Season 4, Episode 7: Read between the Lions

Sara and Daniel interview author Talia Lakshmi Kolluri to talk about her debut short story collection What We Fed to the Manticore. Talia shares what inspired her to write stories from various animal perspectives, geeks out about research (especially animal research!) and the fascinating world of animal friendships – both with humans and other species - as we focus on ReadICT category 9, a book featuring an animal sidekick.

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcription. Some errors may occur. If you find a transcription error, please contact us with any corrections and we will make those corrections as quickly as possible.

[MUSIC]

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Hi everybody. I'm Daniel.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: And I'm Sara.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: And you're listening to Read. Return.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Repeat. Hi!

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Hey. So this morning, Sara, I was getting ready for the podcast, right? I was taking my dog, Otis, to my parents' house, which I do every morning, because my mom, like watches her dogs. And there's a, it was an orange, fat tabby just hanging out, staring Otis down. Staring Odie down.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Odie.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: And I was like, "What are you doing here, Garfield?"

Sara Dixon, voiceover: And it's like, we're recording this on a Monday.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Yeah. And I was like, "What? It's Monday. Like, what are you even doing out?" And then I remembered last night, true story: we had lasagna for dinner.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: So he could smell it on you.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Probably.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: "Where's my lasagna, bro?"

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: And he was like, oh, like, all the Riverside cats like my dog. They're not scared of my dog, though. So, like, I thought it was hilarious, though, because I literally did have lasagna and there was like, an orange tabby, which, like, you might be asking why we're talking about Garfield.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: I was about to just ask, because I'm like, "Okay, that's a cute story. But like, what does that have to do with Read. Return. Repeat?

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Because this episode is a category, is a book with an animal sidekick, and obviously, I think for me and a lot of people my age, Garfield, like the collected Garfield volumes, like Garfield volume one through 10, obviously, was like our introduction to, like, libraries was like, when you went to a library, it's like, where are the Garfield books? Call number 741.5.

Were you a Garfield fan?

Sara Dixon, voiceover: So I was really more of a Calvin and Hobbes fan.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: So 741.5 WAT.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: That's right.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: For Watterson. And then, yeah --

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Still an animal sidekick, though, because Calvin had Hobbes, which was a tiger. Right? He's a tiger?

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Yeah. It's like Life of Pi is just Calvin and Hobbes for grown-ups.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: That's actually not a bad, like way to look at it. Only, you know, less philosophical, I think.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Well, yeah. Well, although both are pretty --

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Both are kind of deep. Calvin and Hobbes got kind of deep sometimes.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Yeah, it did. So I think that, yeah, those are great examples for books with animal sidekicks.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: You're right. You're right.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: I feel like Garfield's not really a sidekick. He's more of like --

Sara Dixon, voiceover: He was the more the, he had main character energy. And like Jon was the sidekick. He was like an animal with a human sidekick.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Yeah.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Maybe we should do that for a category one year.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: That would be... anyway.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: So let's introduce our guest for today. Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a writer from northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, is a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: It was also long listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, as well as the Aspen Words Literacy Prize and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, all in 2023. And was also selected for the 2023 ALA RUSA notable books.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Her short story has been published in the Minnesota Review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, Five Dials, and The Adroit Journal.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: And Pebbles, who we might see later on this interview. So let's go ahead and say hi to Talia.

Sara Dixon: All right. Thank you so much, Talia, for joining us on Read. Return. Repeat. We're so excited to have you.

Daniel Pewewardy: So awesome to have you. Thank you.

Talia Kolluri: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Sara Dixon: So let's just launch right in. Tell us a little bit about your book, What We Fed to the Manticore.

Talia Kolluri: Okay, so What We Fed to the Manticore is a collection of short stories. There are nine of them, and every single one is narrated from the perspective of an animal. And they really do cross the globe, and they cover animals from domesticated working animals, sort of quasi-domesticated in captivity, and also wild animals that have no direct human interaction. And I tried to cover a number of different climates or like environmental settings. So it's meant to be sort of a global animal chorus.

Sara Dixon: We're using a safari background because the, I read the rhino story last. It was very sad.

Daniel Pewewardy: So you mentioned that it's kind of like the global aspect of it, and kind of like talking about environmental, like, the environmental aspect of these stories and things. So was that like the main, was kind of like that the main inspiration, or what were some of the other inspiring factors that went into writing this book?

Talia Kolluri: Oh gosh, so many things inspired me to write it. First and foremost, probably... I really like reading environmental writing and I like environmentally oriented fiction. And as a kid, I really loved animal, animal stories. I don't know if... I mean, I'm sure all of us have read as children a number of stories that featured prominent animal characters, and then somewhere, somewhere in our teens, they all just sort of disappear, and everyone becomes a human and I wasn't sure why that was, why there are not a lot of pieces of fiction for adults that, or young adults that that are from an animal perspective, because to me, it's really appealing and really magnetic, and it's something that I, that I that I loved reading. So part of it was a desire to see more stories. I wrote, I wrote the stories that I wanted to read. That's, that's probably the beginning genesis.

But I do think a lot about conservation in a broader sense, environmentalism. I think about the climate crisis a lot, and I do think a lot about our interaction with the natural world and how I think that a lot of our modern life really primes us to believe that we are not part of the natural world. I mean, here I am inside in an air-conditioned room, speaking through a microphone across multiple states to talk to you over distance, which is a beautiful use of technology, but not a necessarily very natural thing. And so I wanted to explore the idea of being rooted back in the natural world. And so that's, that's why I chose a lot of first-person perspective, and why I chose animal narrators, was to really, really plunge the reader into that perspective, kind of as a reminder that we're, we're animals too.

Daniel Pewewardy: I really like that aspect. I'm actually an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation and we have our traditional stories that are all like, animal based with coyote. And I just really like seeing, I always joke with my friends, I'm always like... when we tell, like, gossip stories, we should just, like, use animals instead of the people.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: I saw Badger hanging out with Robin yesterday.

Talia Kolluri: And guess what? Yeah, no, I love that so much. And you know, you bring up such a great point. You know, indigenous American people use a lot of animal narration. In fact, around the world, almost every culture has a history of storytelling, and oftentimes animals are in those historical stories, just globally and I think that I wanted to reintroduce that for readers who maybe hadn't experienced stories that they could connect to that had animal narrators.

Sara Dixon: That's perfect. So we chose this book for this particular episode because we're focusing on animal sidekicks, generally speaking. And when your whole story is told from an animal's perspective, all your friends end up being animal sidekicks by default. So it fits perfectly, every single story. Yeah, go ahead.

Daniel Pewewardy: So there's, like, a, there's a fable like follies with stories involving animals that can speak and behave like humans in a way that express human weaknesses. You know, like if you look at the Tortoise and the Hare, for like, example. Do you see your stories as modern-day fables?

Talia Kolluri: I do. Yeah, I do. I do. I wanted to deliberately kind of speak to that tradition and participate in it. And you know, as I mentioned earlier, global traditions include animal fables. I thought a lot about a set of stories called the Panchatantra as I was writing them. So those are from South Asia, and they involve a lot of animal interactions, and they're meant to be instructive. So like a lot of animal stories we see, they're meant to teach the listener or the reader or the receiver of the story something about how to live and how to be a creature that interacts with other creatures. And so I thought about those stories. I thought about, you know, the, a lot of the animal stories we grew up with as kids. I thought about fables. I thought about fairy tales and myths also, and just, yeah, I do. I do want to participate in that, in that tradition, pretty deliberately.

Sara Dixon: I want to ask you, like, specific questions about every single story, because I'm like, "Oh, what was that supposed to mean? What was that supposed to mean?" And we do have a couple questions we're going to ask about specifics, but like -- and I'm cutting in, Daniel on your time -- but I want to know about the bear story. What is the fox supposed to represent?

Talia Kolluri: Oh, wow. So I, that changed actually during revision, what the fox represented. So when I first wrote that story, I imagined the fox to be a figment of the bear's imagination, and I imagined her to be a signifier that the bear was dying because... so the beginning of the story was... well, the genesis of the story was, I was thinking a lot about the climate crisis and polar bear habitat loss, and also how it impacts their hunting and their just ability the landscape that they have evolved to live in is just sort of dissolving in front of them, and they're starving. So I'm sure you've seen many of those famous photos of emaciated polar bears, and I wanted to tell a story about that bear and I, and I was struggling to find my way in. And so when it finally arrived, the sort of voice of the story arrived, it was this mythology creation story. But I did originally imagine the fox as death come for the bear. However, as I was in revision, I was returning to some of my research about life in the Arctic for polar bears.

And it turns out Arctic foxes and polar bears actually do have a somewhat, I think maybe the best word is cooperative relationship. But they do, they do have a relationship, a level of interaction that has mostly to do with food. And so sometimes bears will, you know, they'll have a kill, they'll eat most of it, but there'll be some that's left behind. In fact, foxes come and scavenge, and maybe they follow, follow along and say, oh, there's a polar bear. Let's see if there's anything left for me. So they, they have a parallel life. And so as I was revising, I decided to make the fox real. She's a real companion, but I amplified that relationship in the sense that I wanted, I wanted them to have more, more of a meaningful relationship, and a deeper relationship than maybe we have observed in real polar bears.

Not to say that there's something about their relationships that we don't know, because I actually like to imagine that animals have whole lives, maybe that we aren't, we aren't privy to, and maybe they do have an intense friendship, and isn't that nice to imagine? So I, what did that look like? I made that, I made that for myself. That's really, that's really awesome. I like, I saw, like, I've seen photos and videos of cooperative hunting, like coyotes and badgers working together. And I always think that's, like, really cool. Yeah, ravens and wolves, or crows and wolves, they do a lot of cooperation, too. So I think that that's, I think that's something that we don't think about maybe as often as we should.

Sara Dixon: I just watched a documentary on dogs and they were talking about survival of the friendliest. Now, I'm not suggesting that bears and foxes are, like, friendly, but they're working together to... in this story.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah. I mean, I also think about them, you know, they're part of, like a they're part of an ecosystem, and they're all part of, like a... well, I mean, system really is the right word because it has multiple parts and they don't exist in isolation. And I think that's another feature of humanity that we, we pay more attention to, is our isolation from the rest of the environment. So we, we don't notice necessarily all the ways that the parts work together and are necessary for each other, even for our own survival. We don't necessarily realize all the ways that those things are important.

But I think animals, they're, they're aware. They're, they experience it much more, in much more of a present sense. You know, this animal hunts and leaves some behind for me, and then whatever remains, after all of the animals have eaten the prey, then nourishes the Earth, which then feeds the trees, and the trees feed the pollinators and the, you know, insects, and so it's... the connections between the different creatures that live within the ecosystem, I think is maybe worth emphasizing. For sure, absolutely.

Sara Dixon: Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the overall, like, vibe of your book. Because if we're talking about animals, right? Animals are cute and fuzzy and we love them and we just want to, like, pet them and love on them. But you're taking a completely different approach because we're talking about all of these things that are going on in the world that are kind of awful, right? Climate change and emaciated polar bears. So the book overall feels, has a feeling of being very like bleak.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah.

Sara Dixon: But still feels very important. So can you talk a little bit about your approach to... and, you know, I was thinking. As we were just talking, like fairy tales are super dark, right? Fables always have like, a moral at the end of the story. But, you know, fairy tales are very dark, and they're also supposed to mean, meant to teach us something. So can you talk a little bit about your approach in choosing to go with a more, I want to say dark, but also just not choosing that fuzzy, easy story?

Talia Kolluri: Yeah.

Sara Dixon: That's an awful way to phrase my question, but I think what you get what I'm trying to say.

Talia Kolluri: I do, I do understand it. I think that's a great way to phrase it. Because, you know, what is it we often say about fairy tales is that, like they are dark because they're meant to teach you how to survive dark circumstances. Some of it was about bearing witness, right? Bearing witness to a transforming world. I don't want to say crumbling, because we're going to live here. We're all going to live in this environment that is changing around us, and adaptation will be necessary for every species to survive, including humans. And so part of it was bearing witness, and part of it was setting up the question for how, how do we live in a world that feels bleak and hopeless?

I also have, I think a lot when I write about this book by Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a nonfiction book, and it's, in a lot of ways, a long essay about the role of climate and literature, particularly modern literature. And Ghosh talks about how -- and you see this in particular in American literature or Western literature, where the idea is that, you know, you have this sort of aesthetic that has become very prominent where the climate crisis is not included as part of the experience of characters, it appears rather invisible or it's treated as uncanny, like massive storms. You know, all of these things are treated as unusual, uncanny, not part of ordinary life, but they, but they are.

I know that we talk about how in the States, a lot of parts of the country are experiencing what, what are called once in a lifetime weather events, once in a lifetime floods, or once in a lifetime mega fires, but they happen like more than once in a five year period. In California, where we have wildfire season happens every year now and I think that it wasn't like that when I was growing up. We have mega fires, complex fires, floods are happening, hurricanes. And so these things that were considered unusual or once in a lifetime, dramatic events, they're common, and they need to find their way into our literature because our literature is a way of documenting our experience. So I thought about that, you know? I thought about not recasting all the environments and experience, all the environments the animals live in, and all the experiences they have as inaccurately positive. And I know it does sound bleak, but I think --

Sara Dixon: Inaccurately positive?

Talia Kolluri: Inaccurately positive, right. "There is no climate crisis." But I think that one of the things about that is part of living within the world we live in now is paying attention to its reality. So maybe this book is about attention.

Sara Dixon: Yeah, I'm letting that soak in.

Talia Kolluri: It's a lot of words.

Sara Dixon: It feels very, but it feels very like important, like, fables, stick with you, right? Fairy tales stick with you. We remember these stories because they help us try to be better people. And I feel like your story is not giving us a very like specific moral, but it's also like we need to change things so that polar bears aren't starving on ice floes, you know? So that tigers aren't falling asleep under a copse of trees and not waking back up, right? So that happens, not exactly how that happens. But anyway, anyway, I liked the approach.

Talia Kolluri: Thank you.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah, and I, I was going to ask about "The Good Donkey," because it kind of reminded like, because war is also one of these environmental things, like it's more, it more involves humans. So I, it reminded me of The Pride of Baghdad, which was like a Grant Morrison graphic novel about lions during the invasion of Iraq. And so for those that don't know, the donkey is living in a zoo in Gaza as witness of horrific events, including airstrikes, animal smuggling, and the daily trauma experience living in a war zone. So how does writing from an animal's point of view change a story when it's set against a backdrop of something we would view as very human centered environment, such as like being in the midst of a war?

Talia Kolluri: Well, that's such a good question. You know, I... when I think about that story -- and this is a little bit of a preamble -- when I think about that story, one of the things I realize is that I'm still learning how to talk about the choice to write it, and the process of writing it, and I think that... yeah, I'm still, I'm still learning how to talk about the story, right? Writing it came from a really, like emotional place and a, and a desire to answer a question. I'll start by saying it's inspired by a couple of real events that happened over... I basically blended a few real events that happened in Gaza and one of them involved a man who really did paint a donkey to look like a zebra because he was not able to get a zebra into the zoo.

And I began that story with the question of, well, what did the donkey think about that? What did that mean to the donkey? And I think that animals have meaning in their lives, and while we can't always explain what we are doing as humans around them, they will infuse their lives with their own, with their own meaning, they will try to explain things to themselves. So I was trying to answer the question of when you have, what did the donkey think about, about that experience? And also, also sort of like, what did it mean in a greater context? And what can we understand from observing the situation in Gaza outside of human eyes?

And I think one of the things I've realized about animal stories, especially over the course of talking about this book, is I think that I've realized that people are more open to hearing something about humanity if an animal character says it. And I think that that's probably, that's probably the most significant thing I've understood from feedback about this story. And then, and the other thing I do want to say that I think isn't speaking to your question, but is important for me to articulate is that when I was writing it, it was really important to me that I not be understood as trying to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people, because there are a lot of amazing Palestinian writers who are writing literature about their experiences, both, you know, in Palestine and also in the diaspora. So I very much did not want to be perceived as trying to speak for, but I did want to speak alongside, and I wanted to observe that experience from the point of view of a non-human creature to ask what it would, what it would look like if we if we saw it from the outside.

I'm not sure how articulate that was, but --

Daniel Pewewardy: It's good, yeah.

Sara Dixon: I just feel like I should share. I was reading that in a very public space, and it was very difficult to like interact with the world around me because that story was just very emotional for me. But it was beautiful. It was very sad because war is sad.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, I get that feedback a lot, yeah, yeah.

Sara Dixon: And to see through the eyes of a innocent animal, right? Like, the donkey's innocence and... ugh, I'm gonna get emotional again.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah. I mean, the other thing too, I think about the donkey, is it, he has no control. He has no control over his circumstances, and I think that that amplifies the concept of suffering with no power to change it. Yeah.

Sara Dixon: Okay.

Talia Kolluri: So I always feel like I need to apologize when people tell me that my book is really sad. I'm so sorry.

Sara Dixon: Don't apologize. I mean, the thing is, it's stuff that we have to read and understand, and it makes us better people in the long run. No, I mean, I thought it was, it was beautiful. It was just takes a minute. You can't read it. You read all the stories at once. So for instance, in "What We Fed to the Manticore," one reason that that story -- because it's the title of the book, but also the title of one of the stories -- The manticore is the only mythical creature. Like because you write about, you write about wild animals, domesticated animals, humans as animals. But the manticore, we get a mythological creature, which I actually had to look up. And it comes from ancient Persian mythology, and it's like, the head of a lion with, like, is it have wings? I think it has wings.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, yeah. Some iterations of a manticore have wings. I think a couple of them don't, but they all have a scorpion tail and like a human face.

Sara Dixon: Oh.

Talia Kolluri: Like extra, extra teeth. It was the extra teeth, yeah.

Sara Dixon: Not terrifying at all.

Talia Kolluri: No, no.

Sara Dixon: So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what the manticore represents in that story, and then I'll tell you what I thought of --

Talia Kolluri: Oh, oh, this is fun.

Sara Dixon: -- The NeverEnding Story, the Nothing. I love the Nothing.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, I mean, I love The NeverEnding Story so much.

Sara Dixon: Atreyu! Yeah, I don't know, anyway.

So can you tell us a little bit about what the manticore represents?

Talia Kolluri: Yes, absolutely. But first I want to say that I related like very much, to Bastian when I was a kid. I even had the same haircut. I had, I had this like, if you look at childhood photos of me --

Sara Dixon: I feel like I should apologize for that.

Talia Kolluri: No, it was the '80s. A lot of people had it. But I looked a lot like Bastian as a child. And I loved reading and, you know, hiding out and just spending my day with books. So that was, I loved that, that you referenced that.

Daniel Pewewardy: I've never emotionally recovered from Artax.

Talia Kolluri: Who does? Who does?

Sara Dixon: I don't think any of us have.

Daniel Pewewardy: I think I completely blocked it out until like, someone mentioned that scene, like five years ago. I was like, "Oh my god."

Talia Kolluri: Then you're like, "No!"

Sara Dixon: The trauma of a generation.

Talia Kolluri: Oh, we're all... no one has recovered. You know, in a way, in a way, the manticore is like that. I wanted... more directly, the manticore represents a cyclone. And I wrote that story after I had read about a cyclone coming through the Sundarbans, and it had just caused this complete infusion of salt water -- because so the Sundarbans have like salt water and fresh water mixing into this, like mangrove forest. And it's a really incredible ecological place. It's also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So really, really incredible. And it has like a confluence of fresh water, salt water, the sea, land, trees, a ton of different flora and fauna, and people who live there. And all of these things come together. And all of them, their lives just sort of like are shaped by, by where the water goes. And cyclones just surge in. When cyclones come, they transform the landscape. And what is dry land, whatever was dry land last week is something different this week after a cyclone. And they, as many things with the climate crisis, cyclones are more powerful than they used to be, and more frequent. And if you are a tiger, what is a cyclone to you?

What is, what does it mean to have the world that you adapted to live in turned upside down without, without knowing that it's coming or why, or having any understanding of how patterns are changing outside your own observation. So I wanted, I wanted to answer the question of, "What is a, what does a tiger think about a cyclone?" And then I also kind of wanted to talk about... I wanted to talk about human/tiger interactions and how those feel to tigers.

But the other reason I included the manticore is because in some of my research, I learned that manticores may have originally been conceived of because of someone misunderstanding a shared description of a tiger. So someone who had never seen a tiger, heard a tiger described them functionally through like a game of telephone, and then came up with this thing with all these teeth, and there's a scorpion tail, and it's huge, and, you know, it's monstrous. And so I thought of, I thought of how ordinary, animals that we see as ordinary can transform into something mythological through, you know, chains of description until the description of the animal distorts and it no longer represents what the original person saw. And then when they see the original animal, they're like, "Wait, what is that?" So that was, yes, that's, that's kind of how the manticore came to inhabit that story.

Sara Dixon: Okay.

Daniel Pewewardy: So I have a question about like, the humanlike characteristics of all the animals in your book. And so are like... they all exhibit very humanlike characteristics, such as feeling despair. Are we more like animals, are we more like the animals around us than we think? What, what can we learn from them?

Talia Kolluri: Oh, I think we are. I do think we are. Do you have pets? Do either of you have pets?

Daniel Pewewardy: Yes.

Sara Dixon: Both, we both do.

Talia Kolluri: Okay, so you have like a, you have like, a friendship with your pets, right? And do you ever sort of when you're watching them, just like, know, what they're feeling, you just like, know, based on, like, your interaction with them, with interactions with them, and kind of how they've been before? You just can, you can tell, like, their feelings, right?

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah.

Sara Dixon: We think.

Talia Kolluri: So, I think so too. I have two cats. I've always had pets and I've, I've like, I think that most people who have pets would probably have some version of this feeling, which is that we know they have, like, inner lives. They have things they like, things they don't like, ways they understand the world around them. And I've, and as I watch my own pets, I see a lot of familiar emotions reflected back at me and I, and I refuse to believe that I'm super imposing some sort of higher human experience on an animal that isn't capable of it. I think that science is caught up with the emotion to show that animals do have, they do have the capacity for emotion, and they do have the capacity for relationships and play and complexity and I think in a lot of ways, the idea that humans are the only creatures who have this within us, the ability to feel and hope and dream and think and plan and be sinister and to lie, I think is, well, I think that's human arrogance, actually. I think that animals, I think animals have all of that.

And I think that, you know, just to answer your question, yes, yes, we are more like animals than we realize. And there, there are some wonderful books that lean into these questions. One I really like is called When Animals Dream. I think I'm getting that title correct. But, but there, but it sort of asked the question about like, an animal's imaginative life, particularly during the dream state. And we do know that animals, animals do dream. So I think they are what we would recognize as human characteristics, but I think that those are characteristics that we share with a lot of different creatures.

Sara Dixon: Well, hey, let's take a break real quick. We will hear from somebody about some wonderful library service. When we come back, we'll continue diving into What We Fed to the Manticore, What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri.

VOICEOVER: Did you know you can check out more than just books and movies at your library? Over the past year, the Library of Things program has added many new and unique items for checkout. Keep your home safe with our radon detectors, or explore the night with our telescopes. For the little ones, STEAM to GO! activity kits are available in a wide variety of interests such as fossils, robotics and engineering, all this and more can be found at wichitalibrary.org/things.

Daniel Pewewardy: And we're back with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri.

Sara Dixon: And we have to talk about cats and pets over the break.

Daniel Pewewardy: We talked about cats over the break a lot, and dogs.

Talia Kolluri: A lot of cat talk.

Daniel Pewewardy: It's wild because it's like cat person and dog people, but yeah, coexisting together.

Talia Kolluri: Coexisting.

Sara Dixon: Survival of the friendliest.

Talia Kolluri: Species friendships, yes, interspecies friendships.

Sara Dixon: All of the above.

Daniel Pewewardy: How do you approach your research for your stories and to capture the various animal perspectives? Like, how do you prep for it? Like, are we watching, like, Planet Earth documentaries, or, like, talking with animal conservationists? Like, how do you get in the minds of these, these animals?

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, this is my favorite question. I love talking about research so much. Tons of research, and almost probably more maybe than I needed. Because I do, I do love research so much. But usually I begin with, like, a surface level understanding of kind of where, how an animal might live. And usually I, usually I go for, I start with a documentary because I kind of like to see how they move and I like to see what their space is like and get a sense of what's around them. Then I go to books for, like, just a basic, you know, basic understanding of, like, the ecology of the space. And then I write the story. And then after I've written the story, I go back and I correct details. And when I, when I do my revision research, that's when I kind of get into the more... I usually use technical texts, so or like articles written by whatever specialist would write about that animal. But I did actually get a lot of initial inspiration from like, news coverage, environmental news coverage. And so I would, I would get a sense of the landscape first, write the story, get a sense of the animal, you know, write it, and then come back and update behavior.

So wolves was a perfect example. I did a lot of research for that story. So I watched, Jim and Jamie Dutcher do a lot of wolf conservation, and I watched they have a couple of documentaries. Jim Brandenburg had a documentary called, I think it's called Brother Wolf, it's really wonderful, that I watched that. And then I read all of their books, and then I found this compendium of like, wolf wildlife biology and I learned a lot about their eating patterns. And what do they do, like, how fast do they eat, and where do they live? And how are pups housed in a den, and what are their relationships? This particular story was inspired by a real wolf, so I read articles about... I actually read her obituary. She's inspired by a wolf called whose number was 832F, but they she's also called The 06 Female, very famous Yellowstone wolf.

Sara Dixon: Oh my gosh, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about because I read American Wolf by an author that I can't remember right now.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, so I'm sure he and I were, I don't know him personally, but I'm sure we were reading the same obituary at the same time, and probably, I'm assuming, both sobbing over it. I read that at my day job. I read the obituary, and I was like crying at my desk, like, no, I was so devastated. And so that sort of was the entry into the story. But I learned a lot about, I researched the maps of Yellowstone. And I think the one of the things that was very important to me about that story is I wanted to get the weather right. So I wanted it to be snowy, because I wanted to write about, like, you know, navigating the snow. But I also wanted the wolf to have pups, and so I needed to make sure that it was possible for there still to be snow in spring in Yellowstone. It turns out that is true, yes, there is still snow there. So I... so things like that, you know, making sure that I had the weather articulated correctly, that I had the landscape described adequately enough. Those were all, those all pull in research like, you know, the Weather Channel and Yellowstone maps, but also a lot of wolf behavior.

So texts that someone would use for traditional study of wolves, and then documentaries, so all of those things. There are some pieces where my research was really more experiential and I was trying to come up with a way to describe the environment or the landscape, or the experience of the animal. So when I wrote the whale story, I wanted... I know that human ears are not at all like whale ears, and I can't fully experience what it is like to hear as a whale, but I wanted to see how close I could get. So I literally, like, jumped in a pool with my husband, and I told him to talk to me underwater so I could see, like, what does it sound like, at least to my ears when sound travels underwater? And then I used that along with studying the sort of mechanism of whale ears to see if I could imagine a step further to what, what sounds mean to whales, because that's... like a sound is a much more, it's just a much more detailed rendering for whales underwater. It's just, it's... it's probably more important than vision for many whales. But a lot of books would help me with that. I also watched a lot of YouTube videos for that particular story. I watched a lot of YouTube videos of underwater shots of like ships. You'd be surprised at how much footage there is of a ship underwater, more than you would think. I thought there'd be none. And I found like, four videos, and I was able to listen to what does a ship's propeller sound like underwater in the ocean. So things, I did things like that.

Daniel Pewewardy: That's cool. You also have like a bibliography at the end of the book. And I guess, like, fiction writers don't often, even though when they do research, you don't get to see that. So I guess I was gonna ask if you have, do you have, like a... like, do you have a history or, like, a background in, like, nonfiction or research writing, and why did you choose to list your sources?

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, so I do, so my day job... my day job is I'm a lawyer, which is a... I have a really research heavy practice. I'm, my practice is more oriented toward environmental law, and I often don't think about those two things being connected, but the research part definitely is. And then in undergrad, I was a history major, which. Is a very research heavy course of study. And also I kind of wanted to give credit to the people who inspired these stories. I think that that's important. And then lastly, my editor asked me if I would be willing to and I was just so excited. I was like, yes, yes, yes. Let's do a bibliography. And I think I wanted, I wanted people to, I wanted people to read, hopefully, these sources, because I wanted to share things that I'm excited about or interested in or that I think are really important. And if, if something I write that is a little bit fantastical and mostly make believe inspire somebody to be curious about the world that we live in and all the creatures we share it with, I wanted to make... I didn't want to hide where they could find more. If you're curious and you're excited about learning about something, I'm, I want to make an entry into learning more easy. So I wanted to, yeah, wanted to share those inspirational pieces. And I probably could have added even more. There's so much wonderful stuff out there that I enjoyed.

Sara Dixon: I think it's, it was really just an interesting concept for us to see that, like when we were trying to put together, you know, the questions for this episode. It's just you don't see that ever. And so it just kind of takes this fiction thing, but then ties it back into the real world in a way that we don't see. And of course, people get inspired by all kinds of things as they're writing stories, I assume, I don't know.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, sometimes I see people note them in their acknowledgements, like, they'll maybe note like, one or two books that were really, really inspirational. But I hope, I hope, that in my future books, I'm, you know, allowed to do that because I want to. I think I want, I think I want to do that some more. I There's a lot of great stuff out there. There're always, there're always more books to read. I think, I think it was, it was fun for me to put that together.

Sara Dixon: So, many of the animals in your stories are animals that we would normally villainize, right? Like vultures are gross. They eat dead things. The wolves are, you know, apex predators. Even pigeons, right? Who cares about pigeons? So they're often misunderstood. They're villainized. Why did you decide to write those animals?

Talia Kolluri: Because I don't want them to be villainized. I don't want them to. I really wanted, I think that every creature has something really beautiful and wonderful about them, even spiders. I say this like as a person who's terrified of spiders, even spiders. And I want, I want us, I want us to leave space to appreciate them. And so I'll start. I'll start with wolves. I have a lot of, like, strong feelings about all these animals, but I'll start with wolves because all of our literature around the world create, cast them as villains, you know. And even we had the way we talk about, the way we use wolf in our just like casual language, cast them as, you know, villains. So alpha wolf leads to, like, alpha as sort of, like this brutish or domineering type of person. And we talk about the wolf at the door is like, you know, something is coming ominous towards you. And the weird part for me is that I don't see wolves like that at all in particular. One of the things I learned when I was writing is that the concept of a wolf pack being run by an alpha male is not even true.

Yeah, it's, you know, you know this, okay. You're my, my, one of my wolf friends. So wolves, for your listeners, wolves, wolf packs are actually run by an alpha male and an alpha female, and they're a breeding pair, and the pack is composed of their children, sometimes their siblings. So a wolf pack is a family, so basically, but they're the parents. They're the matriarch and patriarch of a family, and the family is a unit, and they care for each other and one of the cool things I learned in one of Jim and Jamie Dutcher's books is that even in a wolf pack -- so wolf packs have hierarchies, and in a wolf pack, even the lowest wolf on the hierarchy is cared for. They don't want any member of the pack to go hungry, right? So every member of the pack is provided for. Every member of the pack has a role. They collaboratively raise the pups. And if a member of the pack dies, the pack mourns them together, no matter where they were in the chain. So I thought this idea of wolf packs as this really community-based living situation, that's not part of our cultural understanding of wolves, and I wanted to change that.

Pigeons, another one. People call them dirty birds or they hate them and they're terrible, but they're so smart. They're so, pigeons are so smart, and they were domesticated to be working birds. And then we just sort of were like, eh, we don't care about you anymore. But they retained all these amazing skills that they had developed and I wanted, I wanted to reintroduce them as something worthy of our love and appreciation. Also, if you look at pigeons and you ignore all of your pre preconceived notions about pigeons, and you just look at them, they're so beautiful, and they have this iridescent plumage, and, and they're really interesting, and they have all these like fun, sort of silly movements. And, and I wanted them to be appreciated.

And then vultures, I'm so glad you brought up that story because vultures are, in my opinion, also very beautiful and also incredibly necessary to a healthy ecosystem. And because, I think, particularly in Western society, we are uncomfortable with death, we do not like to celebrate a bird who is very much associated with death because they eat carrion. However, they are part of maintaining a clean and healthy environment. You know, if you, if you take away humanity's impact on the environment and humanity's production of waste and all of those things, in an ordinary environment, carrion eating birds, primarily vultures, they are responsible for cleanup. And it's what a cool, what a cool thing. What a wonderful, wonderful part of an ecosystem that it has, has an animal whose role is to keep us all healthy.

Daniel Pewewardy: I had a question. So, like, full disclosure, I do not deal well with like books from like animal point of views, or like books with animals dying. And so this was, like, tough for me to approach. And so I guess my question for you was like, how is writing that from like, a emotional point of view? Like, did you have to, like, balance this out with, like, a lot of positivity in your life? Or, like, what was your like approach when dealing with like, animal death or sad animal stories? Like, how does it affect you as a writer?

Talia Kolluri: I think this is a really great question because I think it, it gives me a chance to kind of talk about what writing can, what writing can do for a writer. I think... so a lot of people write really sad, heavy stuff, and a lot of times writers may be using literature as a way to express their own emotional landscape. So your own, your own sadness can be a genesis for a piece of literature that that doesn't necessarily have the same impact when writing it that it will have when it's a finished piece and reading it.

So when, so some of these pieces, when I read them, when I go back and I read them now, I am definitely emotionally affected because I see the story as a whole piece that's separate from me. When writing it, it doesn't feel, it doesn't actually feel the same. So I think when I'm writing it, I'm doing a lot of things like infusing my own way of seeing the world, or my own emotions that I want to process through the story, which I think is an, probably an unusual thing to say because I think a lot of writers who do write human-based stories, a lot of my writer friends who write human-based stories are sometimes frustrated when people conflate them with their characters. And they're like, "No, this is fiction. I made this up. This is not me." In a lot of ways, my characters are some version of me or some version that I was at one point, from an emotional perspective. And so it's partly about the animals, and it's partly about me when I write them. And so I think I'm not as sad when I'm writing them because I'm expressing something maybe that I wasn't able to express as a human, something that I wasn't able to give voice to as myself.

So maybe I feel it's more cathartic or liberating actually. I think maybe that's the way to describe it. I think when I write as an animal, I feel like I can be a lot more honest and free and unencumbered by self-editing when I'm writing. But when I read them later, I actually do feel all of the like sadness of the loss of the characters. I will also say that it took me about 10 years to write this collection, so I didn't write them all at once, and so I had my regular life. Just, I was just living it all the way through. And so I had a lot of components in my regular life that would, that would add balance to what it feels like to live in these little imaginary worlds of the stories.

Sara Dixon: That's interesting that it's such a different experience. Because reading them, it is very emotional. And so that's cool that, like, you can see it from a kind of a different perspective when you're on the other side of it.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah. I think it's emotional in a different way. Probably, yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy: Why do you think -- I guess one other cool thing is, like, have you had feedback from people about, like, the that, like the book being, like, hitting them hard emotionally? And like, why do you think like, animal deaths generally hit us harder than like, human ones in stories? Like, have you explored that at all? Like, DoesTheDogDie.com is a thing.

Talia Kolluri: I mean, oh, gosh. I know, yeah. Oh, that's such a good question. I remember, you know, I read the Where the Red Fern Grows when I was, like, a third grader, I think, and I remember just being devastated, and like, "Why? Why does the dog die?" Spoiler, the dog dies in that one. And it just like, you know, there are a lot of books I've read where, yeah, where the animal dies in it, and it hits me. I think, you know, one of the things I think about animal death, and the reason why it might impact readers really hard, is, I think sometimes, and I know this is probably true for me as a reader, I think if I see a human character that exhibits characteristics that I don't necessarily like very much, particularly if those are characteristics that I myself have, and I can see them in myself and I don't like that I can see them in myself, I don't necessarily want to be as empathetic towards that character.

And that's a me thing, that's not on the writer at all. But I think probably there's, there's more perceived distance between animals and humans, so that we have convinced ourselves that there's, that maybe that they're innocent. I think that... I mean, we use that a lot when we talk about animals. We talk about innocence, and when we ascribe human emotions to them, many people are reluctant to ascribe malice or deception or cruelty to animals. But, I mean, they do all of those things too, but because we don't necessarily emphasize those then maybe, maybe we perceive them to have a little bit more purity of heart, and thus we give them more sympathy. I hope, though -- I hope though, that that compassion towards my animal characters will also inspire people to be more compassionate to each other, because we're also animals --

Sara Dixon: Yes.

Talia Kolluri: And deserve that compassion, too.

Sara Dixon: Yeah. And I think that's exactly what it is, right, that it may be innocence, not the right thing to say. That absence of malice, at, like, absence of being destructive for the sake of destruction, right? Like, yeah, they hunt, but they hunt for the good of their pack or whatever. And so it's just, it's just different.

Talia Kolluri: They don't hunt in excess, right? So wolves are not like, we're gonna eat nine deer and leave most of it, like...

Sara Dixon: Just so we can hang the horn up on our wall, right?

Talia Kolluri: Yeah.

Sara Dixon: I feel like that's why, for me, it's as a reader, like, that's what? Because, yeah, and the dog dies. Ugh.

Talia Kolluri: You're like, the dog didn't deserve that.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah.

Sara Dixon: I can't, I can't. And then there was a book --

Daniel Pewewardy: I think it's like intelligence for me, and like things that are less human, like I have more empathy for because I recently -- my friends have pigs and pigs are highly intelligent animals, and to the point where I've noticed... like, like a dog to me is like a child, but pigs I would put at the level of teenagers. And one of the pigs doesn't like me, and I don't like him. [LAUGHTER]

Talia Kolluri: I love that.

Daniel Pewewardy: It's just like, and then that's like, maybe it is kind of like an... like, a level of like, an intelligence and emotional intelligence, because it's like... I thought about that, I was like, I bet there's some like, like dolphins that I probably wouldn't like, like if I had to hang out with, I probably wouldn't like..

Talia Kolluri: You'd probably be like, that dolphin's a jerk.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah, and feel okay about it.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah. Judging the dolphin for being kind of a jerk.

Daniel Pewewardy: Like the octopus that stole my keys constantly or something.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah.

Sara Dixon: That octopus.

Daniel Pewewardy: Yeah.

Talia Kolluri: So, like, I'm always very interested in stories about animals that practice deception, because they do, they do. And I first learned about this in the instance of like, animals that had a lot of human contact, and they had like... you know, so then there's this idea like, oh, did they learn deception from humans? No, but cuttlefish. Cuttlefish engage in deception.

Sara Dixon: Would you please explain?

Talia Kolluri: Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm so glad you asked me to. So there's this, and it's a particular kind of cuttlefish that I learned does this and, and I don't know if it's all cuttlefish, maybe it is, but it's one of those really giant ones. And they're, they're so cool looking, and the... and so they, when they're engaging in their like, mating rituals. The males they fight, right? They're fighting over, like the choice female cuttlefish. But there are some males that what they... maybe not the biggest ones, but what they will do is they will like, reorient their tentacles so that they appear more female, and then while the two biggest males are fighting, they shift over and go hang out with all of the females and acquire a mate that way by... so they're like, don't look at me. You don't need to fight me. Literally amazing.

Daniel Pewewardy: They like Bugs Bunny it, right?

Talia Kolluri: Yeah. And when you think about it, that's A, very smart because they can, they can say, I can fool, like these, these other ones, and they won't notice me, and then I will go in and I will build a family. I think that's neat. I love that.

Sara Dixon: [CHUCKLES] Okay, so you've obviously done a lot of research on a lot of different kinds of animals. So this may be kind of a dumb question, but we're going to ask it anyway, because we like silly questions and it's fun to end on a good note. So if you could be any animal, which animal would you be?

Talia Kolluri: Ooh, I absolutely want to be a bird because I would love to fly.

Sara Dixon: Any kind of bird?

Talia Kolluri: I want to be a bird of prey. I do. Like so we have a lot of red-tailed hawks where I live, and I think that would be amazing to be a red-tailed hawk, but I have a really hard time committing. I would also like to be a whale, because I would like to know what it's like to live a completely ocean-based life and I... and I want to understand what whale song means. So I feel like the best way to do that is be a whale. So I would red tailed hawk, a whale. And then I also would like to be one of the Old World monkeys that has a very long tail. I'm not really picky about what kind, but I want the nimbleness of a tail and opposable thumbs on my feet. I think that would be really fun.

Sara Dixon: Nice. I like that. All good answers.

Talia Kolluri: Thank you. I've thought about this a lot.

Sara Dixon: No, that's, I figured. I mean, if you're doing enough research on animals that you're trying to figure out what it feels like to be a vulture flying, then you must have thought this through.

Talia Kolluri: Absolutely.

Daniel Pewewardy: So what, what's next for you? Is there, you have any projects coming up or anything?

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, so I am, I am writing a novel, and I've never written a novel before, so I'm going to say to all the writers out there listening, if you've never written a novel before, I understand how you feel to be doing this for the first time. And it's, it's also animal oriented. It's, I'm a little superstitious, so it's a little bit early for me to talk about how it is in detail, but it is animal oriented, and I'm asking similar, but not identical, questions about animal agency and animal cognition and what that means for the world we live in now. And I'm hoping that I can have a draft finished this year and then start making it sound good enough to send to someone. Yeah, so I'm writing a animal-based novel.

Sara Dixon: Cool. Well, we'll look out for it when it comes out. I'll have to make sure. We'll make sure to see it. Okay, so the way that we typically end our episodes is we ask our guest of honor -- you -- to recommend some books to our readers. So if you could recommend three books, and they can feature animals, they don't have to. Whatever you're reading, you're enjoying, books to recommend.

Talia Kolluri: Okay, I was waiting for this question, and I'm so excited. Okay, so I do want to recommend Watership Down as the book that got me as a child really invested in the idea of animal narrators with complicated lives and culture. It's about rabbits. If you have not read Watership Down, I highly recommend it. It's a most wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book. The other one I want to recommend is a book called Memoirs of a Polar Bear. And this is a book in translation. And I love to read work in translation, because then you can just broaden your literary world. And this one is written by Yōko Tawada. She originally wrote it in Japanese, and then I believe it was translated into German, but it's also been translated into English. I read the English version. And it follows three generations of a polar bear family. And I will not spoil anything else about it, but it's polar bear narrated, so it's just absolutely fantastic, one of the most brilliant books I've ever read. And then the last book I want to recommend is actually not really animal oriented, but I think it, it's first of all, it's a beautiful book. I've read it three times, and I and it to me, showed me what is possible when it comes to imagining an inconceivable world. And it's called Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. So good. And it's, it's both magical and moving and feels very, very real. So Piranesi.

Sara Dixon: Okay, thank you. All good suggestions. I've only heard of one of them, the last one, but the polar bear one sounds interesting because I imagine... I mean, the wolf thing. We could talk forever about wolves.

Talia Kolluri: Yeah, we could.

Sara Dixon: Wolf friends now, forever.

Talia Kolluri: Forever.

Sara Dixon: But thank you so much, Talia, for being on our podcast today. It was real pleasure talking with you.

Daniel Pewewardy: I learned so much about animals. It was a good time.

Talia Kolluri: Oh my gosh. I'm so glad, I was so glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful conversation. I enjoyed talking to you both so much.

Daniel Pewewardy: Thank you so much. And again, I'm Daniel.

Sara Dixon: I'm Sara.

Daniel Pewewardy: And this is Read.

Sara Dixon: Return.

All three together: Repeat!

VOICEOVER: Are you wanting to learn a new language, but don't have the time or money for formal classes? With your Wichita Public Library card, you can learn for free on your own schedule with Mango Languages. With over 50 languages to choose from, your journey to fluency can begin with the click of a button. Available on your desktop and as a mobile app, you can choose where and when to learn. To start your language learning journey, visit wichitalibrary.org, click on Research and Learn, and select "learn a language."

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: So that was such an awesome time interviewing someone that, like, I learned a lot with talking with her about animals, and I thought it was really cool.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: I also liked hearing about her process for, like, writing, and then, you know, it was just very different from our experiences as readers. And anyway, I just her whole research journey, I just thought it was great. Yeah, she was great.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: For people that weren't listening, this is not included in the show, but we had to pause the show because there was a spider. Like we kept, it was kind of like, almost like mythical in that we kept having animals show up.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Yeah.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Like Talia's cat showed up for a second, and then there was a spider hanging out above her. So we had to pause so she can safely remove the spider.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Safely.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Safely.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: No spiders were harmed in the filming of this episode.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Yeah, so we were able to keep our like, no animals were harmed, including spiders.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Which was especially important during the animal episode.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Yeah, no animals were harmed. I was like, when she was getting rid of the spider, I was kind of like going, uh-oh, this is gonna be like... Yeah, yeah. She's an animal lover, so she did the right thing and took care of it.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: But we did okay. She respects animals as very evidenced by her writing and research. So this was a great episode. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as we had recording it. Okay. So a list of the books discussed in today's episode can be found in the accompanying show notes. To request any of the books heard about in today's episode, visit wichitalibrary.org or call us at (316) 261-8500.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: Thank you to Talia for joining us for today's recording, and shoutout to our podcasting staff for helping us put on an amazing episode today.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: Absolutely. To participate in the ReadICT Reading Challenge, please visit wichitalibrary.org/readict. Stay connected with other ReadICT participants in the ReadICT challenge Facebook page. Find out what is trending near you, post book reviews, look for local and virtual events, and share book humor with like-minded folks. To join the group, search #ReadICT challenge on Facebook and click join.

Daniel Pewewardy, voiceover: And don't forget to log your books in the reading tracker app, Beanstack. Each month you log a book in the challenge, you're eligible to win fun prizes. If you need any assistance signing up or logging books, give us a call, reach us on chat, or stop by your nearest branch.

Sara Dixon, voiceover: You can follow this podcast through the Spotify app or stream episodes on whatever platform you listen to podcasts. If you like what you heard today, be sure to subscribe and share with all your friends.

Both: Bye.