Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole settler who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. Her short story collection EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, was named the winner of the 2026 Asian Pacific American Award in Literature, winner of the 2026 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award, and a best book of 2025 by Esquire, Electric Lit, Debutiful, and Chicago Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lambda Literary, among others. Currently, she teaches creative writing in Kwinitekw Valley on Nonotuck land. Copyeditor Shira Leah Haus conducted this interview.
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Shira Haus: I think you’ve said before in other interviews, you like how the short story form is super contained, and every sentence counts in a way that it might not with longer prose. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how the brevity of the short story seems to mirror the sense of containment and maybe even claustrophobia that many of the characters in this book struggle with.
Mariah Rigg: Yeah! I was talking to one of my friends who was also born and raised on O’ahu and writes about Hawai’i, and we were wondering whether a novel form was even possible to write about Hawai’i through—which, like, I’m still trying but I don’t know if it is possible, because I feel like the claustrophobia of the form is not only similar to some of the claustrophobia of the length of the collection, but is just inherent to how living on an island and growing up on an island is, especially when you’ve been growing up on an island where generations of your family have been. There’s just a sense of the stories, and the gossip, and the generations pressing in on you. I think that the short story form and the linked collection, at least for me, felt like the perfect form through which to write about Hawai’i.
SH: Continuing in that vein, I’m really interested in how certain characters seem to haunt the narrative—no character is more important than another, but they all create this tangled web of relationships and interconnection. The past and the future converse and echo, the natural world interacts with human relationships. I’m particularly fascinated by the relationships certain characters have with physical objects, such as in “I Made This Place For You,” with the narrator’s connection to the statue and the museum. I would love to hear more about this sort of mirroring, interconnectedness, and haunting.
MR: First of all, I definitely think every story is a ghost story, so it makes sense for me that not only people but places, and even objects like you’re saying, are haunting the narrative. In terms of hauntings, while writing the collection, I was trying to think of time not as a linear thing but as a landscape; that these stories, people, and objects are existing on the same plane or landscape at the same time.
I’m also a very tactile person, so it makes sense for me to write stories that are very tactile and interested in objects, and interested in bodies and how bodies interact with objects like the story you referenced. There’s a scene where the narrator puts the statue head in her mouth, and that wasn’t in the first draft—I took it out and put it back in. That story had the most revisions in the entire collection, as people kept telling me that they thought different things about it! But I kept it because I feel like there’s something so much more interesting about this character putting this statue that almost tastes like blood in her mouth while she’s dealing with the pressures of her own sexuality, the pressures of caring for her grandmother who is, as we figure out, going to die but is also slowly dying anyway if it were not for how the story ends.
SH: I love that moment—that’s one of the moments that really viscerally stuck in my head after reading the book.
MR: Such a weird moment.
SH: It’s so great! This also leads into my next question: I’m curious about the role of surprise and play in these stories, those shocking moments like that one. Even though your stories seem to have an almost cyclical nature, they resist easy resolution and easy answers. How do you decide when to withhold or invite information into your stories? What is that balance like?
MR: It’s interesting that you say the stories feel like they have play, because I feel like often when I’m thinking about my work I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s too serious! I don’t think of myself as a very serious person, and so it’s always so boring to me that my work feels too serious sometimes; I would like to write more like how I speak to people in the actual world. In terms of withholding, it just matters to me so much. So much of withholding feels dependent on character, so a character could be someone who feels very confessional and has maybe worked through their shit more—I had a story come out last year where this character was a survivor of sexual trauma as a child and also had found her parents’ sex tape when she was thirteen, but she was very confessional because she had done all this therapy, and so was trying to tell the reader how she felt now. I feel like a lot of the characters in Extinction Capital of the World don’t feel that way; a lot of them are very withholding because they are very repressed.
SH: That makes total sense. Is there another moment that shocked you or surprised you as you were writing it?
MR: That’s a great question—I have to think, because it’s been so long since I wrote it. I feel like when writing, “Parthenogenesis” was probably the most shocking story to write because it was the most associative in terms of the leaps between scenes and how the story is connected, because the story also uses parentheticals to show where different parts of the story are being narrated from. The ending is when the character wakes up on the front lawn in LA still kind of drunk, and that’s not where I thought the story was going. I thought the story was going to end in the second-person also, because the story jumps into first-person near the end. I was writing it thinking oh, so this is happening, I guess. But that’s what’s so delightful about writing: being so in the thing that writing it can still surprise you and lead you in new directions.
SH: Absolutely. I’m curious about that process of organization. How did you conceive of the overall arc of the book? Did you write intentionally to fill in gaps, or did the stories come together more spontaneously?
MR: So the first draft of this book was only about a third of the stories, maybe half, that are now in the book. Over time, I don’t think I was writing toward stories that I felt needed to be in the book, but I was kind of like, Oh, this makes more sense, in terms of cohesion. One of my professors in my MFA told me that you should always read the last line of a story and then read the first line of a story that you place after it, and see if those make sense together. I did that after my agent and my editor had re-ordered the book and I was like oh no, these lines do not sound good next to each other! But whatever, it worked out. In terms of arc, I always knew I wanted to end the collection with a longer piece or novelette, which is what the titular story, “Extinction Capital of the World,” is. It actually originally began with “Dawn Chorus,” which is directly linked—well, they’re all linked—but is linked to the characters of “Extinction Capital of the World,” but my agent and editor thought that “Target Island” would be a more accessible entrance, so I just let them do that. But at first, the story collection only had a triptych that was linked, kind of like the Juliet triptych in Alice Munro’s Runaway, and then it grew from there.
SH: How did the experience of writing this book prepare you for writing new work? Did the direction of your writing change course, or will future projects follow similar threads?
MR: I think my work got slightly weirder and more adventurous as I wrote. The most ‘traditional’ stories, in the Western, MFA sense, were the stories that I wrote first—like “After Ivan” and “I Made This Place for You,” that in terms of point of view especially are not doing a lot of adventurous things. And like I said earlier, the titular story (Extinction Capital of the World) has like two-and-a-half points of view, alternating between the collective and then another POV that’s intimate with a father, and then one POV that’s intimate with his daughter.
I was telling some students at Hamilton College when I was there in December that I want to write stories that have more characters in them, and then one of my friends who’d invited me out afterward said that’s just a novel, Mariah, which you’re already working on. So I guess I would like to finish a novel, but a part of me—especially debuting with a short story collection, so many people tell me oh, you’re cutting your teeth on short stories, when you write a novel you’ll be a real writer—part of me would like to push against that. Because, you know, there are writers like Danielle Evans, whose first two collections are some of the best books I have ever read. Her second collection was actually supposed to be a novel when she sold the book; it was supposed to be a two-book deal, a collection and a novel, and she was like, I can’t write a novel, here’s my second collection, to her agent. And it all worked out! But yeah, I do want to write a novel just to say I did it.
SH: That’s so interesting, because comparing a short story and a novel, it’s like comparing a sprint and a marathon. They’re both valuable in their own terms, but they just take different skills and processes.
MR: It’s not even the same form, really!
SH: Which other texts would you say this collection exists in conversation with? Did you intentionally write toward conversation with these texts, or did they influence you more subconsciously?
MR: Definitely Edward P. Jones’ work, which I studied a lot in my MFA, and has really strong relationships with place and time, and I would say arc-wise too, his collections’ arcs are so strong. Casey Plett’s Dream of a Woman as well; there’s this novella that kind of braids through the whole collection, so that when I read it I was like, Oh my god, you can do that? You can play with form like that in short fiction? Also Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, Kristiana Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise, and Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare. I’m just very interested in work that is super steeped in place, so all of those. And Alice Munro’s Runaway, even though, you know, Alice ended up being a piece of shit… but I don’t know, it’s more complicated than that! And also, of course, We the Animals by Justin Torres, which he should have won the National Book Award for, but it was a debut, so. Those are some of the books I come back to.
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