I met Kristen Millares Young at Fort Worden, an Indigenous gathering place taken by the federal government, which installed concrete bunkers in the cliffs overlooking Salish Sea. Decommissioned for military service, the fort now hosts nonprofit arts organizations and visitors who come for the views. Some say the place is haunted. If so, it is by the layers of history which underlie our fraught country, containing within it so many sovereign nations and buried truths. On this particular week in July, the barracks were filled with attendees of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, where I was teaching fiction. Young took my class, and it was in one of those aging, airy rooms that I first read chapters from her novel Subduction. I wanted to swallow the story whole.