Terese Svoboda has been a powerhouse of literary production in recent years, publishing five books since 2018, and partaking of a formidable array of genres and approaches. Dog on Fire is structured as an oppositional narrative duet between two bereaved women—the sister and lover of a young man who struggled with epilepsy—who remember and imagine his life and speculate about his unexplained death. The brief novel also touches on ghosts, aliens, and the possibility of foul play, all testament to Svoboda’s inventive eclecticism. Svoboda was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about Dog on Fire and her wide-ranging writing career.
Jennifer Egan: At the center of Dog on Fire is the unexplained death of a young man whose life was shaped, in large part, by his acute epilepsy. Yet his “illness” seems also to endow him with extraordinary sensitivity. How did you think about brain function—and dysfunction—as you wrote this book?
Terese Svoboda: I learned about brain function in high school, when my siblings and I took turns giving physical therapy two hours a day to our brain-damaged brother born with an IQ of 32. His brain mapped very slowly. When the brain shorts out, as in my brother’s epilepsy, what happens is the opposite of Frankenstein: the normal person passes through the Van de Graaff machine. Nearly three and a half million Americans have the disease, which is incurable and sometimes not a lot can be done about its symptoms. In some cases, such as Einstein’s, Aristotle’s, and Edison’s, the ailment doesn’t prevent genius and perhaps—this is very speculative—even encourages faster connections in the brain. For the most, though, the illness is a definite social and physical handicap. A dysfunctional brain isn’t visible to others, so an epileptic often isn’t given the support that he or she might need. That oversight can encourage an acute sensitivity toward others who suffer without sympathy.
JE: Dog on Fire is saturated with the atmosphere and sensory details of what feels like a particular Midwestern region. Talk about the function of place in your work, and its relationship to story.
TS: Place is the mud on the shoes of characters. The farther they walk, the heavier it gets, the more it influences what’s going on. When and where I grew up—1950s Nebraska—is for me a very potent setting, and creates a perceptual shorthand that I can easily access and people. Descriptions of place, however, aren’t always necessary. My fourth novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade, was written solely in the voices of two boys in the eighteenth century, with no description at all. Place was imagined by substituting the readers’ collective experience with swashbucklers, and contradicting or confirming it through dialogue. My first novel, Cannibal, was set in the unfamiliar terrain of South Sudan, a world-building problem of place similar to the writing of speculative fiction. In both cases, so as not to overwhelm the narrative, I was very concise in selecting the details of place otherwise assumed in less adventurous fiction. It’s tempting to tell readers everything you’ve learned or invented about the mountains of the moon, but I believe that they are always going to be more interested in what’s going on in the mind of the marooned astronaut.
JE: Your novel is permeated with a lively presence of the dead, both animal and human. Yet rather than exploring the supernatural per se, you seem to invite the reader to examine the nature of “presence” in our current technological moment. Am I right to think that Dog on Fire is asking what it means, nowadays, to be haunted?
TS: Exactly. Dog on Fire is not really a ghost story, although a ghost appears on the first page and reappears elsewhere in the book. While mourners frequently experience the sense that the dead are present, haunting doesn’t necessarily take place in last night’s dreams or under a white sheet. Think Hamlet, the armature of Dog on Fire: the ghost’s last appearance is in Hamlet’s mother’s closet in a nightgown. Hey, so I put my ghost in door molding. Such intense haunting—or really, remembering of the dead—never really resolves, it just settles inside the mourner, which is rather comforting. The contemporary fascination with the bardo, a place where the dead are not quite gone and are still reachable, gestures toward theories in quantum mechanics that indicate there may be multiple levels of life existing concurrently, all haunting. Deja vu, anyone?
JE: Dog on Fire is not a murder mystery exactly either, but it partakes of that genre. You have also written an opera, several books of poetry, many short stories, and a Western novel. Talk about how you think about genre—how you choose it, and why it feeds you to move among several genres as you have.
TS: Sometimes genre chooses me. My novel Tin God started in dream. I explored that dream in poetry, then story, then a novel. I dreamt of a conquistador lost in the tall grass amongst whispering Native Americans, but that turned out to be not a whole novel’s worth of dream. I kept failing to add pages. Eventually I grafted it onto an existing piece of writing about a farm boy and a drug dealer. Then, like a miracle, the novel lived. The conflation ended as an evening of dance. In this case, I was compelled to try to find a genre to fit, turning it this way and that like a puzzle piece. Usually, when the words spray the page or clump in stanzas, it’s a poem, or when, after five pages, there’s a story, it’s usually short, or if I can’t shake it, it’s a novel. But what about my prose poems that verge on flash? Or my last book of poetry, Theatrix: Poetry Plays, that was dramatic? This whole genre thing is really all about marketing, not about writing.
JE: Much of the present-day action of the novel surrounds an act of violence and cruelty against a dog by a group of teenage boys. Talk about how that event came to be important, and when and how you knew that it would give you your title.
TS: Years ago, I published a story in Narrative Magazine about a woman who travels with her circuit judge father to try a case about a dog set on fire—so the image came before the book. I am not one with much truck in symbols, but when that burning dog reappeared in my writing, I kept it, thinking it could thread the live brother to the dead one. The brother has so many strikes against him: epilepsy, awkwardness, failed ambitions, not to mention a gang of boys bent on humiliating him, who dump a huge pile of dirt in his front yard. He seems to ricochet against his terrible bad luck like a dog with its tail on fire.
JE: Your narrator’s mother says of her dead son, “Although I ask you all like a polite person where he is…he’s wherever I believe he is, not where they say.” Dog on Fire can be read as a collision of irreconcilable visions of reality—a vision that produces, against all odds, a coherent picture of a man’s life. Talk about your use of fragmentation and opposition in the novel.
TS: I like readers to experience the growth of character in glimpses, the same way we make friends: incrementally. First impressions are often wrong. The narrator thinks she knows all about her brother, having grown up with him, and although he can’t defend himself from her assumptions because he’s dead, they’re contradicted by memories of the living. There’s nothing like disagreement to bring forward truth and its complexity. That has certainly become clear with the controversy around the Covid vaccine, with its scientifically-proven positive effects turned into conjecture. We’re back to the fifth century BCE, before Aristotle came up with deductive reasoning and the scientific method. Let’s reach for what’s really true—fiction!
