One of my favorite experiences as a reader is that moment when the world of the story comes to life before my eyes. Whether it’s a particular line of dialogue, a peculiar detail that only this narrator would notice, or the way in which a character interacts with their environment with a level of intimacy one only reaches with years of experience and memories, a great setting in a book feels as if it’s been there forever.
The reservation in Amber Blaeser-Wardzala’s debut novel Another Name for Red feels this way. With a perfect mix of humor, heart, and a critical eye, she crafts a community of beautiful and complicated characters that carry the weight of their personal and collective histories on their shoulders. The book follows Middle Daughter, a young Anishinaabe woman who is grappling with the disappearance of her older sister and the ways in which her absence—as well as the lack of answers that surround it—slowly splinters her relationship with her family, her community, and herself. Middle Daughter’s home is a fully realized world in of itself, which haunts and holds her throughout the novel.
But to be fully realized is to embrace the messiness of life, Blaeser-Wardzala never settles for the simple genre convention. Another Name for Red is a thrilling mystery that doesn’t promise easy answers or the final grand truth. It’s a novel about a family struggling to cope with the loss of the eldest daughter Belle, where healing doesn’t come in great epiphanies but instead in gradual, subtle, and quietly meaningful moments of progress. It’s a story about one character’s home and the long, painful history that made it so.
I talked with Amber about writing about your home with love and honesty, patience in drafting, and how fiction can bring a voice to silence.
Michael Welch
I’m such a sucker for books where the setting and the world the characters inhabit take center stage, and Another Name for Red is such a great example of that. So much of this story—from the family dynamics and Middle Daughter’s worldview to the major tensions overall—start and end with the reservation. Can you talk a bit about how you brought Middle Daughter’s home to life on the page?
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
I’m also a sucker for setting. I have a whole craft talk about how just a single setting detail can completely change the story and its tone. For me, an important part of creating setting is thinking about the history of that place and the histories the characters have with those spaces as well. When I look at a place, I’m not just seeing the current existence of it, I’m seeing my own memories of those places haunting the corners, and that was something that I thought was important for the settings in this book. The narrator is haunted by her sister’s disappearance but she’s also haunted by the places she actively inhabits in the novel—her room is filled with the memories of her sister, the hardware store is haunted by once being a thriving business that is gradually declining, the town is haunted by the joy the narrator felt there pre-casino opening, the powwow arena is haunted by all those years she danced with Belle. As a character, the narrator’s story is wrapped up within all these losses, and there’s a sense of a before and after for her, with the before being something she is yearning to return to but will never be able to. Allowing the settings to hold this emotional weight and all its histories was how I felt I was able to bring it to life.
Michael Welch
You write about this community with so much love and intimacy, but you also don’t shy away from its struggles, failures, and crises. How do you approach striking that delicate tone?
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
Not to be cheesy, but I think true love is being able to recognize and acknowledge a person or place’s flaws and love them anyways. While I love my reservation and the community there deeply, there are definitely faults, as there are anywhere. While this book is not based on my reservation and is fiction, I wanted to interact with those emotions of loving a place and a community but also seeing its imperfections.
When it comes to people in real life, I spend a lot of mental time trying to come up with reasonings and backstories for people I have bad interactions with. All character traits return to some aspect of a person’s history, and I try to move through the world with that understanding in order to have a stronger sense of empathy for people. And the same idea is something I do with my fiction. There are always levels and unseen truths to everyone, including characters, and I do my best to contend with that on the page for nearly all of my characters. In general, I’m just drawn to characters and people who aren’t perfect—and aren’t pretending to be either. I find it is easier to love a person when you know them, good and bad. The bad and the failures almost make it easier to love them, because you recognize the struggles they’ve gone through and the ways things could have gone worse, but you can see them actively trying.
In general, I don’t want any of my characters to feel perfectly good or perfectly bad—like with the narrator’s closest friend. She’s a bit of a bully, but she also actively argues with the elders when they’re transphobic or are anti-Black to the Afro-Indigenous people on the reservation. That’s an incredibly important detail for her character, because she’s a confrontational, outspoken person in both good and bad ways.
Or with the mother character, she’s neglecting her children, leaving the narrator to care for the younger siblings, but she’s doing so because she’s fighting for change. The complication of her actions—of how she isn’t fully in the right or fully in the wrong—that’s something I think is important.
When it comes to place, nearly everything (if not everything) wrong on reservations comes back to colonization, colonialism, and attempted genocide. Being aware of that truth and the ways these horrible things have long lasting impacts on individual people as well as the community but also recognizing the ways we are healing—keeping these two truths in mind was something that made finding that tone easier.
Michael Welch
The book is full of incredibly memorable characters like Middle Daughter’s Best Friend who speaks in British slang and her grandmother who is planning for her death, and they too really help bring this community to life. Were there any characters you found yourself increasingly drawn to as you wrote?
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
Her grandmother, Nookomis, was one of my favorites to write. Funny enough, she wasn’t in the first draft of this novel, except for three offhand mentions of a grandmother existing. She didn’t end up appearing until the third draft, after my professor who read a draft asked why she wasn’t a character. She stepped onto the page fully formed and very opinionated after that, and I loved her for it.
Michael Welch
Middle Daughter’s desire to learn what happened to her missing older sister Belle is at the heart of the book, but I was struck by how patient you were in revealing her and her disappearance. As a reader, you really feel her absence before you even know what has gone wrong in this family. I’d love to hear more about that decision to slowly reveal her.
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
It honestly happened fairly naturally in my first draft. When I write, I don’t go in with much of a plan. For this novel, I had an ending in mind based on a reoccurring dream I was having (spoiler: that isn’t the ending) so I was just trying to discover the story that led to my initial idea for the ending. In that first draft, the narrator was gradually revealing her story and her family’s story to me, which led to Belle slowly appearing on the page.
In the drafts that followed, I made some intentional choices to lean into that more. Such as giving Belle a name they called her, because she didn’t initially have any name. As well as picking the exact moment there’s actually a direct reference to her and a direct reveal of that name. In my own experience with grief and tragedy, I find that people often reveal details slowly over time, but there’s always a sense around them of the haunting and the scars that trauma inflicted. That was the tone I was hoping to strike with the slow reveal of Belle.
Michael Welch
There seems to be an obvious tension between the pursuit of the mystery around Belle’s disappearance and the recognition that we may never get the final answer, which is all too often the case in the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis. Did you find yourself grappling with that tension as you wrote?
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
I struggled with that in my first few drafts of this book. In fiction, when a character goes missing or is murdered, you nearly always have an answer to what happened by the end, but that’s often not the case in real life, especially with (Missing Murdered Indigenous Women) MMIW.. I felt myself being pulled back and forth between those two realities. I eventually realized that while, yes, the mystery of what happened to Belle is an important aspect of the book, it is the family and their story post-Belle’s vanishing that should be the main focus. Once I knew that, that tension disappeared for me.
Michael Welch
What role do you see fiction potentially playing when it comes to highlighting a crisis such as this, which has such a long history and is often met with silence?
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
My goal with this novel was to give an intimate voice to the experience of the MMIW crisis. I feel that often people are aware of the statistics and feel a level of sadness at the numbers, but they’re often not met with the faces and stories and the lasting impacts these murders and disappearances have on the family, friends, and communities of these women. I wanted my novel to serve as a way to bring a face to the experience.
I’m also hoping that people who haven’t even heard of this crisis come across the book and are able to learn about it and develop the same level of shock and outrage and despair I feel when I think of these people who are disappearing and/or being killed. The more attention brought to the matter the more likelihood of the possibility of change. And I think that’s what fiction does so well—it teaches people about places, things, and human experiences they might not have encountered on their own.
Michael Welch
I know you’re also a beadwork artist, and it plays a prominent role in the novel as well. I’d love to hear more about your love for beadwork! Do you ever find your work in these two artforms informing one another?
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
I’ve been in love with beadwork my entire life, but I didn’t actually start beading myself until 2020. Actually, I started doing beadwork at nearly the exact same time I started the first draft of this novel. I was teaching myself how to bead through YouTube videos for those first two years while I was simultaneously learning how to write this novel. In a way, I feel like beginning these journeys together helped me to learn aspects of the other craft. I also use beadwork as a way to recharge. Writing is often emotionally exhausting, but beading, the act of creating something with my hands, fills me up emotionally.
The two art forms are both so detail oriented. You have to pay attention to the little things—to every choice you’re making, to every word you write, to every bead you choose because everything has lasting effects. All those little choices end up making a larger picture.
With most styles of beadwork, if you mess up, it’s really hard to fix your mistake, especially if you don’t catch it early. If you catch it further down the line, you either have to actively choose to leave the mistake and find a way to make it work or you have to undo everything you’ve done since you made that mistake. I think of novels in a similar sense, though a bit more forgiving. While it is much easier to change a scene or sentence down the road, you then have to deal with the ramifications it has on everything else.
FICTION
Another Name for Red
By Amber Blaeser-Wardzala
Pantheon
Published October 13, 2026
