When Caitlin Hamilton Summie was barely old enough to read, she handed her mother a page filled with scribbles and asked her to read it aloud. Her mother, in what might be described as an early stroke of editorial genius, turned the request back on her daughter. “Why don’t you read it to me?” she said. And thus, a storyteller was born.
Summie’s relationship to the written word has always been intuitive, a kind of second language developed in childhood and sharpened over time. Her 2017 debut, To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, a short story collection 25 years in the making, marked the formal arrival of a writer who had quietly carried her art alongside careers, family, and a firm belief in the emotional truths fiction can hold. The stories, many of which were penned during her MFA years at Colorado State University, were finally assembled at the encouragement of publisher Mark Estrin at Fomite Press, who asked her—casually, fatefully—if she had a book. She didn’t. Not yet. But the question lingered, and within a year, she discovered she did.
Now, Summie has returned with Geographies of the Heart, a novel New York Times bestselling author Beth Hoffman describes as “a tender yet powerful journey where bitterness gives way to the determination it takes to stitch lives back together.” It is a phrase that captures not just the novel’s arc, but the ethos with which Summie herself approaches storytelling: patiently, precisely, and always with the hope of healing.
We spoke on a quiet afternoon, the kind of day that might suit her characters, who tend to live in quiet rooms, tense silences, and long memories. “My characters always guide me,” Summie said. “I start with just a voice or a line or a phrase, and I have no idea where I’m going.” This could sound like disorientation. In Summie’s case, it is discipline. She lets the characters unfold over time—sometimes a very long time—until they show her where their truths lie.
If her path to publication seems meandering, it is because life, as she tells it, asked more of her than just fiction. She worked in editorial—first as an assistant and receptionist at a Random House imprint—but soon realized she lacked the instinct required to shape other people’s stories. What she did have was a rare ability to tell the world why a story mattered. She turned to publicity, a decision that would eventually lead to the creation of a literary marketing firm she runs with her husband. In a publishing landscape often preoccupied with sales metrics and social media impressions, Summie remains refreshingly grounded in purpose. “I’m happy and good at telling people why a story matters,” she said, without pretense.
This is a woman for whom fiction is not escape, but excavation. Geographies of the Heart, though not autobiographical, is deeply personal. “I don’t have a sister,” she tells me. “My grandmother was sweet, not sharp and biting like Catherine, the grandmother in the novel.” And yet, she concedes, “there are threads that are reflective of my life.” She grew up in a multigenerational household. She knows what it is to hear echoes from family songs in the quiet rooms of adulthood. The book, she insists, is fiction—but “emotionally true.”
This phrase—emotionally true—comes up often in our conversation. It’s her North Star, the unteachable quality she hopes readers feel even if they can’t name it. In a publishing ecosystem sometimes obsessed with plot twists and tidy arcs, Summie’s work is daring in its refusal to entertain at the expense of feeling. “The characters are experiencing things that are true to what they would do,” she says. “That’s what matters to me.”
At the heart of Geographies is forgiveness—slow, thorny, and un-glamorous. Summie doesn’t believe forgiveness is taught so much as it is endured. “We’re told to forgive,” she says, “but not how.” In her novel, reconciliation is earned, often imperfectly. “Maybe forgiveness can’t be taught,” she muses, “but I do think it is a process of absorbing the pain, understanding the pain, and then letting the pain go.” That letting go is hard, especially for her characters, whose lives are not built around sweeping gestures but moments so small they could easily be missed—unless, of course, you are paying attention.
Despite the acclaim, Summie is uncertain about what comes next. “I don’t know what’s next,” she confesses with the kind of candor that’s become rare in an age of constant productivity. She has a completed picture book. A middle-grade novel she’s been working on for over a decade. But no promises. “For right now, I just want to do other things. Paint the house. Fix up the yard.”
In a culture that often equates success with output, Caitlin Hamilton Summie stands as a quiet rebuke. Her work resists spectacle. Her characters murmur rather than shout. Her pace is deliberate, her faith in the long arc of emotional truth unwavering. Whether Geographies of the Heart proves to be her first and only novel—or the opening of a new chapter—remains to be seen. What is clear is that Summie’s compass, finely tuned to the nuances of feeling and the subtleties of human interaction, will continue to guide her. And if she hears another line, another voice—some distant phrase that stirs the air—she’ll follow it. Slowly. Honestly. All the way home.
Learn more about Caitlin Hamilton Summie.
