Your Family Vernacular: Alex Higley talks to Kathryn Scanlan
Alex Higley and Kathryn Scanlan discuss Kathryn’s short story collection, The Dominant Animal.
Alex Higley: Opening The Dominant Animal I was struck by the title of the first story: "The First Whiffs of Spring." That title seems like it could have been lifted from your recently published book, AUG 9 – FOG. The story itself, tonally, moves instantly out of the world of AUG 9 – FOG, but was that title intended as a small bridge between the two works?
Kathryn Scanlan: It pleases me you think this. Studying the diary AUG 9 is built from felt like studying the vernacular of the region where I grew up, the vernacular of my family—a particular frank, funny, matter-of-fact yet eccentric way of speaking. The familiarity of the diarist’s language was part of the appeal of working with that text, and I think it encouraged a development of that vernacular in my other work.
A: I love the idea of you studying your family vernacular, your home region’s vernacular. Especially because it resulted in AUG 9. Is there art, books or otherwise, from your part of the Midwest that is particularly meaningful to you?
K: I love the work of Marilynne Robinson and Tom Drury, also the paintings of Grant Wood. Jesus’ Son is a favorite book, much of which is set in Iowa City. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is another favorite. I love the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. I have some old pieces of local memory ware, which is a folk form whereby a jug or other vessel is applied with a kind of clay and all the small loose, broken objects one has collected over the years are pressed into it.
A: I’ve seen memory ware all my life but didn’t know what it was called or even considered it until you named it here. Beautiful. Were you ever concerned about putting out AUG 9 before The Dominant Animal? There is so much confidence in releasing them in the order you did.
K: Both books were already finished when I sold them, so initially my editor (Emily Bell) and I talked about releasing them at the same time. When we decided to release them separately, she suggested AUG 9 be published first. I love that my debut was a book that contradicts the conventional wisdom of what a first book should look like.
A: As a reader, AUG 9 made me so curious to see what TDA would be. The reading experience with AUG 9 was closer to reading a collection of poetry (I read it in an hour), but my memory of the work is more prose-like; I think of it as a narrative whole. I was excited to find groupings of stories in TDA. The stories are broken into eight sections. How long did it take you to arrive at the order/groupings in the book? Was there a lot of shuffling?
K: This was something else I worked on with Emily. I knew I wanted “The First Whiffs of Spring” to introduce the collection and was pretty sure I wanted to end it with “The Poker,” but otherwise was at a loss. I thought of shaking the titles in a bowl and dumping them out. I sent them to Emily and she sent them back in groups she’d made based on similarities in theme or style. I used her groups to make different groups. We went back and forth a few weeks before arriving at the final arrangement. The sections were just scaffolding at first, but I decided I liked the idea of a recurring pause or rest—like a pause in a musical sense, a rest between movements. I thought the breaks could act like benches, strategically and periodically placed, where a reader might stop and sit before continuing.
A: I’m curious to go back and read each section with more of an eye towards their grouping. In my notes I have “captivity” and “restrained” written down for the second section; “most disturbing” for the third; “the past” for the fourth; “marriage?” for the sixth. The rest, I’m still looking.
K: I like the idea that a reader might search for organizational similarities within the groups, this seems like a fruitful game with any number of potential interpretations. But my final arrangement of the sections was not guided by anything overt, overarching. It was mostly intuitive and if I were doing it again now, I’d probably end up with something else.
A: Within sections, there are many striking resonances, the appearance of the word “pink” in “Power Tools” following the story “Small Pink Female” was a particular favorite. There is a lot pink throughout the book. Other frequently appearing happenings: women getting sick, caregivers, animals being butchered, animals dying. I kept thinking: I wonder if Kathryn eats meat? Despite these stories representing a decade or so of work, were you surprised to see what was constant in your interests, and in the world of your fiction?
K: It’s surprising, yes—and uncomfortable, too—to have a vantage on one’s preoccupations. I recently started eating meat again for the first time in 20 years because suddenly, I could no longer eat the things I usually ate, due to illness. It’s a knotted topic.
A: Did you have a model for your collection? A collection that gave you artistic permission to approach TDA and its compiling in the way you did?
K: Not really, no—but there may well be books I’m not remembering, or whose influence is so deep as to be subconscious. The symbols between the sections were inspired by the eccentric flourishes found in older editions of NOON and in some of Diane Williams’s books.
A: Is there a writer that people compare your work to often that you have actually never read?
K: I recently spoke with someone who brought up Shirley Jackson’s work, which I haven’t read except for her story “The Lottery”—a long time ago.
A: I thought of W.S. Merwin, Joy Williams, Diane Williams.
K: The Williamses are definitely influences, but I haven’t read much Merwin.
A: Do you start with a first line and go from there? It seems these stories are so charged by their openings.
K: Yes. Sometimes a first line is all I have. Other times I’ll have an idea of the rest of the story, but can’t start until I find the first sentence. It’s always the engine of a story. If there’s not enough energy in the first line I tend to run out of gas.
A: That’s how I work too. Reading the opening sentences in TDA, it’s so obvious they are your engine: “I went alone to the pagan museum and to the historic fountain because he’d been unable to defecate since we’d arrived nearly a week prior.” or “Years ago I had two dogs, one large and one small, and one day the large one killed the small one, though it took the small one a day or so to die.” Do you tend to work relatively quickly after finding your first sentence? Were there any stories that came in one shot or that you particularly labored over for a long time?
K: Yes—some of the stories came quickly, in one sitting (“Beef Hearts Trimmed of Fat, Braised,” “Salad Days,” “The Candidate,” “Live a Little”) and some I worked on in various drafts for years (“The First Whiffs of Spring,” “Playhouse,” “Men of the Woods,” “Bait-and-Switch”). It’s the most exhilarating feeling to write a good story quickly, but in a way it’s a terrible misfortune, because after you’ve done it once you’re always chasing that feeling and feeling like a failure when you can’t catch it. And it might be disingenuous to suggest I’ve written anything quickly, because most of those stories lived in my head for years before I sat down to write them.
Alex Higley is the author of Cardinal (longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction) and Old Open. He has been previously published by Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, New World Writing, PANK, and elsewhere. He lives in Illinois.
Kathryn Scanlan is the author of Aug 9—Fog and The Dominant Animal. She lives in Los Angeles.
