Eric Hall interviews Terese Svoboda

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Terese Svoboda is a writer whose work has been awarded the Guggenheim Award for fiction, the Bob Probst Prize, the Iowa Prize for poetry, and many others. Here today we are discussing her 2023 release, Dog on Fire.

Dog on Fire is available for purchase from the University of Nebraska Press.

From Interviewer Eric Hall: Dog on Fire is quite a piece of writing. It tells the story of a mother who returns to her hometown following the mysterious death of her brother. Along the way, we learn a lot about how she–an unnamEric Hall interviews Terese Svoboda

the narrator–sees and understands the world around her. By the end of it, I felt as if the story had not only come full circle but had made several unexpected turns and developments. Despite the narrator always feeling like an unwelcome intruder in this strange, insular world, her reflections on it were a constant source of sharp insight and wit. By the end, I had wished for more–and I think that’s the best thing you can say about a work.

Eric Hall: Hello Terese, I hope all is well. It’s great to finally speak with you. Let’s start off with a few simple questions. What was the inspiration for Dog on Fire? Did it draw inspiration at all from your own life or experiences?

Terese Svoboda: My brother in Nebraska died mysteriously twenty-five years ago. He had a difficult life and I wanted to try to understand it. My father did see a flying saucer, actually as he would put it, a cigar-shaped UFO. His land also contained a huge meteorite hole. As an adolescent, my son used to expound while scooting around on top of an ottoman. A thinly disguised story in Narrative talks about the dog on fire case that my father tried as a district judge. Thus reality provides pinpricks of truth to convince readers the bizarre is real.

EH: The book begins and ends with shovels and the aspect of digging. What was the specific significance of having this sort of repeated imagery and symbolism?

TS: Shakespeare's tropes, especially from Hamlet, appear throughout the book: Polonius behind the curtain, Ophelia drifting in the river, and others. All the dust at the beginning is of course from gravedigging but in this case, the gravedigger has no one to banter with.

Also, my brother was always digging postholes for my father.

EH: I noticed that the characters are all without names, even the narrator herself. Yet the narrator’s nemesis, her brother’s former lover Aphra, breaks this pattern. I’m curious, what was the intent with having Aphra as the only named character? Did you consider at any point with naming the other characters?

TS: Naming a character makes his behavior easier to gather for the reader, but it also obliterates the possibility of a closer identification. Someone named Helen may have negative connotations for the reader due to a Helen in his own life, and push the character away. Someone without a name allows the reader to associate the behavior with himself or with others he knows of the gender revealed through action, or even to come to a new understanding of character in general. Aphra is named to separate the two female characters more clearly when they come together. I chose it because I'm particularly fond of the work and adventures of Aphra Behn, the 17th century playwright and daughter of a barber, of whom Virginia Woolf wrote: “it was she who earned [women] the right to speak their minds.” Aphra keeps trying to speak her mind.

EH: Initially I thought the narrator was the main character, but the italicized chapters written from the mind of Aphra made me question who was really the focus of the story. Did you see Aphra as an antagonist of sorts within the story or was the goal to make her as much a “victim” of the circumstances of the story?

TS: Aphra was an antagonist, the lover depriving the narrator of her brother, though it's obvious that the narrator often wasn’t either physically or emotionally present for her brother at all. Jealousy knows no logic. I don't see Aphra as a victim. She made a good choice to have a relationship with the compassionate brother, she is seen recovering from his death, and having inherited money from him changes her status in the small town. Whether she safeguards her health by finding a way to lose weight is her choice as well. Victims have no choice.

EH: The chapter involving the literal dog on fire came and went so fast, I was surprised at the pivot the story takes with the narrator facing impending charges but managing to escape them. What was your intent with that section of the story, especially as it is the basis for the book's title? 

TS: To me, the dog on fire epitomizes the cruelty of community, an innocent animal tortured for laughs. It can't go on for long! Dealing with the burning dog and the aftermath gives the narrator another chance to redeem herself. The end of the book suggests the dog is still alive, meaning that the guilt with regard to how she treated her brother will never go away.

EH: This is more of a craft question as opposed to a thematic one. I noticed the book's chapters are rarely beyond five or six pages. Do you naturally prefer shorter chapters in your works or is it something you just sort of gravitate towards without conscious thought or planning? Or was it something you simply felt appropriate for this specific story? 

TS: All my prose tends to come out in five-page segments. This seems to be how long I can hold my breath inside plot. In revision, these pages expand or contract or get glued together. For a visual corollary, you can see Whitman's breath as his lines stretch across and down the page in poem after poem.

EH: I found the use of Jell-O as an objective correlative within the story an interesting choice. It's this jiggly, amorphous thing of no specific shape yet can be molded into anything it fills. I am really curious what inspired you to make it such an important theme within the brother's life and death.

TS: My father claimed that some relative invented Jell-O. I have a friend who's writing the biography of Rose Knox, the woman who made Knox Gelatine a fixture in the 20th century kitchen. She's convinced me that the history of gelatin has many inventors, citing the concoctions the medieval kings served to poison rivals. In the pioneer days in the West, bones were lying around to be processed by someone inventive.

Minus the history, Jell-O is hilarious. Celebrating the life of this unknown brother with Jell-O gave the book a light touch. And I had a great time trying to hypothesize how to kill someone with it.

EH: For the longest time, the book keeps the mystery of the brother's death afloat with zany conspiracies and plots. I found the ending reveal to be so blunt and true–it made me think of the need people have for things to be part of a larger plot or have some hidden and deeper significance. When you were writing this were you set early on with how the brother actually died or were you still undecided until it was time for the truth to come out in the story?

TS: You are a wise interlocutor re: the need for plot. My diary at the time of my brother's death states that no one knew why he died. Twenty years later, my siblings insisted it was a seizure. Four months after I published the book, googling around, I found SUDEP, Sudden Death in Epileptic Patients, a syndrome that plagues one in a thousand epileptics. Over the long time of the book's gestation, I had no choice about “actual.”

EH: There were times the book really grabbed me with the concept of aliens. The father has his conspiracy theories that the brother was killed by aliens, the town is set amidst a meteoric crater, and the Narrator and Aphra both come off as outsiders–aliens–within this town. As someone who has moved far from their place of birth and upbringing, I can relate to feeling like an outsider even when surrounded by family. Was that an important intentional motif when crafting this book?

TS: Aliens are big in the Midwest. It's all the empty-looking swaths of land. Of course, the land was never really been empty but the first European settlers could hardly believe their eyes: no plowed fields. So maybe being an alien is in my blood. When I spent a year in Sudan among mostly naked seven-foot-tall rail-thin Nuer speaking a language that has very few cognates in English, they treated me–very kindly, mind you–as an alien. You do not recover.

EH: Thank you so much for your time. I wish you the best!

Eric Hall is a writer and veteran. He is an English major at Arizona State University. His work has appeared in Mirage and Two-14.