likewise, shorter stories are interspersed among longer ones to create a rhythmic flow. And Peters intentionally begins and ends the collection with stories of personal significance. The opening story is the first piece she ever wrote that she felt proud of, and the final story, entitled “A Strong Seed”, is a celebration of love, family, tradition, and resilience, which closes the collection on what Peters describes as “a super powerful positive note.”

  Peters’ thoughtful attention to craft is further evidenced by the title of the collection.The story “Waiting for the Long Night Moon” was awarded the Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose in 2021, so the publisher thought that should also be the title of the collection. As it happens, Peters was particularly fond of this title, too. And “it helps that the cover art is gorgeous. And as people like to point out to me, I have an affinity for the moon and its impact on our lives, so you will see it mentioned more than once throughout the collection. As someone who struggles with naming her characters and titling her stories, I really liked this one. I think it rolls off the tongue and stays with people,” she explains.

  Amanda Peters (Photo by Audrey Michaud-Peters)
  Though Peters downplays her ability to deploy traditional storytelling techniques in contemporary prose, her writing does capture evocatively the essence of oral storytelling passed down through generations. “Those are oral traditions,” she insists with humility, “and even when translating them to the page, there are folks out there doing a much better job than I am. shalan joudrey comes to mind.” On a personal, equally modest note, Peters explains how she loved a particular story that her aunt shared with her so much that she wanted to tell it in her voice. “So I tried, and I think it worked out okay.”

  Waiting for the Long Night Moon is a collection that feels deeply personal yet is universally resonant, filled with stories that are both a gift to her readers and a responsibility that Peters has embraced with care. “I hope the readers enjoy the stories,” she says gently. “They were gifted to me, and I was given the responsibility to write them. So I now gift them to you to enjoy.”

  Readers in Toronto can attend two events with Peters: “Solo Feature: Waiting for the Long Night Moon” at Word on the Street, Saturday September 28, 4:30-5:15 pm and “Narrative Wisdom: Dissecting the World with Short Stories” at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, September 29, 2:00 pm.

  © Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2024

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2025/02/19/waiting-for-the-long-night-moon/
  Word count: 770

  Searching for Missing Persons in “Waiting for the Long Night Moon”

  by Kate Preziosi
  February 19, 2025
  A review of Amanda Peter's new collection, "Waiting for the Long Night Moon."

  Read Next

  A Fragile Utopia in “The Garden”
  In the opening story of Amanda Peters’ new collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, a child watches at a distance as strange people arrive on the shore. The child’s father recognizes these “pale ones.” He promises his child, “They have come before, and they will leave again.” The child isn’t so sure.

  Waiting for the Long Night Moon comprises vignettes and short stories told mostly from the first-person perspectives of Indigenous people from the Northern Atlantic coast of Canada and the United States. The stories span the arrival of the first European settlers in the 1600s to the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes in the late 1800s and present-day climate protests. It’s an ambitious scope for a slim collection that often packs weighty themes of generational grief and resistance to cultural erasure into stories the length of just a few pages.

  Peters, a descendant of the Mi’kmaq people, has dedicated much of her literary career to honoring traditional Indigenous storytelling through her prose. In her bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers, Mi’kmaq characters are often found sitting together around a firepit, sharing family stories. Waiting for the Long Night Moon reads like a companion to that novel, building and expanding on its narrative universe. Readers will recognize people and places on the periphery of The Berry Pickers in the pages of this new collection: the tree where Mi’kmaq women give birth, young people fighting to save the natural world from industrialization, negligent and corrupt police officers who give no thought to “another dead Indian.” It’s fitting that all of the stories in this collection are short enough to be told aloud around a fire.

  At times, Peters’ economical approach leaves her characters lacking in specificity, and instead serving as archetypes. A young woman loses herself in the big city. Someone overhears three ignorant drunks at a bar and tells them off.

  Occasionally, in what feels like a rush to underscore a story’s lesson, Peters’ dialogue can feel heavy-handed, as when an Indigenous protest is repeatedly described as “holding up progress,” or a young person wonders why all the reservations are so far from “civilization” and adds, “Stupid question…They wanted to hide us away.”

  More often, though, Peters’ brevity works to her advantage. As the stories flow into one another across time and place, a kind of intergenerational dialogue takes shape among seemingly unlinked characters. Children are ripped from their families and put in abusive government-sponsored Christian boarding schools—whose real-life mission was to “kill the Indian in the child”—and long to return home. Elder Indigenous characters guide the children back to themselves by visiting them in animal form, speaking to them in their dreams, and communicating through expressions and embraces when they no longer share a language.

  Several of the book’s characters are mourning missing or murdered loved ones, mirroring the ongoing crisis in Canada and the United States of Indigenous people, particularly women, being abducted and murdered at alarmingly high rates. These family members live out their days instinctively searching the faces of strangers in a crowd for the one that resembles their own.

  What works best about Waiting for the Long Night Moon is how Peters subtly drafts readers into this search party. She leaves breadcrumbs—such as repeat phrases and familiar backstories—to suggest intimate connections between characters in separate narratives. In one story, a grandmother flings herself into a river, and in the next, a grieving granddaughter struggles to feel at home without her guardian. A grown man remembers his sister, who was brainwashed at a Christian school; a later story centers on a brother and sister entering one such school.

  Sometimes, Peters gives her readers just enough information to confirm that our hunch is wrong—these people don’t know each other after all. And sometimes, she leaves us hanging, like all those families with an empty chair at the table, waiting for answers that will never come.

  FICTION

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  Waiting for the Long Night Moon

  By Amanda Peters

  Catapult

  Published February 11, 2025