This week’s story, “Dogs Go Wolf,” opens as a storm is lashing an island in Florida, and a pair of sisters, ages four and seven, are in a fishing camp with no other companions but a dog. Were all these elements—the sisters, the island, the storm, and the dog—in place from the beginning?
My stories come together when separate elements that I’m obsessed by start to speak to each other. In some ways, this story is pushing further into one of my recurrent nightmares, in which I am not around to insure my children’s safety—in some ways it is a photo negative of “The Midnight Zone,” (which appeared in these pages last year), about a mother who is gravely injured to the point where she’s not sure she can care for her children. I started to think beyond the nightmare of the mother in that scenario and into the nightmare of the children left behind. At the same time, I was thinking almost constantly of my own little sister, who is thirty-five now, a two-time Olympic athlete, one of the most brilliant and kind and beautiful humans on the planet, but whom I can’t help but see as the koala-like six-year-old whom I had to escort into the classroom on her first day of kindergarten because she was so frightened. I will never not be her older sister; I will never not want to protect her from the world. Also, I periodically go back to Shakespeare for the language and the pure joy and energy of his work, and I’d just reread “The Tempest” in preparation for teaching Aimé Césaire’s strange and beautiful version of it, called “Une Tempête,” so islands were present in my thoughts, too. But the dog trotted in on his own mean little feet.
Were you thinking of any other island-castaway stories when you wrote this—from Robinson Crusoe on? Did you see the story as part of that tradition?
“Robinson Crusoe” is a book that I love so much that I can’t talk about it without my voice starting to shake. I get something new from it every time that I read it, and the most recent time I found a quiet koan in it about how only hard work and human ingenuity can stave off our profoundest existential loneliness. But, oh, what a lonely book it is. Nothing written has ever matched in loneliness the line just after Crusoe finds himself shipwrecked on the island, when he says of his shipmates: “I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.” Two shoes that were not fellows! The book’s influence on this story is hard for me to trace, but, since it’s in everything I write (alongside “Middlemarch” and “Paradise Lost” and “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Lolita,” and on and on), I’m sure it’s there.
The story will appear in a collection you’re publishing next year, called “Florida.” Do you think that the collection acts as a portrait of the state? Does anything surprise you when you look at the stories as a whole?
Florida is shifty and constantly contradicts herself, and an honest portrait of her would be too large for a single book. The collection is a portrait of my own incredible ambivalence about the state where I’ve lived for twelve years. My feelings for Florida are immoderate, and I love the disappearing natural world, the sunshine, the extraordinary and astonishing beauty of the place as passionately as I hate the heat and moisture and backward politics and the million creatures whose only wish is to kill you. I wrote this collection very slowly and was surprised when it came together to find that the stories built into a ferocious protracted argument.
On the island, the older sister tells her younger sister stories in order to distract her: “Once upon a time,” she always says. What role do those stories play in this larger narrative? Can you remember how important fairy tales were to you when you were this age?
At five or six years old, I read and loved the most savage and bloody of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. There was a book on my parents’ shelves, which they, like most people, probably thought was pretty innocuous because of the anodyne takes that Disney wafted into the world. I believe that stories are the most powerful weapons we have, and that fairy tales act as tiny inoculations against anxiety or terror: we are exposed to the worst scenarios (parental death, abandonment, starvation, imprisonment, etc.), and, through the pluck and intelligence of the protagonist, we are carried into a better life than before. But the staged catharsis of fairy tales and the narratives we have of our culture as a whole are profoundly dangerous if they’re not constantly questioned, and the wholesale adoption of the “pretty pretty princess” narrative is deeply corrosive to women; it has kept us, and is currently keeping our daughters, from seizing any real equality. It’s almost as bad as the cowboy narrative—the smallpox of all narratives—has been to American males. I hate the cowboy with all my guts; he has led to generations of emotionally constipated men who deify violence and guns, men who are unable to work for the common good because they value independence and their own financial gain over taking care of the vulnerable, men who are actively destroying the environment and cheating our children out of their birthright, men who have given rise to this current horrific political moment and the giant, corrupt, pale baby in the White House. We need to constantly push against the narratives we are told to swallow. The cowboy can go straight to hell.
