The Heaven of Animals: Stories (34 page)

5. In “100% Cotton,” the narrator contemplates human suffering as he attempts to re-create his deaf father’s mugging and murder on a street corner. Read the story again, this time considering what the narrator is feeling during the course of events. In attempting to contrive his own murder, what do you think he hopes to achieve?

6. The title of the story “Nudists” telegraphs the importance of the nudists Mark meets on the beach—yet they are only a small part of the story. What makes them so important, worthy of the story’s title? What do you think their presence means or signals to Mark?

7. Consider the other stories in this collection that are written in the first person, or narrated by a character. How much did you trust the narrators’ accounting of events, judgments of other people, and assessments of themselves? What qualities make for a reliable—or an unreliable—narrator?

8. “How to Help Your Husband Die” is the only story in
The Heaven of Animals
to be written as a directive, setting it apart in tone from the rest of the collection. What did you think of this instruction manual–like format?

9. Many of the characters in the collection are faced with death—their own death or the death of a loved one. In what ways do the characters deal with loss or potential loss? What does the threat of death—or a wish for death—mean to these characters?

10. Which of the characters in this collection, if any, would you consider to be truly happy? Or, do you not consider the characters’ happiness to be important?

11. Love, guilt, forgiveness, atonement—these themes run throughout the collection. What other recurring themes did you spot? Overall, which theme do you feel is most important to the essence of the book, and why?

12. Bestselling author Ron Rash has praised Poissant for his “refusal to condescend to his characters.” What do you think is meant by this? Do you agree with his assessment?

READING GROUP ENHANCERS

1. Choose a story or two from the collection to read at the start of your gathering. Then, as a group, discuss how the experience of hearing the story read aloud differed from the experience of reading it yourself. This is a good exercise for sparking further discussion.

2. Make a photocopy of the contents page for each member of your reading group. Ask them to consider how they felt after reading each story, then have them write one word describing what they felt next to each story’s title. Once everyone has finished, share your word choices with one another. Did some word choices overlap?

3. Trace the inclusion of animals throughout the collection. Assign each member of your group a story and ask him or her to highlight or record every time an animal is involved. After discussing your findings as a group, consider what the animals bring to each story.

4. If
The Heaven of Animals
were a record album, what songs would be on it? If it were a painting, what would it look like? Before meeting, ask the members of your reading group to create a piece of art, a poem, a playlist, or some other work of their choosing that expresses their response to the collection. These can be shared at the group discussion or kept private.

5. To learn more about David James Poissant and his work, visit
www.davidjamespoissant.com
.

AUTHOR Q&A

I have to ask: Why does the baby glow?

Maybe a better question would be: Why
wouldn’t
the baby glow? Truthfully, I don’t remember how the image came to me. But, once it arrived, I couldn’t shake it. The story then became a kind of thought experiment. If your baby really glowed, what kind of inconveniences would you face, and what might the upsides be? It’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing a story, though I was surprised by the dark turn the story took at the end. I didn’t really want to go there, but the end result of all life is death, so death felt like this particular thought experiment’s inevitable conclusion.

What first inspired you to write about, as author Claire Vaye Watkins puts it in a review of
The Heaven of Animals
, “our weird, urgent attempts to understand each other”?

I think that we often hurt those we love most, often without meaning to, and I think that these hurts usually come about as a result of miscommunication. Like the narrator of “100% Cotton,” I believe there’s often something—pride, fear, shame, any number of things, really—that stands between people and keeps them from truly hearing one another. But we all want to be heard. We’re desperate for love.

In life, I kind of wear my heart on my sleeve, but, for whatever reason, I’m interested in characters who don’t. I seem to gravitate toward stories about people who can’t quite say what they feel.

Some stories in this collection go on in multiple parts, like “The Geometry of Despair,” while others total only a page or two in length, like “Knockout” and “The Baby Glows.” When you are writing, how do you know when a story is finished? Or, how do you know which stories can be told in only a few hundred words, and which require a few thousand?

When I wrote “Venn Diagram,” I didn’t know there would be a “Wake the Baby,” and when I wrote “Lizard Man,” I didn’t know there would be “The Heaven of Animals.” Those sequels came later. The characters had more to say, and I wanted to explore later episodes in their lives (so much so in the case of Richard and Lisa that I’m currently at work on a novel about their family).

As for length, for me, the weirder stories, ones you might call fabulist or magic realist, stories like “The Baby Glows” and “What the Wolf Wants,” tend to stay on the short side. I worry, with such stories, that I’ll wear out my welcome or that maybe the story will collapse under the weight of its own conceit. Plenty of writers I admire, writers like Karen Russell and George Saunders, can cartwheel through the woods of weird for the lengths of long stories or novels. I haven’t learned how to do that just yet, but I’m not ruling it out for myself for the future.

A majority of the stories in this collection deal with death in one way or another—some subtly, but most in a very overt way that the reader can’t ignore. Do you find it hard to write about such a difficult subject? What encourages you to tackle the subject head-on?

Well, death is what we all fear most, right? I’m not sure that I believe people who say they’re not afraid of death. Who wouldn’t be? It’s the great unknown. In some ways, it seems like the problem we’re here to solve. We spend our lives preparing for our own extinction. We can ignore that fact, or face it head on. Maybe, by tackling death again and again, I’m hoping to take away a little of its power, its sting.

Though there are animals throughout the collection that are metaphorically personified, “What the Wolf Wants” is the only story to feature an animal that truly takes on human qualities—he talks, he drinks coffee, he wants moccasins. Is magical realism a category that you’re interested in exploring further?

Absolutely. Writing, I’m equally happy entering the woods of magic realism as I am sticking to the sidewalks of realism. This is probably less a product of any calculated choice than it is a by-product of my reading habits. I’ll pick up a story collection by Kevin Brockmeier or Aimee Bender as quickly as I will one by Charles D’Ambrosio or Deborah Eisenberg. As a result, story ideas arrive both zany and grounded, and I do my best to write whatever comes to me. In a recent interview, Adam Levin, author of
The Instructions
, said, “I was taught that there’s this division between realism and experimentalism, and I think that the other writers whose work I admire, as well as myself, we sort of don’t care about that anymore. And it’s not because it was ever irrelevant, it’s just that now the point of experimentalism seems to be to still tell a good story and to move people.” That sentiment strikes me as just about right. I’m wary of experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but I think that the best experimental or magical stories, works like Donald Barthelme’s
The Dead Father
or A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest,” get at the truth of life and longing just as earnestly and honestly as work set in a realist mode.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a seismic shift from where I stood in grad school. At the University of Arizona, I was entrenched in the realism camp, not because the program incentivized one ideology over another, but because, somewhere, I’d gotten the idea that one must pick a side and stick to it. Then, in 2007, a magazine called
Redivider
sponsored a contest for stories written on a postcard-sized slip of paper. I wrote “Knockout” and won. Somehow, writing that story tripped a switch, and it wasn’t long before I was writing about glowing babies and talking wolves alongside the realism that I still love.

Is there a particular character in this collection that you would deem your personal favorite, or to whom you can most relate? Conversely, which character did you find yourself fighting with the most?

That’s a tough one. I admire the extravagant love that Grace showers upon Aaron in “The End of Aaron.” In some ways, that love is selfish, but in most ways it feels absolutely selfless to me.

My heart is also very much with Brig at the end of “Amputee” and with the narrator of “100% Cotton.” Their stories abandon them at moments of great internal struggle.

The character I fought with most would have to be Dan Lawson of “Lizard Man” and the title story. It was a struggle to climb into his head, and, once there, to try to see things from his point of view and to write from that point of view without condescending to him. I hope I’ve redeemed him by the end as well, but that’s up to the reader to decide.

All of the stories in
The Heaven of Animals
were published previously in magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. What was the process of putting them together in a single book like for you?

My genius agent, Gail Hochman, took a big chance on me, for which I’ll always be grateful. When we put the collection together, we left out most of the shorter stories and anything that smacked of magic realism. The logic here was that it’s hard enough selling a story collection these days. Why frustrate potential editors with a collection that can’t seem to make up its mind what it is?

But, after my genius editor, Millicent Bennett, acquired the collection for Simon & Schuster, she asked to see everything I had. I sent her another twenty stories, and, from those, we picked six to replace weaker stories from the original manuscript. In the end, we settled on sixteen stories that we both agreed were my best, regardless of length or style, the familiar rubbing elbows with the fantastical. “I didn’t know this was allowed!” I said excitedly, to which Millicent just laughed, though, later, I’d realize that some of my favorite story collections do the very same thing. (Ron Carlson’s
At the Jim Bridger
and Stuart Dybek’s
The Coast of Chicago
come to mind.) Hopefully, if nothing else, the story selection represents my versatility.

The collection is bookended by Dan and Jack’s story, beginning in “Lizard Man” and ending in the collection’s titular story, “The Heaven of Animals.” Why did you make this choice?

I’d always conceived of the collection beginning and ending with those two stories. And, no matter which stories got put in or pulled out, and no matter how they were reordered as my editor and I sought to find harmony and balance in the collection, the one thing that never changed, one thing that Gail, Millicent, and I always agreed on, was that the collection should begin with “Lizard Man” and end with “The Heaven of Animals.” There are at least two reasons for this.

First, for the rare reader who reads the stories in order, the last story will come as a surprise. Personally, I love when writers do this, when a collection, overall, is unlinked, but, then, there’s this gift of an unannounced story that features a character or storyline in which you already have a vested interest.

Second, much of the collection is set in the South, but the final story leads the reader out of the South. Dan’s journey takes him through parts of the country where stories like “Amputee” and “Nudists” are set. Rather than bring the collection full circle by starting in Florida and ending in Florida, I hope this choice gives the collection a different kind of cohesiveness.

Which short story authors would you say have most inspired your own writing?

Lorrie Moore and Ron Carlson for their ability to temper life’s terrors with humor and wit. Charles D’Ambrosio for the pacing of his stories, that patient, narrative unravelling. Amy Hempel for her gleaming prose and her ability, with a single sentence, to put an icepick in your heart. Rick Bass, for his breathtaking imagery and celebration of the natural world. Frederick Barthelme, who writes about the South I know more honestly than anyone I know, and whose novels
Tracer
and
Bob the Gambler
are two of the finest books I’ve ever read. And George Saunders for his humanity, the grace he extends to his characters, and the empathy he demands of his readers.

Those are the writers that I hope have, in some small way, rubbed off on me. If they haven’t yet, I hope they will.

You are currently working on your first novel. How is the experience of writing a novel different from writing a short story, or from creating a short story collection? Do you find one to be more difficult than the other?

On the one hand, writing a novel is difficult in that it’s just
so
much book to write. On the other hand, writing and revising a story can take months, even years. It took me nine years to write and revise enough stories decent enough to fill a collection. The novel will have been written—knock on wood—in under four years. Something about sticking to the same characters and a single storyline seemed to make the process of finishing the novel go much faster than writing and assembling so many disparate stories.