Welcome back! We’re thrilled to bring your latest story, “Dread of the White Dog,” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?
Thank you for having me! I’m honored to be a part of this issue.
This story had two distinct points of inspiration. The first was that I wanted to write about a sort of Faustian deal but from a new perspective. It doesn’t make sense to me that a malevolent entity would separate humans from animals; at some point, if you’re so far above the mortal world, wouldn’t humans and animals look the same to you? What would a deal like this look like if it were offered to a wolf, and why would a wolf take it?
The second stems from my experiences with natural history specimen collecting (this is a fancy way to say that I collect animal bones). I’m in a few online communities with other collectors, and sometimes they will find bones from an animal who had clearly faced a devastating injury, like a broken bone or a gunshot, which healed over well before they ultimately passed. These bones have always been so fascinating to me because you can literally see how the bone has completely reshaped itself to heal (often in a strange, warped way because it was never properly set), but also because there’s a story there: about the animal that was horrifically wounded and continued on regardless.
You workshopped this piece at the Clarion West writers workshop this summer. How did that experience shape this piece, and what did you take away from the workshop experience?
This piece likely wouldn’t exist without Clarion West. My cohort liked to assign themes to each week (it was a bit of an inside joke), and one week happened to be “animal week.” This story idea had been sitting in my story idea list (read: graveyard) for a while now, so I figured I might as well pull it out if we were going to be writing about animals.
I ended up writing this story in about four days (not quite a week, I had critiques to catch up on). The only way for me to write that fast is to just let go of realism and logic, and to heavily lean into surrealist imagery. For a lot of stories, that strategy isn’t really effective, but it was invaluable for this piece. I think I would have struggled to capture the same dream-like style if I wrote this piece like I normally would: meticulously over months and months.
Feedback from my cohort has made the editing process, both for this piece and my other drafts, so much easier. Something I’ve always struggled with is identifying points of confusion in my drafts, identifying which particular lines caused those moments of confusion, and deciding whether or not the narrative truly needs to be clarified at those points.
I can safely say that I learned the most during Arley Sorg’s week, not just from his feedback on my writing, but also from the critiques he gave to the rest of my cohort. He was able to articulate aspects of craft and storytelling that I never had words for until now.
There are strong themes of decay, consumption, and birth in this story, and visceral detail throughout that emphasizes them. Did those themes emerge from the world-building, or was the world built around the themes?
It’s definitely a bit of both. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to portray Risha in various states of decay. In fact, most of the original outline were descriptions of how Risha’s body would fail in a new way, with the rest of the story taking shape as I decided the consequences of that moment.
Decay, consumption, and birth are motifs that felt natural to include in a story about wild animals, especially since one of my goals was to avoid anthropomorphizing Risha. I really wanted to sell that this is a story being told by a wolf, albeit in a heavily stylized way, which means the horrific aspects of the story need to be horrific to a wolf, not just to a human audience. I achieved this through the perversion of the natural world: rotting that never ends, death that never comes, the birth of creatures that have inherited your curse.
The wolf, dog, and stag appear in storytelling traditions around the world. Do they have specific symbolic meaning to you?
Wolves and deer are the quintessential predator-prey pairing to me, which is the main reason why I focused on these two animals for the story. If anything, I think I defaulted to a wolf and a stag without a lot of thought, but as I was discovering the story, it became clear that they were incredibly useful for the narrative: a wolf is a type of animal that someone would shoot, not to eat, but to kill, which is an important distinction to make for the beginning of the story. In “Dread of the White Dog,” hunting and eating, because they are so closely related to survival, also invoke feelings of love and intimacy. I wanted the relationship between Risha and the stag to be the opposite of that between Risha and the hunter.
The dog was an easy choice for me. The creature appearing to the wolf needed to be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, which is a dissonance that lends itself to a feeling of unease.
What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
I’m in editing mode right now. I have a bunch of workshop drafts that I’m super excited about, including one about eldritch horror unicorns, which ended up being my favorite Clarion West story. In addition to that, I’m also editing a larger novella project that I’ve been meaning to fix up for years now. These edits are going to be a labor of love between me and my partner (she edits a lot of my work!) It’s a draft that I love dearly, which features traumatized necromancers, robot wolf gods, and surreal gender-bending shapeshifting. I’d love to finish working on that in the next few months!