A world going to the dogs
Yoked to humanity's choices, animals get their say in Talia Lakshmi Kolluri's latest
Ten years ago, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri wrote a short story from the point of view of a sled dog. A longtime “Watership Down” fan, she felt surprisingly at home in this world.
“It felt natural to write from an animal's perspective,” recalls Kolluri, so she wrote another — and another.
“It felt liberating, and I liked the feeling of being embodied in something else. It was easier for me to write expansively and convey a lot of emotional texture.”
Kolluri, who grew up in the Bay Area with birds, dogs and cats as pets, kept going for a decade until she had the nine stories that make up “What We Fed to the Manticore.” She'll be discussing the book with Melissa Chadburn at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on Monday.
The vivid stories are never grim but are often haunting as we see a world in which all other animals are front and center yet unable to escape the violent and destructive impact of human beings: a donkey living in Gaza watches her owner struggle to bring new life to a zoo that is bombed and rebombed; a tiger struggles to survive in a changing environment where food is increasingly scarce; a hound risks his life to help his human try to protect rhinos from ruthless poachers; a wolf leaves her pups to seek her missing brother, only to encounter human hunters instead.
Kolluri, who spoke recently by video, continues to explore the world through this lens. She has a story coming out from a red-tailed hawk's perspective, an animal-centered novel in progress and plans for three or four more such books. “I find a lot of meaning in giving myself opportunity to learn about the other living things we share our planet with.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q How did writing these stories change the way you think about animals or yourself?
A We often live our lives as though we are not integrated with our environment, and I've been reminded more and more forcefully that we are animals and are part of the environment, which is a both terrifying and joyous thing. Terrifying because we are vulnerable to climate crisis and natural disasters and suffering, but it's joyous because it means we're never alone, which is a wonderful feeling. Even in the city or the suburbs, there are living, growing things near you that you may not have noticed, even if it's small insects or plants. That's a wonderful thing to remember.
Q Did you seek a unifying thread throughout the stories?
A As I wrote it a couple of significant themes emerged: One is the climate crisis, which has a very far reach; the most central theme is about how nonhuman living things experience the varying degrees to which our human community impacts their lives. Sometimes that means a close and deliberate interaction, like with captive or working animals; sometimes it's very distant, with the impact of the climate crisis on wild animals in the Arctic.
Q Humans do plenty of damage in these stories but they're often on the periphery or absent.
A That started out as a natural way to tell the stories but transformed into a deliberate choice, because I wanted to reframe our human position to animal lives. We have a significant impact on them but we're not the most important thing to them. If I were a vulture I wouldn't know anything about people, even if I felt their impact.
Q The stories with no human interaction generally feel more mythical — the relatable comingof-age whale story in “The Open Ocean Is an Endless Desert” is an exception — while the others feel more grounded. We connect emotionally to the narrator of “The Good Donkey” even though he's a donkey because he lives with and cares for a man who is trapped in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A I was trying to accurately imagine what each animal might think, which is a leap of faith. But at least no one can do fact-checking by interviewing the animals about whether my stories are accurate.
The more interaction an animal has with people, the easier the relationship will be. The polar bear and vulture have no direct human contact, so our comprehension of each other is pretty remote.
Q Children play with stuffed animals and read books filled with talking animals. Were you trying to revive that sense of wonder and almost magic for adult readers?
A So much of our appreciation for animals is characterized as something that's for children. You turn 13 and no one asks what your favorite animal is anymore. I don't understand why we don't maintain these curiosities and fascinations. I have friends who encourage it in their own children but don't talk about it from their own personal perspective.
I wonder if it has something to do with expected seriousness out of adults and there's not as much space for joy. If you have a favorite animal that's pretty joyful, you'll learn everything there is to know about it and you'll want to tell everyone about it. Ask any 5-year-old to tell you about their favorite animal and you get a six-hour treatise about the zebra or the jellyfish or whatever.
One of the blessings of being in the creative arts is you have permission to dip into the same sense of wonder. I think we should all have more of that. If we maintain our awareness of the amazing things around us, it's more natural to care for those things.
Q What are your favorite animals?
A I really like vultures, I learned to appreciate them when I was researching this book. There's a very cool one called the bone breaker that drops animal bones from high up to shatter them and then swoops down to eat them. I also love old-world monkeys — they have complex social structures and hierarchies and fights and drama and they're so interesting.
Q Do you have pets now?
A I have a cat. Cats are wonderful pets because they force you to recognize that you have no dominion over a wild thing but you can live together — happily, actually.
Q Which animal in your book would you most want to be?
A I'd absolutely love to be a whale. I'm so curious to understand what it's like to be that size and to move through the sea in that way and to experience the world through sound. It was the hardest and most rewarding story to write because of the soundscape. Q There are some lovely and caring individual people in these stories, but between wars and poaching and climate change, we don't come across well as a species. But you end with “Let Your Body Meet the Ground,” where a wounded pigeon is befriended by the Toy Man. Was it a conscious decision to end a fairly depressing book on such a sweet note? A As I was drafting this collection, it was so sad that a friend said I should call it “Everybody Dies.” But what we do to the planet is sad — there are species losses and human communities suffering from the way we treat our own planet. There are things to mourn.
Yet I recognize and appreciate that there's still hope that we can change our ways. So I credit my editor for asking that I write something that had more of an optimistic ending, a moment of rescue.
Pigeons are so smart. I liked the idea of a story about a city bird, who not everybody likes but who is actually awesome, being appreciated by someone whose life is built around not discarding things and appreciating the little things.
I chose to place this story at the end because I hope readers will finish and feel they would want to become a person who has a positive relationship with nature. We all can and it doesn't even have to be in a large way. Stewardship of the environment is stewardship of ourselves and our fellow human beings.