Acknowledgments
Thank you:
My first teachers and earliest encouragers: Sandra Meek, Lawrence Baines, Marc Fitten, and Jack Riggs.
The MFA program at the University of Arizona, where I had the good fortune to work with Aurelie Sheehan, Buzz Poverman, Jonathan Penner, Elizabeth Evans, Bob Houston, Fenton Johnson, and Jason Brown. Thank you, Jason, for teaching me the meaning of the word revise. And thanks to my fellow students in the program, especially Rachel Yoder, Mark Polanzak, William Bert, Donald Dunbar, Joshua Foster, and Patrick Burns. It was a pleasure to write and learn with you.
Cara Blue Adams, for years of friendship. Yours was the best pen I’ve ever borrowed.
The PhD program at the University of Cincinnati: I could not have asked for better professors than Michael Griffith, Leah Stewart, Brock Clarke, and Jennifer Glaser, or better friends than Mica Darley-Emerson, Soren Palmer, Peter Grimes, and Christian Moody. Christian, you’ve always been there for me. Gracias, mi amigo.
For their support of my work along the way, I’d like to thank Lauren Groff, Ron Rash, Laura van den Berg, Holly Goddard Jones, Kevin Wilson, Claire Vaye Watkins, Clyde Edgerton, Matthew Pitt, Shannon Cain, Alissa Nutting, Erin Stalcup, David Scrivner, Lance Cleland, and Rachel Cantor.
Bret Anthony Johnston, patron saint of young writers, you’re an inspiration.
Adam Stumacher, for the big assist.
Ashley Inguanta, for perfectionism behind the camera lens.
Justin Luzader, for your friendship, and for wisdom beyond your years.
Laurie Uttich, who read and commented on many of these stories in earlier incarnations.
Nicole Louise Reid, model citizen among writers, thank you for your friendship, endless encouragement, and good example.
All of my colleagues, students, and friends at the University of Central Florida. You keep work from feeling too much like work.
Ryan Rivas, Jared Silvia, Nathan Holic, John King, Pat Greene, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Susan Lilley, and Phil Deaver, for making Orlando feel like home.
The Tin House, RopeWalk, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, for the kind financial support. For their mentorship, thank you to Lee Martin, Joe Meno, Christine Schutt, Robert Boswell, Brad Watson, and Karen Russell.
Serenity Gerbman and everyone at the Southern Festival of Books.
Christopher Burawa and everyone with the Clarksville Writers Conference.
Joanne Brownstein and Jody Klein, for helping my stories find good homes.
My agent, Gail Hochman, for your patience, persistence, and the tireless advocacy you demonstrate on behalf of all of your writers. You continue to amaze.
My editor, Millicent Bennett, for believing in these stories and for never letting me settle for good enough. This collection could not have come together in the way that it has without your guiding hand. Working with you is a gift.
Everyone at Simon & Schuster, particularly Sarah Nalle, Maggie Higby, Mara Lurie, and Susan M. S. Brown.
The anthology editors who gave these stories legs: Kathy Pories and ZZ Packer; Jason Lee Brown, Shanie Latham, and John McNally; Murray Dunlap and Kevin Morgan Watson; Natalie Danford, John Kulka, Dani Shapiro, and Richard Bausch.
The magazine and journal editors who made these stories better, stronger versions of themselves: C. Michael Curtis; Alice K. Turner; Samuel Ligon; David Daley; Elizabeth Taylor; Steve Almond; Shara McCallum and Paula Closson Buck; Jeanne Leiby; Kathleen Canavan and William O’Rourke; Hannah Tinti and Karen Seligman; Matthew Salesses; Ann McCutchan, Miroslav Penkov, Barbara Rodman, and Hillary Stringer; Christine Larusso, Daniel Hamilton, and Ed Winstead; Linda B. Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown.
For their generous support of my work, I would like to thank the National Society of Arts & Letters, the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, the UCF Office of Research and Commercialization, the UCF College of Arts & Humanities, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson Pima Arts Council.
Jeanne Leiby and Barry Hannah. You are missed.
Ken and Debbie, Chris and Jenny, Jon and Nicole: Thank you for your love and for welcoming me into your families.
My Grandfather George, Uncle Dave, and Aunt Sherrie. Every grandson and nephew should be so lucky as to have people like you in their lives.
Carrie Emmington, longtime reader and longtime friend, thank you.
Chad Swiggum, your friendship means the world to me.
Jonathan Jones, for reading these stories and never holding back. But, mostly, thank you for friendship beyond compare.
Chris and Naomi, for your warmth and loving-kindness.
My parents, for your unwavering love and affection. Without your support, this book would not be.
My sweet, hilarious, darling girls, Ellie and Izzy. Your lives are my pleasure.
Marla, my inspiration, first reader, best friend. You have my heart.
Earlier versions of stories from this collection previously appeared in:
“Me and James Dean” (as “Between the Teeth”), Willow Springs, 2006
“Venn Diagram” (as “The Geometry of Despair”), The Chicago Tribune, 2006
“Knockout,” Redivider, 2007
“Lizard Man,” Playboy, 2007
“What the Wolf Wants,” West Branch, 2010
“The Baby Glows,” The Southern Review, 2010
“The Heaven of Animals,” The Atlantic, 2010
“100% Cotton,” The Southern Review, 2011
“How to Help Your Husband Die,” Notre Dame Review, 2011
“Refund,” One Story, 2011
“The Disappearing Boy,” The Good Men Project, 2011
“Wake the Baby,” American Literary Review, 2012
“Nudists,” FiveChapters, 2012
“Last of the Great Land Mammals,” Washington Square, 2013
“Amputee,” Glimmer Train, 2013
“The End of Aaron,” Printers Row, 2013
Stories also appeared in the following anthologies:
“Venn Diagram,” Best New American Voices 2008
“Lizard Man,” New Stories from the South 2008
“Lizard Man,” Best New American Voices 2010
“Me and James Dean” (as “Between the Teeth”), What Doesn’t Kill You, 2010
“Me and James Dean” (as “Between the Teeth”), Press 53 Open Awards Anthology 2010
“The Baby Glows,” New Stories from the Midwest 2012
SIMON & SCHUSTER
READING GROUP GUIDE
THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS
DAVID JAMES POISSANT
The Heaven of Animals, award-winning author David James Poissant’s debut short story collection, packs a devastatingly human punch. The book comprises stories that speak of heartbreak, divorce, failure, betrayal, guilt, and loss, yet hope is often not as far off as it seems. The people who populate Poissant’s universe somehow emerge from unbelievable emotional wreckage and devastating loss with spirits intact—though rarely do they emerge unscathed.
The precarious relationships that connect us as humans—romantic, friendly, familial, or even those between strangers catching each other in a tense or desperate moment—are what interlace these stories. And it is the characters’ perceptions of one another, and of themselves, that make this book an important, heart-wrenching read.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Which story resonated with you the most? What do you think it is about that particular story that most appeals, or feels most important to you?
2. After reading the final story in the collection, did your opinion and understanding of Dan Lawson change from your introduction to him in “Lizard Man”? If so, how? Was he able to redeem himself in your eyes?
3. How is Brig changed by his short but poignant night with Lily in the collection’s second story, “Amputee”?
Do you feel hopeful for his future after this night, or is he doomed to repeat his mistakes?
4. Precarious romances run rampant in this collection. Some couples make it through their obstacles, like the couple who fight to keep it together after the death of their daughter in “The Geometry of Despair.” Other relationships are beyond repair. In your opinion, what qualities must a relationship have in the world of The Heaven of Animals in order to last?
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 an 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 poi
nt 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?
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