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Interview: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

Kolluri’s touching and exquisitely crafted story collection invites readers to imagine the lives of animal characters. Themes of trauma and grief, of time and friendship intersect as the unique voices Kolluri builds for every narrator embrace the mystery and estrangement of animal lives with magic and wonder. The Florida Review asked Talia about the process of making unreal things feel real, the art of crafting non-human voices, and the potential of fiction to address the climate crisis.

What We Fed To The Manticore was published in September 2022 by Tin House Books.

Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira for The Florida Review:

The book features a variety of animal-human relations. Some are on the more positive end of the spectrum, like Hafiz and the donkey and the pigeon and the Toy Man. But we also see the pain humans can inflict in animal lives, such as with the poachers in “May God Forever Bless The Rhino Keepers” and the boat in “The Open Ocean Is An Endless Desert.” So I’m curious about how, when approaching an animal’s perspective, you decide what kind of role humans will play in the story.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri:

When I was writing this collection I made a deliberate choice to decenter human perspectives, so I always began writing each story with the idea that the animal experience would always be primary. But the crucial foundation upon which all of these stories rest is the fact that humanity has impacted every ecosystem on the globe, even in places where we have yet to travel. So in that sense, humanity has played a role in every one of these stories. But when I wrote humans (or humanity’s impacts) directly into a story, their portrayal was more likely to be negative when I was portraying a human system, and the human role was more likely to be positive when I was writing an individual human character. I think lots of individual people can be very compassionate stewards of nature. But we live in a world full of systems that are destructive and this is ultimately what I wanted to call attention to.

TFR:

Some stories, like “The Dog Star Is The Brightest Star In The Sky” and “The Hunted, The Haunted, The Hungry, The Tame” focus on relationships and bonds between animals of different species. How do you set out to define these relationships, and how do you keep them from coming across as too “human” while also keeping the reader emotionally invested.

TLK:

Early on in my process, I worried a lot about writing characters that came across as too human. Anthropomorphizing animals has long been viewed with varying degrees of skepticism and occasionally perceived as unserious. I wanted my characters to be believable. And while I love reading work that uses animal narratives as an allegory for a human situations, I didn’t want my work to be read that way. I also did not want my inter-species relationships to be viewed as superficial or cute. I wanted them to have emotional depth and nuance the way all of my own relationships do. Ultimately the best way for me to achieve this was to do solid foundational research in animal behavior and use that to shape how my characters behave. I kept their senses and general actions as close as possible to what I could learn from research. And when it came to the emotional texture of relationships, as long as I could keep their reactions within the framework of realistic animal behavior, I felt they could be believable.

But also, as I continued writing, I stopped worrying about my characters and their relationships seeming too human. In the wild world, a lot of different species interact and have lives that overlap. In some cases they have a history of collaboration, in others they may have a more neutral but regular interaction, and in some they have a mutually beneficial co-existence. In all of these cases, I have a hard time believing that animals don’t notice each other. And if they notice each other, perhaps they have significance to each other. Often when we describe something as human, it’s because we assign emotion to a reaction or interaction, and emotion is something that we are reluctant to assign to animals and instead hold only for ourselves. But why is that? I suspect we might be the only species that stubbornly insists that we are not animals at all, but are instead something above and apart from animals. But it just isn’t true. We are animals too. And if we respond to our surroundings and our interactions with emotion, and we assign meaning to things, then other animals probably do something similar.

TFR:

The spectrum of climate change is present in the book, like in “The Dog Star Is The Brightest Star In The Sky.” How do you view the role of literature in the ongoing political conversation surrounding this topic?

TLK:

I’m glad you asked this because I feel it is absolutely vital that literature directly bear witness to the astonishing uncanniness of the climate crisis, that is in fact becoming the ordinary texture of all our lives. For many of the years that I was writing the stories in this collection, I thought about Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. Ghosh writes broadly of the ways that contemporary literature, and fiction in particular, has failed to reckon with the climate crisis and the colonial history that lit the first spark of the crisis itself. Despite it being a pervasive and escalating part of our reality, it is primarily addressed in non-fiction work, and when it is included in fiction, the very real features of the climate crisis are often deemed too extreme and too unbelievable to be included in fiction intended to depict reality. Instead, it is categorized as something more like science fiction. In other words, unbelievable because it couldn’t be real. This isn’t to say that science fiction doesn’t show us aspects of our reality, or that our futures don’t eventually converge with things we once imagined to be impossible. But Ghosh’s point is that the impacts of the climate crisis are being felt right now, and despite that, fiction that describes it plainly has been treated as deviating from reality.

Early in the book he writes, “[i]n a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?” I read this passage and felt as though he was writing directly to me, and telling me that my desire to write human impacts from inside the minds of creatures who have no agency over what humanity does, was a worthwhile artistic pursuit.

I think that confronting the climate crisis through fiction has the potential for magnified emotional resonance. I can read books and articles about ecology, and the science of climate change. I can watch the news and see the real-time impacts of droughts and superstorms. But all of these pieces of information will come to me from a distance, filtered through a medium that tells me that none of this information really applies to me. If I am watching coverage of a flood from my untouched home, then no matter how much empathy I purposefully cultivate in myself there is still some distance between me and the crisis because it is not, in fact, happening to me. But here is where fiction offers an opportunity. If I read a story where the characters face some aspect of the climate crisis, and I do what I always do, which is imagine myself as one of the characters, then suddenly the crisis becomes real. Because although it is not actually happening to me, the experience of imagining that it is creates an emotional response that brings me closer to the experience of the events themselves. I am less removed. My perception is less sterile. Instead of being reminded that it is not happening to me, I am instead reminded that it could and it might. And this difference is important because a person that does not see a vast distance between themselves and the climate crisis is a person more likely to be inspired to take action.

TFR:

Two of my favorite stories, “What We Fed To The Manticore” and “Someone Must Watch Over The Dead” employ, in addition to the animal perspective, elements that veer on the fantastical and mythical. What is the process to incorporate those elements in your work, and to decide when you’ll take a more realistic approach as opposed to a more magic one?

TLK:

I think my default way of writing is to write in a more mythical style. That’s what came to me naturally for most stories. But I found that some of them needed to be rooted in reality more than others, so in a practical sense I found myself having to deliberately incorporate realistic elements, instead of the other way around. I also find that myths, and fairy tales, and stories from various religious traditions are where animals stories most often live. I think the human heart hungers for magic, and there is truly something magical about wild spaces. Animals and birds and sea life are all so fantastical when I think about them long enough! I did find that I was more likely to discard mythical elements when I included human characters more prominently. Perhaps that’s because humanity holds a little less magic for me. Animals are still such a mystery to me and in mystery lies wonder and enchantment.

TFR:

Time is a recurring theme in some of the stories. In “The Good Donkey” you have a stunning scene of a drone attack that is rendered in the style of a rewind; “A Level Of Tolerance” is all about a wolf stuck in a time loop. What fascinates you about playing with time in your writing?

TLK:

Time is a tricky thing, isn’t it? I have noticed that the older I get the more I am aware of how elastic time is, how it speeds up and slows down according to how I feel, and how my perception of time has changed over my life. I also know that while time can be measured, it isn’t as rigid as we make it out to be. For instance, the time at the bottom of the Mariana Trench does not pass at same speed as the time at the top of Mount Everest. The other thing I think about often is how through memory and imagination, we are often traveling through time. If I recall a conversation from last week and I spend part of my day thinking about it, what time am I living in? Is it today? Have I returned to last week? Is it both? What if I’m imagining something three months from now? What time am I living in then? And what does trauma do to our perception of time? For those who suffer from post-traumatic stress, the memory of a traumatic experience can often feel as though it is happening again, in the present, in real-time. And this feeling can occur over and over. And perhaps after trauma, there remains the desire to undo the traumatic event. I wanted to find a way to convey the way that time is elastic, and also the way elastic time can bind someone in place when something painful happens.

TFR:

In your author’s note, you frame the notions of wildness and tameness as matters of dependence and communication. How did this influence your approach to dialogue in the book, and the process of finding each animal’s voice?

TLK:

I used this framing most often to imagine how well my point of view animal understood human life and all of its features. The closer an animal was to humanity, the better they understood human speech, human objects, and human choices. Perhaps the closest to humanity is the donkey. He began as a working animal but ultimately became more of a companion to Hafiz. In my mind this meant that the depth of their emotional connection would allow them to communicate directly. I also think that we are more likely to make an effort to communicate when it’s necessary and I imagine it could be the same with animals. But I don’t know that my ideas about interspecies communication had any real influence over how each character’s voice emerged. In a lot of ways, characters and personalities emerged organically. To me, writing fiction is a lot like playing make-believe. In each instance, I was pretending to be all the animals in every story, in pretty much the same way I would play all the characters in a game of pretend when I was a child. I think the difference here is that I could make all of the characters feel real to myself because I had a fuller understanding of their environments and how their senses worked. When I was small and I pretended to be a lion, for example, I understood what they looked like, and had an idea of how they walked and a superficial idea of what they did. But I had no real understanding of lion pride social dynamics, or what animals they had to compete with for food, or whether their habitat was dwindling or not. I just really wanted to be a lion. Now, I can take that same desire and fuel my game of pretend with a full spectrum of animal and habitat facts that I have gathered over the years, and maybe this is how the animals voices find me.

TFR:

I’m impressed by how evocative and memorable the titles in this collection are. How is your process for choosing a piece’s title? Is it usually something you come up with in the beginning of the story or after finishing it?

TLK:

I wish I had a process, but in most cases, the title arrives fully formed at the beginning and haunts me until I write something. Usually it ends up representing an idea that the whole story crystalizes around. In several of my stories, the title ends up embedded somewhere in the text, probably because they’re so linked to something I’m trying to communicate. The one exception is “A Level Of Tolerance,” which is a story I really struggled to find a title for. Instead of being haunted by a potential title, I was haunted by several lines that are now in the story. So, when I first wrote it, I gave it a working title of “832F” which is the identifying number of the wolf that inspired it. But my first readers had a really hard time connecting the title to the story and it seemed out of place to many of them, so I felt I needed something different. I ended up pulling the phrase “a level of tolerance” from a document that talked about wolf culling and discussed the idea that culling is used to bring wolf populations to “a level of tolerance,” meaning a level that the human population is willing to tolerate. I felt that phrase was a very sterile and detached description of how to think of an endangered animal population. I used it because I don’t feel very detached and emotionless when I think about the possibility of wolf extinction. Instead, I feel devastated. I thought the contrast was interesting, so I used it as the title.

TFR:

In the end of the book, you include sources related to every story. When writing about animals, how important is it to you to make sure you’re adhering to their biological realities? Is there any example of a story in which the science made it difficult for you to write out your ideas for the characters?

TLK:

It was incredibly important for me to make sure I was writing my animals as accurately as possible from a biological perspective. I am asking readers to take a series of very large imaginative leaps with me. I am asking them to believe that animals can tell stories, that they have their own mythology, that they can commune with the dead, that they are chased by mythological creatures, they can talk to people, and they exist outside of time. I am trusting the reader to take these leaps with me. But if I am asking them to jump, I must give them a firm foundation to leap from. I wrote a lot of unreal things, but I want them to feel real. And if they’re going to feel realistic, they need to be grounded in facts that can be verified. I want readers to wonder if vultures actually can understand how their carrion lived through eating. I want them to wonder if whales really do live inside a song net. But a reader may not ask these questions if nothing in the story feels believable. This is not to say that fully fantastical stories are not wonderful, because they are! I love stories that lean all the way into the miraculous and strange. But if there’s nothing concrete for me to hold onto in a story, then I understand it as something wonderful that will never be real. I wanted my stories to include the possibility that everything in them could be true, which I think comes from knowing that some of the things in them are true.

However, the story where I struggled with this the most was “The Open Ocean Is An Endless Desert.” Whales are amazing, and fascinating, and strange, and completely unlike humans in an astonishing number of ways. But the difference between whales and humans that was hardest for me to grasp was how precise their hearing is underwater, and how imperfect mine is. When I was writing this story, there was one afternoon where I jumped in a pool with my spouse and had him talk to me underwater to see if I could understand him. All I could hear were indecipherable noises enveloped in a strange echo and even though I saw where he was, I couldn’t hear exactly where the sound was coming from. I had to return to research to learn more about whale ears and whale communication and how they sing to each other over distances before I could come up with a way to describe their lives and community. But I’m glad I did because as much as I loved whales before, I am so much more in awe of them now.