Eleanor Keisman Writes About a New Animal

Eleanor Keisman on The Future Lab

**Machine-created transcription, potentially with errors. The audio is the record of the episode.**

Lee Schneider (01:03.413)
First, so Eleanor, welcome to the show. So nice to have you here.

Eleanor Keisman (01:24.546)
Thank you so much. I'm so pleased to be invited. Thank you.

Lee Schneider (01:28.821)
So Let's start at the very beginning. Why did you write this novella?

Eleanor Keisman (01:34.842)
well, that's to begin with, That's a good question. it started as a short story, actually. And, I love the short story. I wanted it to stay a short story. but I was in an MFA course. And, you know, the whole purpose of the MFA is to write a novel. I really liked this idea, but I, I didn't like it as a novel. And I just.

I didn't want it to be that and I didn't want to force it and it became a novella and I thought it just was so perfect that way. I started to love it more than I did the short story which surprised me a lot.

Lee Schneider (02:18.846)
Why is that?

Eleanor Keisman (02:21.292)
Why did I love it more or why did it surprise me?

Lee Schneider (02:23.371)
Why did it, well, it surprised you, I guess, because it kept going. One reason maybe. But why did you end up liking it more than the short story?

Eleanor Keisman (02:27.694)
Mm.

Eleanor Keisman (02:33.822)
I think because I got to spend more time, I got to spend more time with the characters. I really got to know particularly the wolf character. And you know, whenever you, when you do something that you've never done before, of course, the outcome is going to be unexpected and you'll, you'll learn things and experience things that you didn't anticipate. And that was very much true for me. Writing this, this was the longest thing I'd ever written.

And until then, it had always been sort of my opinion of myself that I had never written a character that I wanted to spend that much time with. The length of a novel or a novella, just wasn't interested in my characters. Not that I didn't like them, I just felt quickly done with them. And so I got to know Pope and Bill.

And Shirley in particular became surprisingly dear to me. She kind of started out as just as a device, a supporting character, but she really became somebody. And it was great. It was great to experience that.

Lee Schneider (03:47.731)
It's pretty fascinating in writing these things how the characters kind of step up in a way and they audition for the roles and they succeed at the audition. get into the book and then they grow and prove themselves. But I wanted to talk about the challenges because you mentioned three characters there, Pope, Bill, Shirley. Two of those are people. One is not. So describe Pope for us a little bit and

Eleanor Keisman (04:13.134)
Yes.

Lee Schneider (04:17.502)
what it was like to write for as Pope or get into Pope's mind.

Eleanor Keisman (04:23.64)
So Pope is a wolf. Pope is a Yellowstone wolf, the last of the famous Druid Peak pack wolves who are real. That's a real pack of wolves. And it started off very impulsively. I think in the short story, it was very much just using my imagination.

And then I quickly ran into roadblocks because I am not a wolf and I could never be a wolf. So I think one of the fun things about writing this was all the research I got to do, just diving into these different websites online and watching all of the footage that I could find on YouTube, for example.

of wolves and people interacting with wolves and observing wolves and reading books also about accounts of wolves. So he's the last of his pack and he is kind of, he's fleeing climate change which is rapidly happening at his heels. And that's Pope.

Lee Schneider (05:43.583)
I was going to ask about the detail of Pope and wolf interaction and dog interaction and dog-wolf hybrid interaction. Your vision of it and your expression of it is super detailed. I felt like I was in the minds of those non-human characters, which is no mean feat. It's hard to get into the mind of a human character, but you took me into their minds. Now,

Eleanor Keisman (06:06.702)
so please.

Lee Schneider (06:12.84)
What happens beyond, I guess I'm asking for what's the stardust, what's the magic, beyond watching a lot of YouTube videos and trying to immerse yourself in that world. I assume you've gone on some hikes that you seem to know a bit about nature, but what's the added thing? What do you think happened after you absorbed all the facts, shall we say?

Eleanor Keisman (06:39.81)
I think I started to see some very human qualities in wolves and some wolf qualities in humans and in me. I think the magic would also have to go back to Jack London and Call of the Wild. And I am gonna mention Call of the Wild as a

opposed to White Fang and I couldn't tell you why but something about the character of Buck, he's a dog but he sort of he becomes a wolf and maybe it was that sort of transition almost you know in a way I identified with it like could a human become wolf-like and live among wolves could a wolf become human-like and live among humans which is actually

more like what happens in White Fang, which is, in my opinion, the more devastating of the two stories. So I think that was the magic piece. was some part of me that that identified with with the animal. And I think that's so true for anything that we write. think anything a writer puts down on paper, is a piece of them in some capacity, maybe a distorted or, you know, through it through a different lens. But

So that was it for me. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (08:12.052)
Yeah, definitely. There's a sense of self you have to draw from something no matter how abstract or fanciful or imaginative the character and the place might be. You have to draw from something in yourself. The sense of place is also really powerful. And you mentioned the national parks. And I think of Jack London as writing in a time where the national parks felt sacred and maybe even maybe new is the wrong word.

There was something about that generation's writers' connection with nature that we have to work at a little harder now because our world is so much more technical and so much more industrialized and so much more citified. I think we still have, thankfully for the moment, access to that kind of a nature. But how did you...

You know, I assume you're writing in an urban environment and you're looking at trucks and cabs. live not in the United States. And, but somehow I feel that you're in the woods with me, that sense of the wild, the way, and I can almost see Jack London getting there sooner because there was less urban America at the time he was writing. And now we live in a super urbanized super tech.

Eleanor Keisman (09:17.902)
Yes.

Eleanor Keisman (09:35.714)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (09:40.818)
world. So what was it like to access nature so vividly and get it down in the novella?

Eleanor Keisman (09:49.432)
Well, I love doing that and I do that in a lot of my other writing as well. I do love to go hiking and I love to be in the woods. Particularly, I very much like to be in the woods alone and just sort of listen and watch. It's one of my favorite hobbies of solitude, I guess. And you know, you're right, do. Well, so I did live in Vienna, Austria, and now I live just outside.

the city limits, more in nature, but still it's, you know, I live in town. So I will say that a lot of this was a combination of my own personal experiences in the woods and research. And this is just, think, the imagination. There's definitely an element of escapism of it for me that I would just go on my computer.

and start Googling places and go onto Google Maps and zoom in and zoom out and look at pictures and watch footage that other people had taken and transport myself there.

Lee Schneider (11:01.577)
Yeah, want to talk about that too, expanding on the idea of the place and getting into climate change. Because when we think about the climate emergency, often, at least the way I frame it in my mind, I think of urban places, flooding, tornadoes coming up, or a hurricane now is coming up the East Coast of the US. But thinking of how it would actually affect animals and the wild,

has not been on my radar as much. And your book, New Animal, really got me thinking about that. Because even most of the climate change themed novels I've read, their focus is urban, pretty much, and how it affects people. So I'd never really thought about how it would affect non-humans and spaces that aren't heavily populated by people.

Eleanor Keisman (11:45.944)
Yes.

Lee Schneider (11:57.442)
So my question there is a question coming in there somewhere. Why go with a climate change theme and what were the challenges?

Eleanor Keisman (11:58.252)
No. Okay.

Eleanor Keisman (12:10.296)
Well, that is a good question. Why go with the climate change theme? I think climate change, it's something that's a part of my, it's something that's part of my daily thought and my daily life, particularly in the summer months. I'm a person that as the years have gone on and as I've.

gotten older and just been a person longer in this world, I suffer in the heat a great deal. like I know that my allergies have gotten worse inexplicably. And then I read the newspaper and they talk about how, everybody's allergies have gotten worse. Talk about sort of natural phenomena, which are normal occurrences that have gone sort of completely.

wild because of the changing climate, such as wildfires. That's a natural thing that the forest does, and they get out of control now in a way that we've never seen before. Or pollen counts have completely changed. And when the pollen numbers rise and when they drop and the way the plants are behaving, and that's impacting

insects and animals and it's impacting our immune systems and I think I think that it is and will continue to impact humans relationship with animals as the years go by. I think that we have some we will have to change something and I don't know what that's going to look like you know my my novel New Animal is really speculative I talk about

the neo-abolitionists, in this case abolition, or that they want to abolish the slavery of like farm animals, this kind of thing, and the sort of the politics of ethical veganism. And I really kind of, you know, spin it out. But I think that it's worth considering that changes like this, how we interact and relate to animals is going to change with the climate.

Lee Schneider (14:32.637)
I agree. And the reason it was powerful for me is that it started to address the othering of animals and the othering of nature. What I mean by that is when we see climate change happening, it's kind of us and them, like it affects us this way. And then there's all that other stuff out there, which is, by the way, the world. And, you know, that's an odd way of conceptualizing the planet we live on just as kind of an us and them.

So for me, the book was a leading edge into understanding, wait a minute, we're kind of all in this together, or maybe not even kind of, we are in this together. And the environment that we share, the place we share with animals, there's going to be lessons learned from them. There's going to be tragedies that we'll witness around them. There was kind of a undertow, a little thought of

They could teach us something. Animals might teach us something. Bill seems to, as he becomes more animal-like, you know, I won't do the spoiler, but new animal could refer to different entities and beings in, I figured that out in the book. But he appears to learn some survival skills and some, maybe even some coping skills.

Eleanor Keisman (15:47.49)
Yes, yes, exactly.

Eleanor Keisman (15:58.85)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (15:59.331)
from the animals that he's emulating maybe or around. Do you think that's something that could be of use to just humanity generally? Or do you think when we're talking about the climate emergency, I guess I'm asking which side of the fence do you think the solution might come from? Some kind of techno solution, some kind of human driven solution or something that we take from

indigenous peoples or something that was here before we were here.

Eleanor Keisman (16:34.062)
I mean, oh, there's so much in that question. It could be any of them, I guess. It could be any of them, but for myself, suppose, just personally, I tend to go in the direction of saying that we have something to learn from animals. But I think that's just, that's a preference of mine because I have always felt...

Lee Schneider (16:41.5)
Mm-hmm.

Eleanor Keisman (17:01.43)
a connection with animals and feel that there is something to be learned from them just as a matter of our existence and how they communicate and how they operate and move through the world. think there's some things to be drawn from there. I do think that going forward, I don't know who I'm going to offend politically by saying this, but climate change is clearly happening.

What's causing it, I suppose, is debatable, but it's happening. And I look at a lot of science fiction and some of it's speculative and says, our technology is what is going to save us. And then there's other climate fiction that says, nope, the only way out of this is to go back to basics. One book I love, Diane Cook's The New Wilderness.

Lee Schneider (17:59.549)
Yes, great book.

Eleanor Keisman (17:59.658)
imagines, I love, love that book. Yeah, imagines people going back to nomadic tribes and that's how that's going to happen. So I don't, I just, I don't know. I wish I did know, but I like the idea of learning from those indigenous tribes that have been here long before us and animals that seem to have a sense about things that we can't possibly sense.

Lee Schneider (18:02.61)
Great book.

Eleanor Keisman (18:29.678)
I did want to write Bill as slightly altered just in the basis of him. That he was fundamentally a person who was somehow more robust, just born more robust to deal with the world so that he would perceive how the climate was changing and perceive the impact and see it around him, but it wouldn't cripple him.

way that it was doing to other people and that put him in the unique position to be able to learn from Pope and and yeah he does ultimately become something else I think.

Lee Schneider (19:11.528)
Well, he takes an action because he could have become terribly depressed. He could have seen more and experienced more and retreated. But he's kind of an action guy, which is interesting. It brings me to this idea of this is what speculative fiction is supposed to do. It's supposed to speculate. And in doing so, it gives us a plan. It may not be the plan that we want to follow.

Eleanor Keisman (19:18.179)
Mm-hmm.

Eleanor Keisman (19:34.264)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (19:41.149)
but it's a plan that the characters follow. We get to watch them work it out, whatever it is. And you do that with Bill, he has solutions and you could point to the Diane Cook's novel, great, great novel, definitely worth reading, which also points a path into the future and suggests what we could do. And you could look at any of the great novelists like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, they have...

Eleanor Keisman (19:45.996)
Yes.

Lee Schneider (20:10.758)
They show us, could be, my gosh, is this really what it's gonna be like? Or it could be, well, these people are working it out. They may be hundreds of years in the future, but they found a way to survive and beyond. So I think in so many ways, that's the point of writing in this genre. I could go on and learn about that because it's one of my favorite ideas, but you might have some thoughts on.

Eleanor Keisman (20:33.614)
Yeah.

No, but it's exactly what you said, that it's like we could become incredibly depressed and certainly wouldn't be wrong to be. I couldn't fault anybody for feeling that way. But as you say, a path will open up. It will become apparent and it may not be the one that we want. Probably won't be, probably. But we can rise to the occasion.

maybe not gallantly or triumphantly, but like we will do and we will discover and we will go forward and we will become something other than we were because we have to, because we can't exist in this world doing the same old things any longer. It's not working. And exactly speculative fiction, that's what it does and that's what's so great about it. And that way it's very hopeful.

Lee Schneider (21:28.198)
Yeah. Yeah. It is hopeful, even though sometimes the situations it provides are kind of downers, but it reminds me of this interesting parallel of the beginning of the novel. If you look at like Madame Bovary or any of the Brontë sisters or Sense and Sensibility just pulling a grab bag of early novels, they were sort of instruction books for the bourgeoisie to figure out how to

be who they were. were kind of, I look at them as kind of, and this is not original to me, but kind of class instruction manuals. They tell you as a reader of that book, they tell you how to behave according to that author's vision of class, especially the British authors. And I think in a positive way, climate fiction has that opportunity now to give us some scenarios that

We may not like, some of them are interesting, some of them look awful, but they are scenarios and as a species we're pretty good at scenario building and it might, someone might read one of those books or one or more of those books and find a way forward.

Eleanor Keisman (22:39.478)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I hope so. I hope that's that would be nice. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (22:41.019)
Maybe.

Lee Schneider (22:46.445)
Yeah, it would be very nice. So I want to switch gears a little bit to just the world of publishing and getting this book published. What is your advice for if there are young authors or authors who are not young, but they want to break into science fiction and fantasy? What do you think is a pathway in for someone who might be new to the genre?

Eleanor Keisman (23:17.036)
Well, I think I got extremely lucky, I'll be honest. I had a lot of people tell me, well, they didn't tell me that I shouldn't write science fiction or speculative fiction, but they did tell me I shouldn't write a novella. And I don't think they were wrong to tell me that. I just happened to just, it was just a freak accident. I got it into the right hands with Broken Tribe Press.

And they've been great and it's just it's been wonderful. So I I don't know if I'm really the best example. I would say if that if there's person who wanted to write speculative fiction or climate fiction, it's popular now. And I would say read as much as you can read what other people are writing. And my favorite.

Lee Schneider (23:57.766)
Mm-hmm.

Eleanor Keisman (24:16.162)
read what other people have written. There's some wonderful climate fiction that's come out of the 1960s that, like John Wyndham is just one of my absolute favorite writers and that is climate fiction and I think we should be talking about it more. It's just wonderful stuff and it's influenced me a lot. I don't really know if that's good advice though. I don't know if that's best seller advice.

Lee Schneider (24:42.543)
Well, I don't know. I don't know either. But I'll tell you one thing. I'm almost positive that if I ask that question of almost any writer, they would say it was a freak accident or I got lucky because because the very first turn of one's career is usually unexpected. know, you're not sitting waiting for the phone to ring or for the email ping to ping and say, you know, I'm certain this will happen. I just don't know when most people don't.

Eleanor Keisman (24:45.762)
Ha

Eleanor Keisman (24:59.448)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lee Schneider (25:10.339)
No, if it's it being the big break or whatever it might be.

Eleanor Keisman (25:13.686)
Yeah, and sadly I think there are many wonderful manuscripts that just stay unnoticed and nobody picks them up.

Lee Schneider (25:19.567)
Yeah. Yeah, certainly, because the system is pretty rough system to be the discovery system is pretty rough. mean, we're we're lucky now that we can bring books out on our own or find other ways of doing it. I would say finding something that really drives you a real internal motor that makes you want to finish that book and makes you want to write that book.

Eleanor Keisman (25:28.311)
Yes.

Eleanor Keisman (25:33.379)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (25:49.5)
because for me, climate fiction is, it's an important topic. I know a lot of people care about it. It's what I think about. So I'm using that as my theme. I'm going for, you know, that's what drives me to write the book. Just writing a book. Yeah, if you don't love it, you know, you're gonna spend a lot of time, you know, having to work on that book, so.

Eleanor Keisman (26:03.98)
Yeah, if you don't love it, yeah.

Eleanor Keisman (26:16.331)
Yes, yes, I think that I mean, that's the key thing. If you don't if you don't love it, no amount of plotting and planning and strategizing is going to is going to get it there. You have to be you have to be your first fan. It has to really drive be driven by your passions. And yeah, as you say, like it's like you climate fiction is something that I think about.

Honestly, sometimes I read the news and it reads like climate fiction and I have to remind myself that it's not fiction. But it's great. But it's fodder for fiction, let's say.

Lee Schneider (26:51.092)
Yeah, right. It's coming true faster. Faster than can be written.

Lee Schneider (26:59.803)
Yeah. You mentioned you have to be your own best fan. I love that. That's a great idea. I'm wondering how you keep track of the internal world. beat by beat, the day by day, what characters know, what they don't know. know, the wheel of the story turns and as writers we drop in at a different point every day.

Eleanor Keisman (27:05.038)
you

Lee Schneider (27:26.951)
In the first draft, we're going in order, but later we're jumping around all over the place as we fix things. Do you a way of keeping track of all that?

Eleanor Keisman (27:38.158)
That was hard. And this is maybe why it's a novella, not a novel. I think some of it was me being able, almost like an actor in a way, being able to jump into the characters of Bill and Shirley and Hume and Pope. And then I would know. So sort of all I needed was a little bit of a cue.

whatever that is, you know, just to get in there. And that helped me keep track. But a lot of it was going, you know, in the editing process, going back through noticing inconsistencies, things that didn't feel right or make any sense, you know, fixing those. And perhaps I, you know, I think so this is written in the like really third person omniscient

And doing that allows me to jump around in terms of, because then it's not about what the characters know all the time, but it's about what I, the all-knowing, all-seeing, know, godlike character is going to share with my readers. So there's some, and I really do play with that in the book, and I just sort of crossed my fingers that readers would go along with me because I'm head-hopping as a third-person omniscient.

which got a bit tricky, but it saved me from having to remember too much about what do they know, what don't they know.

Lee Schneider (29:15.718)
Yeah, that's a I would say that is huge advice in that if you're going to take that third person omniscient view, you for you, the teller of the story, I envision sitting around a campfire and you already know the story. You already as the teller of that story, you are in a position in time where it's already happened and you're relating it. It's a lot freer than trying to remain those books that.

Eleanor Keisman (29:32.482)
Mm.

Eleanor Keisman (29:41.347)
Yes.

Lee Schneider (29:43.463)
tell you they're in the head of each character, say chapter by chapter, or it's a first person narrative and your person only can say what they know and see what they see and remember what they remember. That becomes much, much harder. yeah, that's...

Eleanor Keisman (29:53.954)
Yes.

Eleanor Keisman (29:58.35)
And I love that storytelling. mean, me personally, I love novels that read like that. And it tends to be older novels. It's... Sorry.

Lee Schneider (30:09.958)
We are in Vienna or near Vienna

Eleanor Keisman (30:11.624)
Yeah. It tends to be older novels that do the more storyteller voice, but I love it and I suppose it was a choice for me that I just wanted to take a writing device and share it with people that I really loved and share it with people.

Lee Schneider (30:31.078)
And I wanted to remind listeners that Hume and Pope are wolves. Well, not quite wolves, but they're nonhumans. And Shirley and Bill are people, just so. So when you get into the book, you'll see that there's it's kind of it's an interesting cast. Let's put it that way.

Eleanor Keisman (30:52.27)
Although there is a wolf, briefly, called Shirley. There's one other wolf, yeah. Shirley's actually two characters. Yes, but yeah, it's a limited number of characters and yes.

Lee Schneider (30:57.275)
that's true, you're right, yeah, yeah, there's one other wolf, that's Right, right, right, right, yeah, right.

Lee Schneider (31:09.04)
So what are some of your success stories about building an audience for this and what have you found? I know it's only been out very briefly out, but what has worked so far for you?

Eleanor Keisman (31:09.406)
Lisa.

Eleanor Keisman (31:18.69)
Yeah, just a few weeks. Well, prop, you know, you should check back with me on that in six months. Because I'm still working on it. I am trying to have an online presence. I'm not very good at that, to be honest. I'm trying to utilize social media.

like Instagram, the two ones I go to the most are Instagram and Substack. I write on Substack, which I've been enjoying very much. then help, a little help from my publisher. They are an indie publisher, you know, there isn't too much steam-power behind what they can do. But I think what's nice is that someone told me recently the indie novel with an indie publisher, it's like a slow,

burn. You have time to sort of find your audience. doesn't all have to happen in that first month or it's a flop. So that is nice as a new author. That's nice.

Lee Schneider (32:28.718)
I find it kind of a relief working in the indie world that I don't have to write an instant blockbuster success. I write books that find an audience on their own time.

Eleanor Keisman (32:41.634)
Yes, yeah. And that is really the thing. I that's what I want so much. I don't want to blast my book out and tell everybody to read it because I don't think that everybody will like it. I mean, that's always going to be true for fiction. There are audiences. And to me, I really want to find the right people for this book. I want to find the audience for New Animal and connect with them.

Lee Schneider (33:07.27)
So I want to switch gears one more time with some sort of wide angle questions, which are if you had a do-over to do in your career, what would it be?

Eleanor Keisman (33:20.872)
well, I'd be independently wealthy and live in a cabin and just read all day long. not worry, I'd be independently wealthy. That would be my career. No, no, a real answer. I think I'd want to be an actress. I think that there's something in writing that is like acting because you embody these other people and...

Lee Schneider (33:28.772)
Hahaha.

Eleanor Keisman (33:49.77)
I think, yeah, I'd like to be an actress if I could go back and do it all over. Maybe I wouldn't be any good, you know, but...

Lee Schneider (33:54.618)
Yeah

Lee Schneider (33:58.694)
His writing, being a writer is like being an actor in so many ways, in the ways that you've described. If you could publish or write any book, what would it be?

Eleanor Keisman (34:13.422)
I wish that I could write like crime novels, but really good, like well paced sort of thrilling crime novels. I can't. I've tried. So any crime novel is my answer. I wish I could, I wish I could write something like Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. I don't know if, I mean, this is a completely different genre, but just as a reader, I love reading that kind of stuff and.

Lee Schneider (34:39.205)
Yeah

Eleanor Keisman (34:43.608)
I wish I could do it. I'm still trying. I haven't succeeded. We'll see. One day.

Lee Schneider (34:49.75)
and if there's an author you could meet, go to coffee, nothing, you know, not, I don't want to do the dinner because maybe that's too much. If we learn too much about the authors we like, we might not make it through a whole dinner, but maybe coffee. Who would that be?

Eleanor Keisman (34:59.15)
you

Eleanor Keisman (35:03.073)
Yeah.

Yeah, they say you shouldn't meet your heroes, right? Yeah. there's so many. Alive or dead?

Lee Schneider (35:15.321)
Either.

Eleanor Keisman (35:17.742)
Shirley Jackson. I'd want to meet Shirley Jackson. Maybe not, yeah, maybe not for dinner. I think she might be kind of intense. Coffee, yeah. I bet she'd be an interesting person to talk to. I'd love to talk to her about writing. So.

Lee Schneider (35:32.262)
I'm curious also, what is your, where you work, you write, what does that look like?

Eleanor Keisman (35:43.79)
So I'm there now. Right now it's chaos. Right now it's chaos but that's because I'm not sort of heavily working on anything at the moment. When I'm working I really like a bare desk. Just my laptop and nothing else. get visual clutter. Clutters my mind and my thinking.

When I'm not working, my desk looks very different. It looks like a person who is trying to come up with an idea. So like right now I'm working on a poetry project. And so I have sort of like paper and pens out for that and colored pens because there's an art component to it and other sort of notebooks and bits of research that I may or may not follow up on. And the minute I start working on something though, that'll all be gone. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (36:36.453)
And what do you think, This is my widest angle question, What do you think is the state of science fiction and fantasy writing and publishing today?

Eleanor Keisman (36:50.862)
I think that it's getting more and more popular. think that particularly, you know, climate fiction. I think that people are really kind of hungry for this type of thing. I think that the world is getting to be a, I'm sorry, my downstairs neighbor is a musician. Can you hear him playing the piano?

Okay, just I just need to hear him play. Okay. All right. I think that the state of the world, the what's happening with the climate leaving politics completely off the table, you know, I think there's a lot of uncertainty. And every year, every season, it feels like something unknown is happening. I see more and more speculative fiction, climate fiction, and I think

Lee Schneider (37:19.311)
Yeah.

Eleanor Keisman (37:46.038)
It's very comforting to people. I know it's comforting to me.

Lee Schneider (37:51.788)
so.

Eleanor Keisman (37:53.666)
How so?

Lee Schneider (37:54.723)
Yeah, why comforting and how?

Eleanor Keisman (37:56.586)
Why? Well, I think kind of like what we talked about that it proposes a way forward. You know, when everything is filled with such uncertainty, there is no path forward because it's anything, anything could happen. I mean, in New Animal, I write about that winters get so short that they're not even really considered a season anymore.

And you know, I live in central Europe and I've been seeing that happen over the past years that winters get shorter and shorter and summers get longer and more intense and we don't know what's going to happen. So climate fiction novels, they show a way forward and show how people rise to that and travel down that path. it's sort of a, it's a nice way to work out that anxiety, I think.

Lee Schneider (38:50.659)
Wonderful. Thanks for sharing. Is there anything else that we should talk about that we forgot to bring up?

Eleanor Keisman (39:04.096)
I don't think so. These were great questions. These were really great questions. Let me see if I, like I took out some books to...

Lee Schneider (39:06.565)
Good, yeah. thanks. Thanks.

Eleanor Keisman (39:18.902)
Mape, did we talk about writing animal characters and staying away from the Disney component?

Lee Schneider (39:26.169)
We could take another run at that because we didn't dig into the whole Disney-ification of the natural world, which is a whole thing. I could phrase it as a question and we could have a run at it. Let's give it a try.

Eleanor Keisman (39:29.698)
Mm.

Eleanor Keisman (39:35.608)
Yeah.

Eleanor Keisman (39:40.142)
Let's try it. Let's try it. Yeah, because that was a consideration for me. I'm curious what I'll say.

Lee Schneider (39:46.278)
Sure. So writing animals as characters, there's a lot of history to that, not all of it good. How did you approach that and how did you make it feel the way you wanted it to feel?

Eleanor Keisman (40:02.478)
It was definitely difficult and there was a large part of this process where I think I would set the novel aside for long stretches and just read. And in my research, one of the things I was looking for, I was just sort of grabbing up any book and it didn't even have to be climate fiction or science fiction. Well, I suppose it is a bit science fiction if it's an animal protagonist, but any book that had

an animal protagonist, even as a supporting character, like a strong support. I found there's a crime or like a police detective novel where the major supporting character is a German shepherd. It's a police dog. parts of the book are written from this dog's perspective. And so I just reading and reading and trying to see how people.

how people did it so that it wasn't a joke, not the talking animal route. And it was difficult. It took a lot of consideration. I wanted to be respectful to the wolves. Another part of it was that I did a ton of research reading what sort of the environmentalists who research wolves wrote about and the...

Yellowstone Rangers and wolf experts and people who reintroduced wolves to the environment and watched them very closely. there's even Jim and Jamie Dutcher, two scientists who literally lived with wolves. They actually lived with them for a while. And all of that was instrumental to trying to figure out how to create this

plausible wolf character, but still obviously having to use language, you know, for a nonverbal character. So, had to make some choices and I hope I made the right ones, you know.

Lee Schneider (42:12.43)
Yeah, a very, it walks successfully, walks a fine line between anthropomorphizing and entirely humanizing, which wouldn't be right, but enough of a hook into human-like thinking and of course words. But most of it is really feels like the interior mind of a wolf-dog or wolf-dog hybrid.

Which of course I'm not, so I don't know, but you convince me that I'm in the mind of that. I mean, to take a different example, I just finished reading John Skaal-ze's starter villain, which has as major characters, cats, cats who can type. And it's total comedy, and we kind of get inside the mind of a cat a little, but it's more about the comic shock value of hyper-intelligent animals.

Eleanor Keisman (43:09.024)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think our, sorry.

Lee Schneider (43:10.082)
very different approach. So to do realism is tough.

Eleanor Keisman (43:18.786)
Yes. Well, I think one aspect, you you mentioned sort of like the shock value of these comic cats who can type. think that there is, I think that humans do have certain biases and prejudices towards certain animals and cats are funny. I mean, they are anyway, like they're quite funny. They are very silly. Wolves, on the other hand, we automatically take them seriously. If you ran into a wolf.

in the wild. Like we are naturally, we are hardwired to stay away from these creatures. So I think that was something I just kind of tapped into. I'll use the word exploit here very loosely. I exploited our natural sort of reverence for the wolf in order to create this serious character. But yeah.

Cats are funny. I venture to say that this writer also did the same thing, but in the opposite way.

Lee Schneider (44:17.86)
Cats are running.

Lee Schneider (44:23.97)
Right. Well, yeah, he's very fond of his cats, apparently. All right, good. I think that works really well as an answer. I'll find a place earlier for it and put it in.

Eleanor Keisman (44:33.752)
Great.

Great, great. And my, I had an alarm go off before. hope that, my God.

Lee Schneider (44:41.41)
Yeah, I I heard that. can probably work around that. No worries. No, it's fine. This has been good. The microphone sounds great. So.

Eleanor Keisman (44:44.366)
I completely forgot. thought I turned everything off. All right. Great. This was This was really fun. Great questions. And yeah, it was really fun.

Lee Schneider (44:56.257)
thanks. And thanks so much for being on the podcast. It was great to have you.

Eleanor Keisman (45:00.696)
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.