A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young writer
In The Dominant Animal – Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection – compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned and teased for maximum impact. A ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress.
| Kathryn Scanlan |
The stories in Kathryn Scanlan’s collection, “The Dominant Animal,” published today, will probably be described as “flash fiction.” They are short, but their mood and imagery are lasting, and reflective of brutal truths of the commerce of human civilization. Revolving around the dynamics between animals and humans, men and women, parents and children, they collectively ask the uncomfortable question, “Who is the dominant animal?” In the midst of a pandemic these chilling, finely tuned pieces on power and survival feel further and further from fantasy as COVID-19 overwhelms us. Scanlan and I spoke about the role of animals, folklore, Los Angeles and the suspension of time and place in her work amid a global emergency.
| Kathryn Scanlan |
‘When a day is not structured by appointments, meetings, driving to work, taking lunch, driving home, shopping (i.e. capitalism), its soft, loose (wild?) shapelessness becomes apparent.’
Kathryn Scanlan and Kate Zambreno discuss life in quarantine, and the works of art that make time feel as strange and deconstructed as it is now.
Kathryn Scanlan:
It’s been rainy all week, cool and windy and purple out. I walk every day but now, suddenly, there are three or four times as many people walking at any given hour, so I’ve been finding different routes. Everything is blooming and the air smells strongly of flowers, even inside my apartment. Hummingbirds are militantly at work. On Tuesday I cut my finger when a glass jar of frozen curry I was trying to coax into a pan broke in my hand. The cuts seemed deep and continued to bleed hours later, but they’re almost healed now. On Wednesday I cut the same finger with a large knife, chopping collards – a shallow split halfway through the nail. I’ve been batch cooking, freezing the extra. On Thursday I simmered a chicken, argued with my husband. Reading Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, Moyra Davey, Index Cards, Thomas Bernhard, but also randomly picking up books from the scattered stacks on my desk and reading a line, a paragraph, a chapter, a story – then setting them back down. Texted with my mother. She told me she’s had this quote next to her laptop since last summer: ‘Life is a sinking ship and work is the lifeboat.’ Felt wilder and wilder with fear, day after day – crying wildly in my office in the dark – until yesterday, when it culminated in bodily collapse, a relentless rod of pain in the head. This morning I feel quieter, and am writing this to you.
| Kate Zambreno |
Kate Zambreno:
We can’t figure out how long we’ve been mostly inside. We think two weeks, although that feels inexact. It doesn’t help that our clock in the main room has been broken for a day. I keep overlapping all this with the beginnings of daylight saving time. It’s when our three-year-old daughter stopped going to bed at night, and we began letting her, as the day began to lose shape, which feels like a return to her being a newborn, to those early days out of time. John now lays with her for hours, talking to her in the dark, holding her hand through the crib. I usually have been waiting for that time to weep, because most of our efforts have been to keep Leo upbeat and active, even though she is not going to school or seeing her friends except over Zoom, or leaving except for one circumscribed walk around our Brooklyn neighborhood, trying our best to avoid others while not seeming unfriendly. Our streets feel crowded too, especially on the bright springish days, with the flowering magnolia and cherry blossom trees and lilacs coming up. There’s that line from Territory of Light, something like, why is it only our children who are allowed to have breakdowns? I think about that a lot. I’m sitting here cross-legged on the couch, a green wool striped blanket on my lap, and Leo has just come and demanded that she have that blanket, and she pulls it out from me, because she wants her father to play Linus in this new game of Charlie Brown she likes to play. She is almost always Charlie Brown, and sometimes Peppermint Patty, we are usually the minor more passive characters. John is usually Marcie and I am almost always Schroeder, which works well for me, because I can just not talk and hunch over my laptop. This morning we sat on the floor in front of my laptop and watched a dancer in her cramped bedroom admiringly lead a toddler dance class with very few props or space. We wiggled our toes in front of us and jumped like frogs and waved around scarves. At one point the dancer took a small stuffed animal from a shelf and began speaking to it, then looked at the screen and said something like, This is what ten days of quarantine has done for me, I’m now talking to stuffed animals, and I really felt for her.