Mariah Rigg: On First Lines, Little Deaths, and How Hawai‘i is More Than White Sand Beaches in Her Debut Story Collection ‘Extinction Capital of the World’

Last summer, I returned to the 530-square-mile island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, where I grew up. I stood on a stretch of coastline that I’d spent years fishing with my father, where the sunset glazed the water and the fish leapt from the waves. That day it had rained and a rainbow arced in the mist over the coastline. I was standing there for the last time. The next time I visit, developers will have built a luxury hotel on that spot. I felt—and still feel—a piercing grief for the loss of that place and who I’d been there.

I returned to that moment again and again as I read Mariah Rigg’s debut short-story collection, Extinction Capital of the World (Ecco, August 2025). In one of the small coincidences endemic to island life, she and I were both high-school juniors in the same honors English class. Mariah’s talent was evident even then. Her collection brought me full-circle, because Extinction Capital of the World is a multigenerational, environmental love letter to our home. Mariah maps out the complex web of feelings that I share about Hawai‘i: its susceptibility to climate change, its long history of militarization and imperialism (and our participation in that lineage), and the deep emotions that so many of us hold for the land. 

Her collection also explores the tangled relationships so central to life in Hawai‘i. Fittingly, this interview marked the first time that we’d spoken since high school. It was a privilege to interview her about her process and her work.

Nina Michiko Tam: I’ll start at the beginning. More specifically, I’ll start with the beginning of all these stories. So many start with an ending, like a first paragraph or sentence foreshadowing a character’s outcome. In the story “Field Dressing,” you begin with letting us know that one of the character’s fathers is about to die. The very first words are, “The August after my dad’s death.” And in “Dawn Chorus,” you begin by discussing how climate change will affect Midway Atoll. Those beginnings gave me a great sense of how you were going to be thinking about time, how even at the beginning we know the end. So can you talk a little bit about what you were thinking with time, beginnings, and endings when you wrote these stories?

Mariah Rigg: Definitely. That’s a great question. One of the reasons why I love short fiction is because it’s so compressed. It feels like there’s a single room you’re writing in, and you have to build that room out around you as you go. One of my mentors, Marjorie Celona, once told me that the thing about a short story is that it’s ending as it’s beginning. I found that so beautiful, and I think that is really resonant to the way I write. I always know where I’m going with the story when I begin it. I know a lot of people are what they call “pantsers,” but I am not one of those people. I’m definitely a “plotter.” I don’t know if you are. I like to map out scenes before I start actually coming to the page. 

And in terms of first lines, I think that the first line is the most important part of anything, whether a short story or a novel. I always read the first line and if I hate it, I won’t keep reading. So I hope that other people feel that my short story first lines aren’t terrible. One of my friends taught an entire class on first lines, and it was a really beautiful class.

NMT: So does that first line come to you early on, or are you honing and tweaking as you’re writing it?

MR: It definitely changes depending on the aboutness of the story. You were talking about the first line of “Field Dressing”—that first line wasn’t the first line until the final draft. Initially, it was way different. I didn’t talk about the dad stuff at all. I was focused more on the friendship between the two men in that story, which is still central to the story. But it felt less ominous without the dad’s death in the first line.

NMT: I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but there’s a magical moment in the collection where I realized that many of these characters and these stories are interconnected. You said that you mapped scenes out. Was that part of the mapping you did? Did you know that these characters were going to have these connections when you were writing all these separate stories?

MR: I wish, but no. [Laughs] I didn’t want to write a linked collection because I read so many in my MFA. It was a thing that a lot of people were doing in the 2000s. I love so many linked collections, but I was like, I’m not going to do that. But then, growing up in the place that we grew up in, it always felt like so many lives were touching each other and you couldn’t disentangle those lives. So I think that started happening in the stories, for better or for worse. A lot of times, it’s just characters brushing up against each other, rather than repeats.

NMT: It’s so great that you say that, because I actually have written down that the interconnected characters really resonated with me as someone from the islands. It does feel like everyone is linked through family or history. Even the word that you used earlier, about short stories being this kind of compression—I do feel that about Hawai‘i in some ways. It’s like you have time and people and history all compressed onto one little rock.

MR: Yeah. It really is. Part of that, like you said, is because place is so constricted too. I think time obviously moves differently on an island. History feels weightier too, in terms of colonization and the ongoing military presence in the islands. Time, everything, feels weightier to me.

NMT: Yes. I totally agree. You know, you spoke about weightiness, but there’s a lot of death in these stories too. Even the title, right? Extinction Capital of the World. I think that’s really interesting, because when a lot of people from the continental United States think about Hawai‘i, they probably don’t think about death. I’d love to hear how that played into your work. 

MR: I wrote the titular story “Extinction Capital of the World” last. And that wasn’t going to be the title of the collection until I wrote that story in the spring before last, in 2023. I think that grief is really essential to the stories too. I couldn’t figure out how to balance grief and death without doing a lot of death in the stories. I’ve experienced a lot of death in my own life.

In terms of Extinction Capital of the World being the title—I struggle with it. I was worried that people would see that title and immediately think of the point of no return in terms of both climate, but also Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian people. And I didn’t want that to be the first thing that people thought about. 

A lot of indigenous theorists write about the idea of survival and extinction as central to the American colonization project, because if you think of something as already extinct or dead, then you don’t have to put any work into perpetuating that thing that you’ve killed, even if it’s still alive. So I struggled with the title. 

But I also thought that it was important that people don’t just think about white sand beaches, tourism, and going to resorts when they read the collection. I wanted it to be a collection about the places and people and things that I loved about Hawai‘i. I think that a lot of that deals with things that were going and gone. Even going back home now, it’s so different than when we were in high school or when our parents were kids. So it’s the little deaths in the story. Not just the deaths of people, but the deaths of who you could have been, or being able to go back home, because so many of the characters can’t return to what once was.

NMT: You said that you wanted to counteract this “white sand beaches” thing. It is so important to write stories about this place as a challenge to these existing colonial narratives. Do you ever feel that’s a lot of pressure?

MR: Yeah, but I think that life is a lot of pressure. [Laughs] Living a good life is a lot of pressure. For me, writing is an extension of life. So writing is a lot of pressure, but it’s part of living a good life, which I probably don’t live, but I try. I also think of my writing as a way to be braver than I am, or better than I am, in my actual life. Even if it means letting my characters really fuck up. Sometimes I learn things through letting my characters be better or braver or even worse than I am. I think that takes the pressure off, because I know that there are things about this book that people will critique. And I know there are things about this book that I did wrong. And I know that there are future things I write that will probably be done wrong too, but I just hope to be better and learn more and do more every time, every day, every story or novel or whatever I do. That’s maybe cheesy, but it’s how I feel.

NMT: No, I love that. Relatedly, you wrote in your acknowledgements: “As someone who was born and raised by settlers on Hawaiian land, I understand that my very existence is a direct displacement of kānaka maoli. I am not sure that anything I do or write can ever make up for this. This book, I hope, is a start.” It’s such a meaningful concept—about our writing trying to make up for things.

MR: I hope that what we write does something right and pushes the needle in some way. I don’t always think that it will, but I have to hope it does, or else I would not write and maybe just also die. [Laughs] 

But like I said earlier, I do a lot of research when I’m writing, both on the computer and in books, and calling people and asking them about stuff. Asking about their stories, and always asking if I can share them. I think that makes a difference too: that research, and the community building that writing allows, both in terms of—this is silly—but in terms of the people who read it, and the people that I have to reach out to. Or us right now talking and reconnecting, which is amazing.

I don’t know if this book is a start of me contributing anything worthwhile. It might be, it might not. I think it was something that I needed to do, but I know that that first books are often messes so… [Laughs] We’ll see.

NMT: I didn’t think it was a mess! I do feel it’s a very brave thing to call people and ask them to speak with you for the purpose of your art. In the story “I Made This Place For You,” there’s a line from the art-curator narrator: “I lived my life with the belief that art was not dead, but living, kept going by the people who walked these galleries, by the people who continued to create in these traditions.” I felt that in what you said, in calling people, creating connections, and actually having their stories in your collection. Are there people who you spoke to whose stories play a role in this collection?

MR: Certain things in the book are inspired by stories that I’ve heard, or questions I’ve had and then done research on and been like, Oh my gosh, this is so interesting and this fits perfectly into a theme that I want to write about anyway. But I wouldn’t say that the book is autofiction.

I do feel really lucky to know and love a lot of really interesting, complicated people, who’ve lived interesting, complicated lives. And I think that that is one of the reasons why I wanted to write fiction in the first place: because there were so many people I knew and loved that I was interested in learning more about, or even imagining different endings for. 

NMT: If you’re calling people, how do they react when you say, I’m asking you these questions for my writing?

MR: I think people are more generous than you think they would be. One of the stories, “Target Island”—the first story—actually was inspired by this neighbor that I had when my parents rented a house in Palolo. She would volunteer on Kaho‘olawe every other month and we would watch all her cats as she volunteered. She would tell me stories about what was happening with the military ordnances on the island. I didn’t really understand because I was, like, five, but I actually reconnected with her in writing “Target Island.” It was really beautiful and wonderful to be able to talk to her again after twenty-five years of not seeing her—my parents moved out of that house when I was seven. [NMT: Palolo is a neighborhood in Honolulu, on the island of O‘ahu, in Hawai‘i. Kaho‘olawe is another Hawaiian island; the U.S. military previously used it as a bombing range. Unexploded ordnances remain on the island.]

But yeah, I think the people are more generous than you think and most of the time, people are interested in connecting back with you. Not everyone that I’ve talked to has read the collection, so maybe I’ll feel differently after they all read it and they’re like, What did I do by talking to you?

NMT: When you think of who you’re writing this collection for—if you do—who do you imagine? Do you imagine it being someone from Hawai‘i? Do you imagine it being someone who doesn’t know anything about the islands?

MR: I would say that I’m writing to a younger version of myself. I don’t think that I’m writing to people who aren’t from Hawai‘i. You can only invite so many people in. And you can’t write for everyone. Someone’s going to hate what you’re writing, even if you try to make it accessible to everyone. So I don’t always think about that. I think more about the questions I want to answer when I write. Along with plotting out themes, I’ll have a list of questions that I’m interested in answering. Some people would call those themes, but I prefer to think of them as questions, rather than themes.

NMT: Could you give us a little glimpse of some of those questions?

MR: Oh my gosh. So for the story, “After Ivan,” I was thinking about what would happen if it was the late eighties and two kayakers met and fell in love. Some are big questions: what happens when you can’t forget a place, like for the stories “Target Island” or “Field Dressing”? What happens with someone you’ve loved since you were a child, who you still love—but can’t be around anymore? And then finding the situation that fits the question, finding a way to answer the question that isn’t silly.

NMT: I love those questions too, because they’re all so based in human relationships. Your stories all have this layer of human relationships, and then this other layer of the place that they’re in, adding a deeper resonance. All these stories are tied to Hawai‘i in some way. Do you think you’ll ever write stories that aren’t set there? I personally sometimes feel that if you’re an artist and you’ve grown up in Hawai‘i, the place is always thrumming in the background, in a way.

MR: The project that I’m working on now is still very based in the islands. I’ve written short stories since this collection, and all of the characters are from Hawai‘i, or the secondary characters are from Hawai‘i, but the stories do take place in different places. I’ve heard that your first book is you trying to fix your childhood or writing towards your childhood, and after that you can figure out what traumas you want to deal with. [Laughs]

NMT: I think that’s true, actually.

MR: So we’ll see what traumas we’ll unearth next.

NMT: I do feel that a lot of great artists have this central question that they can’t get away from, no matter what. It’s this story that you keep coming back to.

MR: You have your lane, you know? You can’t really find a way out of it. I also think as humans we’re interested in certain things, and are drawn to them even when we’re trying to do something else. It’s always there.

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Mariah Rigg is the author of the short story collection Extinction Capital of the World (Ecco, 2025). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Mount, Oregon Literary Arts, Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, and Lambda Literary, along with being published by The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, The Common, Joyland, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD candidate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.