» Interview

Magic in the Woods: A Conversation with Shasta Grant

When We Were Feral
Shasta Grant
Regal House
$19.95
Publication date: June 9, 2026

Coming-of-age stories are rarely easy ones. In her highly anticipated debut novel When We Were Feral, Shasta Grant tells thirteen-year-old Maggie’s coming-of-age story, a journey more complicated than most. Maggie’s mom recently left the family without leaving any word about where she was headed. A short time later, a classmate’s mom disappears, following a family tragedy. Maggie becomes a girl on a mission: to discover where Erin’s mother could be. In a summerlong search for answers, Maggie leads her best friend Sarah along with Erin through the rural woods and backroads of New Hampshire where they encounter more than they are prepared to handle. Diane Gottlieb spoke with Grant about being feral, class differences, religion, and the pressures and experiences of young girls in the boys-will-be-boys days of the 1990s.

Diane Gottlieb: Congratulations, Shasta, on a gorgeous debut novel. When We Were Feral will stay with me for a long time. I’ve always been fascinated by the writing process—how writers come up with ideas and how those ideas takes shape and form. Can you share the story behind this novel?

Shasta Grant: Thanks for the kind words, Diane. I started this novel when I was the spring 2017 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida. I was writing a lot of flash fiction at that time, but I really wanted to take those three months to see if I could write a novel.

I was reading History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund and noticed that the first chapter of her novel won a story contest. So, I got this bright idea (spoiler alert: it was a terrible idea) to use my own prizewinning story (I had not that long before won the Kenyon Review Short Story Prize) as the first chapter of the novel.

That story had an adult narrator, but I was also working on expanding some unpublished stories about an adolescent girl whose mother ran off. And that was the seed for the novel—this mother who ran off, leaving her daughter behind. The narrative went back and forth, alternating between the younger and older versions of the narrator, both revolving around the missing mother. But that adult narrator turned out to be a giant red herring that I cut during the first revision. The story really belonged to the girl, not her older self.

Gottlieb: While I was reading the book, I kept thinking of Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. I know there’s a lot of controversy about that book, but to me Scout is an amazing narrator, so beautifully written—and your Maggie felt Scout-ish to me—which is a very high compliment!

The masterful way you capture the child’s voice—it’s no small feat. Did Maggie’s voice come naturally to you?

Grant: The voice came easily. I think partially because it was so connected to the place. I used my real hometown as the setting, and that was like a portal, allowing me access to that time and place. And even though the novel isn’t autobiographical, I could easily remember how fraught it was to be a girl in the early ’90s.

Gottlieb: The title is fabulous. I used to do a lot of animal rescue, so when I hear the word “feral,” I hear “cat.”  I used to work with feral cats, and with a lot of love, attention, and support many would become comfortable in their homes.

And others, not so much.

Grant: I love that idea of connecting the word feral to home and the capacity to feel safe and comfortable there.

That’s interesting, the idea of being tamed, of coming home. In the book, there’s the lingering question of whether Maggie’s mother will ever come home or not. And I didn’t want to give a tidy answer by the end.

Gottlieb: I think the title also reflects the times. Kids in the ’90s were rarely micromanaged. They were left more to their own devices.

Grant: Nobody knew where I was half the time when I was that age. We would go to the woods or wander around town. We had these lives that were completely separate from our parents’ lives in a way that kids don’t have now. Their lives are on their phones. They have secret online lives, which is dangerous in different ways.

Gottlieb: I love that so much of this book is in the body. The girls are beginning to mature physically. They express so much of who they are through the body: what they wear, how they walk. They buy sexy bras and hide bikinis that they sneak and change into at the beach.

They are also injured through the body. Violated through the body. But find their agency and healing through the body, as well.

Grant: Puberty is necessarily of the body, right? Your body changes in noticeably public ways. This may be especially true for girls. I wanted to address that, and both sides of it: wanting the maturation and not wanting it at the same time.

My narrator is struggling with that. And there’s this level of comparison when you are that age. Whose body is changing first?  Whose body is changing for the better?

Moving from a girl’s body to a woman’s body can make you into an object for boys and men. I think this story had to be led from the body.

Gottlieb: You explore big, sweeping questions, which I love because those are the books that stay with me. You can read a book with a dynamite plot that just doesn’t have these big ideas, or explorations. While you’re reading it, you’re so in it, but a week later, it’s like, I know I love that book, but I don’t remember why.

Not so with When We Were Feral. In addition to the pain of the missing mothers, you explore religion and class difference and death.

Grant: All of these things are connected, with one leading to another, as I wrote the book. I wanted to approach religion through the insider/outsider lens. To me, that is often what religion feels like. Maggie can’t fully access her best friend’s religion because she’s not baptized, and her father does not support her getting baptized. There’s a losing religion thread as well because Maggie really wants to believe, and she tries so hard to believe. But because of everything that happens around her, she cannot.

Gottlieb: Maggie takes Sarah’s Bible. It’s a beautiful book with Sarah’s name engraved on it. To Maggie, it seems that Sarah’s family has everything, and she wants so much to taste what that’s like. It didn’t feel to me that Maggie’s struggle was as much about God but about longing to belong somewhere, to be a true member of a community, not one who will always be a bit on the outside.

Grant: Maggie really wants to belong somewhere or to someone, and she mistakenly thinks Sarah’s family and the church can give that to her. It is difficult and painful if you are a child from a certain kind of family, and you rub up against a different kind of family, what you think of as a better, or perfect, family. You can be somewhat part of it, swept up in it, but then there’s this reality that this isn’t your family. And you are never going to be part of this family in a full capacity. I had several experiences with that, not this particular situation, but as a child growing up in situations like that. It’s hard.

Gottlieb: There’s a class distinction too. The difference between what Sarah takes for granted and what Maggie can only wish for. And then there’s death.

Grant: Basically Maggie wants everything that Sarah has—her family, her house, even her beach towels. At the beginning of the book, Sarah and Maggie witness Rachel Mann drown at Lake Sunapee, which is a real lake not far from the town I grew up in. My grandmother’s sister drowned in that lake when she was a child. I didn’t make that connection until much later, which I think is interesting, the way the mind works. The drowning shifts something in Maggie. She starts to see the world differently after that.

Gottlieb: Maggie and Sarah would go to the beach whenever they could to study the teenagers there. Then one day, boom, this happened. And Maggie wants to feel what Rachel felt as she drowned. She wants to be pulled under herself. Maggie struggles with some dark things.

Grant: Yeah, Maggie could probably use some therapy.

I don’t know that any adult is really looking out for Maggie, even though Mrs. Roberts—Sarah’s mom—wants to pretend that she is. Obviously, Maggie’s mom is not around. Her dad is busy drinking and working long hours. There is a danger when there isn’t an adult looking out for you.

Gottlieb: Rachel had a younger sister Erin who is Maggie and Sarah’s age. When Erin’s mom goes missing, Mrs. Roberts wants to take Erin in too. Again, I’m thinking of my animal rescue work. Mrs. Roberts has this need to collect strays. It fills some void she has.

Grant: There’s definitely something missing in her life.

Gottlieb: Later, the girls get into deep danger with some local boys. I think that is a story that many girls could tell.

Grant: When I first shared the book with a couple of women, the first thing they said was how much that part resonated with them.

Back then, if you were a young girl and an older boy showed an interest in you, well, you had to be interested in him too. And if you weren’t, too bad, you were expected to do whatever he wanted anyway. You were an object. Nobody was talking to teenagers about consent. There was no language for asking for or giving consent.

Gottlieb: You portray the girls with their full humanity. Readers may want to warn them or discourage them from making poor decisions, but I can’t imagine readers not feeling a great deal of compassion for each of the girls—and their mothers.

Let’s talk about the three moms. There’s Sarah’s mom, Mrs. Roberts. Maggie’s mom, Laura. And Erin’s mom, Mrs. Mann. We don’t know much about Erin’s mom except that she was a realtor, that her husband had an affair, and she’s gone missing.

The girls make it their mission to find Erin’s mom. Although we know—and I suspect the girls do too, on some level—that her mom will not be coming back.

These mothers are not…

Grant: Not great mothers.

Gottlieb: They’re not. But you don’t hate them; you have compassion for all of them.

Laura took off suddenly and, still, she left Maggie with many gifts. Laura taught Maggie how to be true to herself and about the importance of not blindly conforming. I believe Maggie will remember those gifts and, hopefully, temper them with a few boundaries and limits.

Grant: I love that lens. I wanted Laura, even though she’s physically absent, to be present. Hovering.

I think Mrs. Roberts envied Laura in some ways. The freedom that Laura had. Laura wasn’t constrained by her role as a mother, by religion.

Gottlieb: Can you talk a little bit about the pull of the woods? The woods is such a fabulous metaphor and such a powerful draw in a lot of literature, but what was it about the woods for you and the girls in this book?

Grant: It was a place that was just for them, outside the view of all the adults.

What was interesting to me was the idea of two versions of the woods. There’s one when you’re young, where it’s this magical home that you can make your own. Then, when you’re older, the woods is a gathering place, a place you go to party.

I wanted to hold both versions of the woods.

Gottlieb: It’s also a witchy place.

Grant: Yeah, absolutely. There’s magic in the woods. The woods are a place where the girls felt at peace, safe.

Gottlieb: This book was a long time in coming. Do you have any advice for people struggling with their own first novels?

Grant: I spent a lot of time revising this book. I remember sending my agent a big revision and I thought I nailed it. I was like, this is it—we’re finally going to be ready to go on submission! My agent did not agree.

But with every revision, I understood my characters better. I understood the story better. Writing a book takes a long time. Getting a book published takes even longer and involves a great deal of luck. And persistence. But for me, the joy was in the writing, and it was kind of nice to linger in that phase for so long.

Gottlieb: Given that your narrator and main characters are thirteen years old, did you feel any pressure to call this a YA novel? Where do you see When We Were Feral fitting in the fiction landscape, and why?

Grant: There was never any pressure to call it YA—in fact, my agent and I had a long conversation about whether this book could be classified as YA—and, ultimately, we decided no. There are technical differences, but what she said (and she works a lot in the YA space) was that there is a fine line between coming-of-age adult fiction and YA, and ultimately YA fiction has a more immediate feel to it—it’s more intense in a teenage way (no shade meant here). Whereas Feral has more of a looking back tone in the narration.

Gottlieb: I happen to adore coming-of-age stories. I truly believe we all come of age many times throughout the course of our lifetimes. I also believe that reading a good adolescent coming-of-age book in adulthood helps us to heal the wounded children we still carry inside of us. Do you think reading When We Were Feral would have helped you when you were a girl growing up?

Grant: Oh, I love this question. I hope so? I think I was hungry for any stories where mothers were absent—either emotionally or physically—because my own mother wasn’t around. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt was hugely important to me as a young girl. But it wasn’t the same as my own story—those children really had to make their way in a survival sense. I think I would have loved a book about a mother who takes off but the girl still has family, friends, a home—yet somehow she knows that will never be enough.

Shasta Grant

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. Her debut novel, When We Were Feral, was published in June by Regal House.