Fairhaven Professor Caskey Russell discusses his debut novel, 'The Door on the Sea,' an NPR Books We Love 2025 pick

“The Door on the Sea,” published last fall by Solaris and distributed by Simon & Schuster, is the first in Caskey Russell’s the Raven and the Eagle trilogy that Simon & Schuster calls “an epic quest fantasy debut that is the Tlingit Indigenous response to 'The Lord of the Rings'” and NPR hails as “a new, fascinating take on a classic epic adventure.” 

“The Door on the Sea” follows Elān, a young man of the island-dwelling Aaní people, and his crew made up of the foul-mouthed Raven, a human bear-cousin and a giant wolf, on an epic canoe journey to defend his people from shapeshifting Koosh invaders.  

Professor and former Dean of Western’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies Caskey Russell teaches songwriting and poetry, is an enrolled member of the Tlingit Nation of Alaska and was raised in the Seattle area. Russell earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Western Washington University and his doctorate from University of Oregon, where he wrote his dissertation on Tlingit culture and language. He taught at University of Wyoming for 18 years before returning to WWU as dean of Fairhaven in 2021, after exactly 25 years away.

Russell said his inspiration for the Raven and the Eagle trilogy was his two boys. In 2013, he was on sabbatical from University of Wyoming and moved his family to Hamilton, New Zealand for a year, where Russell was a visiting researcher. His boys were in first and fifth grade and terribly homesick, so in an attempt to cheer them up and make them laugh, Russell would write a couple pages in the office each day, then read them to his boys at home in the evenings, straight off his laptop. 

Western Today recently sat down with Russell to talk about his book, an NPR Books We Love pick for 2025, and the inspiration behind it.

WWU: You were originally interested in writing literary fiction, but “The Door on the Sea” has been a successful debut in genre fiction. Tell us what that shift was like for you. 

Russell: “I used to gravitate towards literary fiction because that was what was on offer in the curricula in graduate school. In my spare time I was drawn to sci-fi, fantasy and historical fiction, especially when I was younger. 

But I tried to write literary fiction because I thought that’s what a real writer should do. And it really kind of put a filter in my head, or a censor, that monitored what I was writing, because I was trying to live up to some image I have of a writer. 

It was, maybe not debilitating, but it was always there, this kind of censor in my head asking, Is this literary fiction? Is this the next Steinbeck or Toni Morrison or something like that? 

But when I was writing “The Door on the Sea,” it was more like, let’s see if I can entertain these two little brats that are crying every night. See if I can get them to crack up and laugh. I had no inhibitions.” 

WWU: How did that impact your writing process?

Russell: “I just thought, I’m going to throw everything in there, and then rewrite it according to the first grader and fifth grader’s desires. I wrote their stuffed animals and their Native names into it and put other references to our family in there — all these things the boys wanted in there. 

When I’d read it to them at bedtime, they would give me all these notes and demand that I go back and rewrite parts of it. So many notes!

It became part of our daily lives in New Zealand. We went out to the Hobbiton film set for the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movie. We spent eight hours there because they loved the film. We liked to go have root beer in these big pewter mugs at The Green Dragon, where they had this big fire blazing and a huge stone hearth. My boys said they wanted that exact thing in the novel. I was like, Hell, it’s not Tlingit culture, but okay! 

The one time I can remember pushing back is when my son wanted the characters to reach in the ocean and grab a shrimp, then squeeze and shoot it like a phaser from Star Wars. And I said, Yeah no, we’re not doing that. 

It was so freeing not to have this image of what a lyric fiction writer should be or what fiction should be — to just enjoy the writing.

I think what I’ve learned is, I’ll keep writing what appeals to me and not what I think should appeal to others.” 

WWU: When I talk about writing, I often think of a Natalie Diaz quote that I’ve revisited hundreds of times. She says, “If I write a poem, the poem is the least of what has happened.” 

In writing this trilogy, what has happened for you beyond the page? 

Russell: “That’s a great question. I would say it’s nice to have a book for some of my relatives. I’ve heard from cousins on the Tlingit side of my family — my cousin sent me pictures of them buying the book.

I’m part of this big family called the Peratrovich family. The opening of the book is dedicated to our ancestral village up in Alaska called Kooyu Kwáan. It’s a village that was decimated by smallpox — its longhouses were torched in a futile attempt to prevent the spread of disease. So the epigraph is: ‘Dedicated to Kooyu Kwáan, those scattered, not forgotten.’ 

We’re all part of that group, even though the village is abandoned, and the longhouses are all burned. When smallpox hit, everyone who didn’t die fled the area. So I’m trying to get my mind and my literary arms around all the survivors of this plague from the 1860s and kind of recreate some stories and inspire new ones. 

So that was my intention, and it’s nice to see some of my relatives responding to that. I just did a reading at Elliot Bay, and a cousin of mine, who I hadn’t seen since 1998, came out for it. 

I would say, in that larger framework of what’s been going on outside the book, it’s been nice to reconnect with family and get some appreciation from some of our cousins on the Tlingit side.” 

WWU: What advice do you have for Western students and other creatives who want to be writers? 

Russell: “Persistence is the one big thing. Well, there are two things: Persistence and practice. 

Also, find an agent. I submitted to 60 people, 60 agents, and all 60 said no. Around 10 of them wanted to see the manuscript, and even they said no. It was the first reader of one of those agents who was starting her own client list that was really interested in the novel and reached out to me. 

So, if I had stopped at 50 or 59 or even 60 rejections, you know, the novel would have never gotten published. Then it took over a year to find a publisher — all the U.S. publishers said no.

My agent suggested that maybe my book wasn’t right for the American Market, and I recall worrying that Americans weren't interested in Indigenous myth and fantasy. But she tried this press over in the UK — they snapped it up, bought all three, and they’ve been great! 

But before they picked it up, my agent had started asking what other ideas I had for novels that we could try. I could have given up. She could have given up. 

So, I would say persistence is key. Keep writing. Practice writing.”

WWU: You started the trilogy during your time in New Zealand, put it away for a few years, then picked it back up and finished it during the pandemic at Western. How did that varied context over the course of a decade shape the story? 

When I went back to the book to finish it, the tone of the pandemic, and the fact that my boys were about six years older, really shifted the story. When my boys were young, it started out kind of Young Adult — with a scatological Raven that I tried to make true to Tlingit culture but in a way that would also make my boys laugh. 

The book shifts when Elān and his crew go on their epic journey in the canoe. The themes become more adult, and it gets more violent. 

Even my editor and agent asked, How do we balance this tonal shift from Young Adult to Adult, from kind of light and happy, to maybe a bit darker towards the end? 

So, I think the pandemic had that effect on it. 

WWU: What’s next for you, after the Raven and the Eagle trilogy?

I’ve got ideas for the next few books I want to write. There’s one, in particular, that’s marinating and sort of demanding to be written.

Here is the notion: In the future, maybe 100 years from now, what if a group of people have compiled records of all the carbon use of people’s ancestors from 1930, or whenever we started keeping receipts, say, of gas, travel, flight. Maybe 1950 up to whenever the end of oil is. A group of people have the records of whose ancestors benefited the most from carbon use and destroyed the planet. What would they do? 

Learn more about designing your own education at WWU’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies here. 

Allie Spikes covers the WWU Graduate School and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at spikesa@wwu.edu.