Aaron John Curtis is a Miami-based bookseller of Native American (Kanien’kéha) heritage who faced down a rare autoimmune disorder while getting his start as a writer. Abe, the hero of his debut novel, is also a Native American bookseller in Miami who aspires to be a professional writer.

But Curtis’ path to autofiction wasn’t as straightforward as those storylines suggest.

“I had it in my mind that if you’re writing fiction, it had to come 100% from your imagination, or it wasn’t a valid piece of writing,” Curtis says via video chat from his home in Miami. In the novel, he explains, Abe originally worked in insurance and lived in Tampa. But a colleague at Books & Books, the landmark indie store where he works as “quartermaster,” told him, “Just go full autofiction with this. Write what’s going on with you and just see what happens.”

What happened was the novel Old School Indian (Zando, May 6), which Kirkus, in a starred review, calls “an affecting tale of loss and healing that thrives through its seriocomic style.”

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Curtis discusses the novel’s circuitous development, its relationship with other works of Native American fiction, and the one change that made everything click into place.

What does it mean to be the “quartermaster” at Books & Books?

The quartermaster is the guy in the Army who, anytime someone had to requisition something, you went to him and he would bring in whatever it was you needed. With indie bookstores, everybody wears so many hats that it’s impossible to say, “I cover this” or “I cover that.” Some people would hand out their business cards, and there would be a little paragraph under their name with all the stuff that they took care of. I didn’t want to go that route, so I picked a big, all-encompassing title.

In the novel, Abe is diagnosed with a fictional disease, Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis. In real life, you had Polyarteritis nodosa. How similar are the two?

They’re very similar. There’s a line in the book about how “1.5 million people have rheumatoid arthritis, but only four people have what you have.” That was something my rheumatologist told me. It’s a scary thing. I worried about writing about it, because by the time I got around to finishing the book, it was under control—they had me on an injection that tamped my immune system down. It was going very well for me, it was working for me. But as for Abe, well, he needs to have his journey.

How did the diagnosis impact your writing of the novel?

There was a lot of beating myself up at the time: What have you done now? You’re gonna die. I was in a writer’s group, so all of that fear and panic just came out [in the writing]. They really enjoyed it. And they were like, “Keep going with this, flesh it out.”

The first version of the novel was in first person, and I think it had to do with the fear of death and the guilt over how much time I felt I had wasted, thinking that nothing would ever come of this effort. There was a lot of anger, and it was directed towards the reader, and I needed to get away from that. Diana Abu-Jaber [a novelist and member of my writers’ group] said, “Go to the third see what that unlocks.”

But you kept the first person in interludes narrated by Dominick Deer Woods, Abe’s poet alter ego.

He brings the humor, as opposed to the anger. Because you can have both, as well as the grief and all that wrapped up in one book. But it goes down a lot easier with a joke.

The book has examples of Abe’s poetry. Do you consider yourself a poet?

I’m the child of an alcoholic. When I was younger, I would go to Al-Anon and Alateen meetings, and I wrote some poetry during that time to kind of process everything. So it’s always something I’ve done. But I’ve never called myself a poet, and I’ve never had a poetry group. I’ve had essay groups, and fiction groups. But you just can’t get any four poets to agree to a certain date at a certain time [laughs]. So the poetry is what I’m honestly the most worried about. Originally, my idea was that as Abe got more effective as a poet, the poetry in the book would get better. The first ones were gonna be rough, and then by the time you got to the end of the book, it would be the best he could do. And that got thrown away pretty quickly. I just really tried to make every one the best I could.

There was a poem that I thought was one of the strongest, and I loved it. And during one of the last passes through [the manuscript], where you’re more focused on grammar and not rewriting anything, it just jumped out at me. Like, This is not it. This poem is standing in the way of the right poem that’s behind it. I rewrote the entire thing. And [the editors] didn’t change a word of it. They were just like, “The first one we loved, but this was a showstopper.”

The novel deals with Abe’s attempts to heal via Western medicine but also with folk healing through his Great Uncle Budge. It’s a little similar in some ways to Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony.

There’s a story Budge tells in the novel about breaking the world that’s very similar to a story Silko tells in Ceremony. And what’s funny was my uncle had told me that story, but he never said, “I read this in a book.” It was one of the scenes that has always been there, since Day 1 of the book. I was googling Tommy Orange to see what he was doing, and he’d written this article about Ceremony and talked about that scene. I had never read it; it was always on the about-to-read shelf. I pulled it out and read it and I’m like, Oh my God, I just ripped this off.

What Native American writers had you been reading?

Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich were the two big writers in our family. Especially Erdrich. My mom would always say, “I haven’t thought of this story since I was a kid” when she was reading her work. I love Tommy Orange, Morgan Talty, and Oscar Hokeah. Oscar’s novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance, is also a story about healing, kind of similar to Ceremony. I guess it’s just a thing. Like, we’re all kind of trying to work on healing generational trauma, [to work on] getting better, and it’s showing up in our work.

What are you working on next?

A few things. I keep them on a vision board—some of it looks like a note from a serial killer [laughs]. It’s too soon talk about. But I also have wellness stuff on there. The book tour is on there, reminding myself to be in the moment and enjoy the process. I don’t know how much I’m going to like it. I’ve seen [book tours] from the other end so many times, so I’m dying of curiosity.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix.