REVIEW of Morghen Tidd's Houses We Die In
Plus Five Questions with the author!
WHAT'S HAPPENING
In this triptych of stories, we closely follow the narrator as they parse their grief over a range of losses—a grandmother, a toxic friendship, a beloved neighborhood cat. Each loss is tied to place and time, objects even, making the reader keenly aware of how events—and their memories—are intimately tied to where they occurred. The front steps at Nana’s house. Lazing on a kitchen floor eating noodles. Coloring books with cheap wax crayons. No place or object is immune from memory. Each remembered detail, no matter how quotidian, lingers and becomes part of the narrator's present anguish. These stories ask what it means to be haunted and to haunt—how we leave bits of ourselves in places that have impacted us as much as we carry the ghosts of what happened there.
WHAT WE LOVE
Tidd’s ability to observe and render memory is extraordinary. Her prose twists and undulates, creating a kaleidoscope of experience that reads true to how memory works. Place-bound. Fragmented. Raw. Yet it’s impossible to talk about the quality of Tidd’s prose without talking about her syntax and grammar. The visual page upends expectations: Justified, brick-like paragraphs become vessels for sparsely punctuated sentences. Capital letters don’t exist. These craft choices combine to suggest memory is a messy thing. Urgent, yet continuous. Something to which you must attend—closely—or risk losing. This is a book that can be read again and again, each read offering the reader something new and necessary.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“i don’t know where to put these memories how to keep them fondly uninfected by the we who are now rotting.”
“I have spent too much time in water for someone who can’t swim.”
“the people of my family are still mysteries to me. obscurities kept alive through the retellings. like ghosts the stories linger around me. and i repeat them to myself again and again."
“what is friendship but a haunting?”
BOOK DETAILS
Houses We Die In can be purchased here. (Pre-orders until its Nov. 2026 release.)
Published by Conium Press. The volume is 7”x 4.25”, comprises 54 pages of prose, and features cover art by Leticia Higa.
FIVE QUESTIONS WITH MORGHEN TIDD
This book is such a masterful statement about the experience of grief and how our bodies and places imbibe our losses. How did this triptych coalesce?
I appreciate that! I tend to be a slow writer so this collection was written across the span of a few years. During this time, I had experienced a period of what felt like constant loss which ended up shaping these stories. I didn’t start writing with a set triptych in mind, but as I was reading over what I had written I saw these throughlines of grief, loss, wanting things that I could never have again, and cats. After putting the stories together, I could see them telling this overarching story in three different ways.
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You have a distinct style that compels and shepherds your reader so readily through your stories. The grammar of your prose feels so integral and intentional to this effect. How do you think about punctuation and other elements of grammar when shaping a narrative?
I try to write in a way that captures how a moment felt instead of making it fit into rules of grammar or punctuation. Without being guided by the usual rules of grammar, there are a lot of ways to play with language and my focus ends up being on how sentences sound next to each other. My editing process is just me reading paragraphs aloud over and over again to get the sound just right. I’m very inspired by Eimear McBride’s work (especially A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing) through her unconventional use of language. Her sentences feel very alive to me.
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The titular story “Houses We Die In” is such a standout, in part because the narrative is structurally driven by place. How do you see the theme of embodiment playing out in your work?
I often return to a quote from one of Angela Carter’s stories where she writes, “She herself is a haunted house.” For me, it invokes this idea of how a body can be haunted just as a house can be and I think this is something that comes up in my work a lot. The sense of memories and loss as things that are within the body and are carried with you is very interesting to me and something I try to explore in my work.
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Where do you see your work headed next? What’s holding your curiosity?
I would like to write a novella or novel for my next work. Currently, it is just a bunch of half sentences and notes on my phone, but someday I hope it will turn into something coherent. Lately, I have been interested in how to capture in writing a sense of lingering in one place that music and movies are able to capture so well. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the part in Mount Eerie’s song Moon Sequel when the lyrics “you’re gone” are repeated nineteen times in a row. It’s hypnotizing and makes my stomach hurt a little when I listen to that song, but in prose, the reader could see that it’s the same phrase being repeated and skip to the end. I want to capture that feeling in prose in a way that isn’t easily skipped over.
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Your bio mentions you have two parrots. Parrots are amazing. Tell us everything.
The best way I can describe it is like having a perpetual toddler who has pliers for a mouth! I can’t say I recommend them as pets but I do love them very much. I got my Green Cheek Conure, Frodo, when I was a young teenager and she turned 18 this July. I also have a 13 year old Congo African Grey named Renly. It is definitely an interesting experience to share my life with these creatures who can live for so long and are so intelligent.
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BIO
Morghen Tidd holds an MA in English from the University of Maine, where she was the Ulrich Wicks Teaching Assistant. She lives in Maine with her two parrots and partner.
OTHER BOOKS
girl thing (Long Day Press)
SOCIAL MEDIA
Instagram: @spookymorghen
Twitter/x: @spookymorghen