Alexander MacLeod’s long-anticipated new collection of short stories, Animal Person, is finally unleashed and out in the world. The national launch on April 6 was a celebration complete with Cape Breton musicians, drawing several hundred fans and friends to the Halifax Central Library.
“The last time I published a book, we didn’t have this library, that’s how long it’s been,” said Dr. MacLeod, drawing laughs and applause from the crowd. The landmark library’s construction began in 2012, and MacLeod started building these stories back in 2010, soon after his first book Light Lifting was released to wide acclaim.
The musicians were Wendy MacIsaac and Troy MacGillivray, playing fiddle and piano while MacLeod signed books. The event’s co-host was author Francesca Ekwuyasi MA’16, a Saint Mary’s University graduate whose debut novel Honey Butter Pig Bread is earning international praise. She relished the opportunity to pick MacLeod’s brain on behalf of the audience, diving in with perhaps the hardest question first: “Why do you write?”
“I write because I think I’m trying to make sense of experience,” MacLeod replied. “Sometimes my experience, sometimes our experience. And I believe that experience is resolutely resistant to language. It doesn’t want to become a story. I’m fascinated by how much work it takes to process experience and turn it into something interesting … I’m trying to pin it down as best I can.”
Language doesn’t settle easily on animals either, he added: “In this book, there are times when people are contemplating animals and wondering what the animal thinks of them. That animal is not using human language but that animal is definitely having thoughts.”
The short story genre allows him to focus on the intensity of the situations found in his imagination, and to shed light on them from various points of view.
“I think I may have the first really deep dive on piano recitals and pet rabbits (and) motel rooms with serial killers,” he said of the varied collection of eight stories, published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart.
He mesmerized the room with readings from two of them, selected to show how the book travels great distances in space and time. “Everything Underneath” follows two sisters snorkeling at the beach on the last day of summer, in scenes recognizable to people from Dartmouth to Inverness County and beyond.
California is the setting for his “weirdest” story, which gets inside the mind of a man with a fetish for connecting with the contents of strangers’ suitcases. “What exactly do you think you’re looking at?” was inspired by two photographs taken in the mid-1970s by the late U.S. artist Henry Wessel Jr. The story resulted from an invitation to be part of Henry Wessel: A Dark Thread, a 2019 exhibition at La Maison Européen de la Photographie in Paris. Another photo of Wessel’s is featured on the cover of the U.S. version of Animal Person.
“The book is very much interested in intimacy and connections, and not necessarily the typical ones,” said MacLeod.
Some of the stories are like cats on their second or third lives after appearing in previous anthologies, and it’s good to have them all herded together in this one collection. Anchoring the book’s front end is “Lagomorph,” honoured with a 2019 O. Henry Prize and the 2021 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, which MacLeod won with Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press for their handbound letterpress collaboration.
“The Closing Date” originally appeared in the Sex and Death anthology (Faber & Faber and House of Anansi Press, 2016). “Once Removed” was featured in a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, and “The Dead Want” was first published in iLit Modern Morsels: Selections of Canadian Poetry and Fiction (McGraw Hill Ryerson, 2012).
Dr. Alexander MacLeod teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at Saint Mary’s, and also the Atlantic Canada Studies program.