April 12

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What’s Worth Fighting For by M. T. Anderson

Posted by on April 12, 2023 in Author Posts | 6 Comments

During the pandemic of 2020 I wrote a book about being isolated in a house in the Vermont hills with a magical dog. That’s because during the pandemic of 2020 I actually was isolated in a house in the Vermont hills with a magical dog.

I live alone in a haunted 18th century cottage on a dirt road off a dirt road in a town about equally divided between people and cows. The house is surrounded by forest. My dog, LaRue (9 at the time) and I explored that town together, walking for miles every day. We explored the forest that surrounded us, finding paths and secret ways and beaver ponds and the lairs of coyotes.

When you live with an animal – particularly when you live alone with an animal – the two of you become attuned to each other. I’m sure most of you have had this experience in some way. You start to be able to read each other in a language deeper than speech, older than human words. And when we pay attention to that ancient language, animals show us an invisible world that lies all around us, but which they can smell and see. Cats know routes through the garden and where things climb into the house. They also seem to see a lot of startling things in corners. LaRue, my dog, showed me how to go through the woods by following deer trails that couldn’t be seen by human eye. I followed her to places where I saw beautiful vistas – fields overlooking distant hills and unnamed towns. She introduced me to her colleagues: the porcupine she’d eye in a field we passed, an easy truce between them; the owl she had long dialogues with. (A friend suggested the owl was teaching LaRue the language of owls. If that’s the case, LaRue mainly learned insults.)

Why was she magic? At the time, she had just recovered – for no good reason at all – from a tumor that seemed to be fatal. In November, the vet told me she had three or four days to live. Her body was literally eating its own flesh from the inside. He suggested I schedule a euthanasia appointment for that Friday. I went out to my car and, for the first time in many years, I actually cried. She was my closest companion in the world.

But despite her prognosis, I still took her out on little walks. And so we walked, and each day the walks got a little longer, and I spent the nights letting her out and in and out and in and cleaning up vomit and even blood, but the walks still got longer, and within a few days she actually bolted after a deer, and then we started to walk along all the dirt roads in the town, traveling farther and farther each day, and because of that I found all sorts of wonderful places – a barn built as a bridge across the road, a Zen monastery rising out of a cranberry bog – and we were walking five or six miles a day, and even climbing mountains, and then suddenly, somehow, it was March of 2020 and the vet told me that for no real reason, she seemed to be fine. The tumor had stopped growing.

The dog was fine but the world had shut down. For four months, she was basically the only creature I saw. We became even closer than before. I couldn’t believe the miracle we had been granted: this time to spend together. The snow melted and we walked through the crappy browns and half-assed grays of Vermont spring, and then the gorgeous green unfurling of new life, and I was so happy she had been spared that I started to write a book for kids about a boy who, trapped with his family during the pandemic, discovers a magical dog who escaped from a shadowy kingdom under the mountain, and the adventures they have together.

My dog on a mountaintop, a year to the day after she got her fatal diagnosis.

 I am known, fairly or unfairly, for books filled with satirical irony, or books somewhat stricken by a vision of the cruelty humans are capable of.

This book could not have been more different. There is nothing arch about it, nothing angry, nothing political. It’s still comedic, but it’s basically filled with a deep sense of gratitude for everything our animals bring to our lives and wonder at the world around us.

LaRue and me during the lockdown of 2020. By photographer Jess Dewes, who was doing a series of (distanced) photos of Vermonters who hadn’t seen people for a few months.

If you had asked me back in the naughty Noughts why my books like Feed and Octavian Nothing were sharply satirical, I would have told you that it was because as Americans, we’re muffled in a consumerist cocoon, lulled into complacency so we don’t ask questions about how our world works, where things come from, where things go. We don’t want to look straight at the world we’ve built.

But it’s different now. The world has changed and the wounds are open. We are battered constantly by news of crisis. (In just the past two weeks, the IPCC has issued a report telling us that without immediate climate action, we face cataclysmic disaster – and a consortium of powerful tech-heads, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and a long list of AI experts, has issued a petition for research on “black box” AI algorithms to halt for six months until we can assess their destructive capacities.)  

So when I, like many others, turn to fiction at this precarious moment in history, I don’t need to be reminded of what’s wrong. We spend all day facing what’s wrong. I want to be reminded instead of the things we fight for because they’re precious. I want to be reminded of community, which is how we’ll save ourselves. I want to be reminded of the love of the people around me. I want to be reminded of the small wonders we can discover right in our own towns, our own neighborhoods. I want to be reminded of the imagination of the young. When our world is relentless in reminding us of cataclysm, we need something to remind us of joy. We need to remember why it’s all worth it. So though Elf Dog & Owl Head is set in the world of the pandemic, it’s not about the pandemic. It’s about a family. It’s about siblings. It’s about a friendship. It’s about animals and what they give us. I fully believe that this message is as important as all my satirical Jeremiads written back in the day. If the tone is gentle and the ending of course is happy – as a kid, I couldn’t stand all those dead pet books – dogs, horses, trained racoons – what did authors have against animals? – if everything comes out well in the end in this book, it’s because I now believe that optimism itself is a political act.

I want kids reading this book to feel real companionship. I want them to look at their own town and the routes they walk on and start to see stories hidden all around them, surprising histories in alleys and in old houses with their collapsing porches. I want them to see that world is full of surprises and things that can delight us and comfort us and thrill us and teach us.  

And I want them to say: That’s a place worth fighting for.

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M. T. Anderson is the author of Feed, a National Book Award Finalist; the National Book Award winner The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party and Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, which were both Michael L. Printz Honor Books; Symphony for the City of the Dead; Yvain: The Night of the Lion; Landscape with Invisible Hand; and many other books for children and young adults, including The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, cocreated with Eugene Yelchin, which was a National Book Award Finalist. M. T. Anderson lives near Boston, Massachusetts.