(July 1, 2008) PCM's Ashley had the opportunity to talk to Aryn Kyle, author of The God of Animals, her debut novel. The God of Animals is a wonderful coming-of-age tale about 12-year-old Alice Winston, who lives in Desert Valley, Colo. with her agoraphobic mother and her father, who struggles to keep their ranch above ground. The New York Times bestseller is based on Kyle's short story, Foaling Season, a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication in The Atlantic Monthly. Aryn Kyle was kind enough to provide some insight into the novel, her writing process and some of her favorite authors in the interview below, a must-read for aspiring writers and fans of The God of Animals.

Ashley: Hi, is this Aryn?

AK: This is Aryn. Hi.

A: This is Ashley from Pop Culture Madness. How are you doing?

AK: Good, how are you?

D: I'm good, thanks. I wanted to ask you a few questions about your book, The God of Animals, and your writing process. To start off, could you just tell me how you got started writing?

AK: I always wanted to be a writer, even when I was a really little kid. That was what I said I was going to be when I grew up, and I wrote stories and poems when I was a kid. I guess I didn't really start doing real writing until I got into graduate school. I went straight from my undergrad to an MFA program.

While I was in the MFA program, I wrote the short story that ended up being the first chapter of my novel, [The God of Animals], and it was picked up for publication in The Atlantic Monthly, and then it won a National Magazine Award. Then I got a few other stories published, so it happened pretty quickly after that.

A: That's pretty amazing for a first short story. (When I was reading The God of Animals, I could not believe it was Aryn's first novel. It is really a beautifully-written book and reads like it was written by a very experienced author!)

AK: I know. Everybody I know was like, "I can't believe it!" It was the first time I'd ever submitted a short story, and I didn't even really know what the Atlantic Monthly was. But a girl who was in my [MFA] program had a story published there, so I thought, "Oh, well, I'll send it; I'll send it there." And like four weeks later I got it and I thought, "Wow, this is going to be a total piece of cake!" Of course, the second story was harder to sell than the first. (laughs)

A: Yeah, I think the idea about getting stories published is that it takes you hundreds of tries.

AK: Right. Yeah, and after that - I didn't have an agent for a couple of years after graduate school, so I was still submitting all my stories myself. And I did get hundreds of rejection letters. That was a great process, though, and I wouldn't trade it. A lot of my friends got agents very quickly, so they never went through the experience of submitting their own work, and I really enjoyed it. I mean, I'm glad to be done with that phase, but I learned a lot sending them myself.

A: So, how did you actually make the transition from short stories to novels?

AK: Well, I was working on a novel when graduate school ended because that seems, you know, like what you're supposed to do. You work on stories in graduate school with the idea, always, that you're going to write a novel. I was working on a novel in graduate school and it kind of fell apart. Then graduate school ended and I started to work on another novel that was just so overly ambitious for where I was as a writer. It took place in Victorian England and spanned a hundred years and required all this research.

AD: Wow. (That sounds like it would be a really hard first novel!)

AK: I ended up moving back to my hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado, just because I was kind of out of options and out of money and didn't know what to do. That was the town that I had set that short story in - a sort of fictionalized version of that town. Being back in the town I started to think about the characters again and what happened to them the day after the story ended. It seemed like a story I really could tell; the writer that I was at that moment could tell that story. It was a much simpler story, it was straightforward and it was in one point of view. Once I started to work on that, it was only about 18 months from start to finish. So for me, I think it was finding the right story for me to tell that made it possible to transition from story to novel.

A: Uh-huh. So, can you explain some of those similarities and differences between writing short stories and novels?

AK: Well, I think with stories, I give myself a lot more freedom to try different things. With stories I feel like if I really blow it or make a wrong turn, it's a couple of weeks that I've wasted and 20 pages. In working on the novel, I was much more nervous because it was like, "Oh, if I take a wrong turn or if I'm working on something that isn't going to work, that's three years of my life." So for me, I think working on stories is a little more fun. But the novel gives you so much more space for character development, so much more time to really spend with the characters, to be in their heads. I feel so much closer to the characters in the novel than any characters I've written in stories, just because I've spent so much time with them. I think when I worked on the novel, it stopped being about what I wanted and I just became led by my characters. That doesn't happen as often in stories; a lot of times in stories I'm kind of structuring things and moving things, and with the novel, ultimately I just felt like I was on a ride by the end.

A: Yeah, wow. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? Do you usually have an outline and plan it, or do you write as you go?

AK: I don't, usually. I don't usually start with an outline or anything like that. Even with stories. I think the first thing I'm interested in is character, and that's why I'll usually sit down to write, because I have a particular character in mind. And I'll always be a little nervous because I'll have the characters, but I won't really know what they're going to do. Plot is sort of the last thing that comes to me. I really have to know the character first, and sort of what they want and what they're willing to sacrifice to get what they want. Plot, for me, sort of comes from knowing the answers to those two questions.

A: (I've talked to several authors and I had always assumed they all worked with carefully-planned outlines. But to my surprise, several of them told me that was not the case. It is really amazing how Aryn described it; that she becomes so engrossed in her characters, she almost lives them, that the plot and the story develop naturally, organically).

Are the characters that you write about based on people that you know?

A: Sometimes they start off that way, but by the end I never think of them as like anyone but themselves. I recently went back to Grand Junction with the book and did some readings and talks at the library. It was very, very strange to do that there because the people from the town recognized the town and they thought they recognized characters. In some cases they did recognize people who the characters were initially based on. It was so strange and uncomfortable to be there and answering questions, and I was like, "I'm never going home again! It's so much easier to do this in Minneapolis."

A: (laughs) How much of what you write is based on your own experiences?

AK: It's so hard to answer that question because, you know - All of it? None of it? For the most part I feel like I as a person haven't had a ton of experiences. I've been in school most of my life. I only wanted to be a writer, I studied writing, I read a lot of books, went to college, went to grad school, wrote a book, went out and toured with the book. And I don't write about people writing. But I think a lot of the emotional states of my characters are more autobiographical than their experiences or their lives. I mean, I didn't grow up on a ranch, I don't have a sister, I was raised by my mom and my step-dad in a little house with a couple of dogs. But I know, sort of, the adolescent experiences of being lonely and feeling longing and wanting to simultaneously fit in and escape. So I think that's the part of my writing that is more truthful for myself.

A: It's actually really surprising to hear you didn't grow up on a ranch, because I immediately assumed that based on the book.

AK: No, I didn't.

A: How did you find out about the experiences someone would have living on a ranch?

AK: Well, I took horseback riding lessons for a few years when I was a kid and was really into it, spent a lot of time out at the barn, competed in some local shows. As a kid I really idolized that world. I just thought, "Oh, if I could just live in a place where I could have all of these horses and all these dogs and live out in the country." It just seemed like a dream come true to me. And then I kind of dropped it in high school. When I got older and looked back I thought, "That experience was so different for the people living it than I imagined it was." Looking back I thought, "God, they were always struggling to pay their bills." I think it's a hard life and I, as a child, glorified it.

And that was the genesis of the original short story, of the idea of what it would be like to live the reality, as opposed to the fantasy. So I'd seen a lot of things out at the barn, I did a fair amount of research and talked to a lot of people. You want to be as accurate as possible, but of course sometimes you make choices for plot rather than authenticity. But it's very funny because the farm that I sort of based the novel on was a small-town barn, and the people that ran it hadn't been to college for equine sciences - it was very much that they had learned their methods from their parents, who had learned some from their parents, and a lot of these things are on their way out. A lot of people in the know would say they don't do things the right way.

A: Do you have a favorite part of The God of Animals or a favorite character?

AK: It's so hard; it changes from time to time. (long pause) I'm trying to think if there's a favorite part. I really like the characters - there are a few characters that surprised me, that I kind of originally included them almost as props or devices to move one scene to the next scene. Like Jerry, Nona's husband, is one of them, Patty Joe was one of them, Mrs. Altman was one of them. And all three of those characters - at different times, I was writing and all of a sudden thought, "Ooh, you're going to be important; you're going to be important to the book." And then I would have to go back to the beginning and write them back in as whole characters, rather than caricatures.

A: Mmhm. (It's really interesting hearing the differences between her actual writing process and what I thought the process was really like for most authors).

AK: Those were some of my favorite writing experiences, when suddenly somebody sort of popped out and became real. I think I have a special affinity for those characters because they kind of insisted on being there, and it was a surprise.

A: How did you view Alice's relationship with Mr. Delmar, her teacher?

AK: You know, that relationship started in sort of a strange way because when I decided to go back to the story and expand it into a novel, I was sort of like, "Okay, these are the guidelines I have to work with; this is the world. Everything in this novel has to come from this first chapter." And I had a lot of ideas, but the one thing I really didn't know what I was going to do with it was the drowning of Polly Cain. It's such a big part of that first chapter, and it was such a big part of the short story, which is word for word the first chapter - it hasn't changed at all. And I just thought, "I don't know what to do with this. I don't know how to make this thread evolve," because I really didn't want Alice to spend 300 pages sort of mooning over this dead girl.

It had to go somewhere, and strangely the teacher was what happened with that. It was just where that went. I wanted that death to sort of push her in a new direction, to take her to some relationship that was completely outside of the barn. And then when it did - you know, a lot of people read the book and say they expected something so much darker than that relationship.

A: (I know I certainly did!)

AK: In retrospect, I can completely understand how readers would really expect the worst of Delmar. But when I was writing it, I never imagined it going in that direction. I never thought of him as being dangerous in a predatory sort of way. I wanted him to be dangerous just in the fact that the relationship was wrong. A child shouldn't be talking to an adult in the middle of the night, and yet he's really the only character that Alice talks to, the only character that she sort of reveals herself to, even though she's mostly lying. She reveals a lot about herself to him. I just always thought of him as being a damaged guy who was in a period of his life where he was making some really bad decisions and, right or wrong, that connection that Alice had to him really helped move her from one place in her life to the next place in her life.

A: You brought up Polly's death. When you were writing, did you have in mind - because you never really explain in the book how she died - did you have that in mind or did you just want it to be sort of vague?

AK: You know, there was one point where I did think I was going to expand a little bit more on that and give more of an indication of how she had died, but in the end I decided not to do that. The drowning is one of the few things that I kind of lifted from my own childhood. When I was in eighth grade, a girl I went to school with who I didn't know very well drowned in a canal. I kept waiting for someone to tell me why it had happened. I was in middle school, so everyone gossiped about it: "Did she jump?" "Did someone mess with her and throw her?" Nobody ever told us. To me, so much of the book of Alice's journey was not really about discovering answers, but figuring out how you live, or how you make sense of the world, in the absence of answers. So I sort of chose to just leave that open.

A: Right, right. So what do you think that Alice would be doing now, like a year after the book ended?

AK: People ask that sometimes and I never really focused specifically on where she was or what she was doing, but I did really know that she was in a very different place. Are you familiar with the writer Joy Williams?

A: No. ( I'm not really that big of a short story reader, but Aryn has inspired me to pick some up!)

(Williams is an American fiction writer who has published four novels, three short story collections and two non-fiction works. One of her novels, State of Grace, was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction, and another, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her essay collection, ll Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.)

AK: She's one of my very favorite writers and she has a short story called "Escape" that sort of influenced how I ended this book. But the story "Escape" is about this little girl whose mother is an alcoholic. They drive around in the mother's convertible and go to this magic show. The whole story is about this little girl who's sort of tied to her alcohol mother, and the very last line of the story is something like, "I got out of that car, but it took me years."

A: Oh, wow. (That's a really powerful last sentence!)

AK: That was sort of the ending that I wanted for that novel: I got out, but it took awhile. So it was never terribly important to me where, specifically, she was, just that she got out.

A: Right. You mentioned that author; what else are you reading now? Or what else has influenced you?

AK: I've been reading a lot of stories lately because I've been trying to finish up a collection of my own. Joy Williams is just one of my very favorite authors in the world. I love Jeffrey Eugenides; Middlesex is one of my favorite books. Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson is another one of my favorites. Catch-22 [by Joseph Heller], which is a very unlikely choice for me. People are always like, "Really?" That's one of my favorites; I had to read that while I was in high school against my will, but I ended up loving it.

A: Yeah, that always used to happen to me. (I'd just like to thank my Contemporary American Writers professor for assigning Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate...)

AK: Um, what else. That Night by Alice McDermott, is another one of my favorite books. I mostly read - really character-driven fiction is what I find myself preferring.

A: So you said you're working on a short story collection - is that what you're doing now?

AK: Yeah, I have a lot of those stories I wrote while I was in graduate school, and they were published while I was in graduate school. Now I'm trying to fill out the collection a little bit. It feels a little strange to have these things, you know...

A: Yeah, awhile ago.

AK: Yeah, awhile ago. It's not like a novel but it just keeps progressing. It's like, "The story represents me at 22." (laughs) "This story represents me at 25."

A: Do you have any ideas for another novel? (Please say 'yes'!)

AK: I have a few, yeah. For awhile I thought, "Oh, I just really need a break." I didn't have any desire to jump back into anther novel; I still felt really connected with The God of Animals. I needed some time to sort of separate, and then you're out on tour, so you're talking about it a lot, so it was very hard to remember where that book stopped and I began.

I really didn't want to start another novel until I made that break. I feel like that's the kind of passion I'm starting to get excited about, going into novel number two, whatever it may be.

A: Great. I'm looking forward to it. My last question for you is, I know that you said you had always wanted to be a writer, but what do you think you would be doing if you weren't an author?

AK: (laughs) Oh, that's so hard because I'd tried to get jobs and I've always been so bad at them. I have no idea, I really have no idea.

A: When you were a little kid did you ever think that you would be like a ballet dancer or something? (That's what I wanted to do for a long time).

AK: Yeah, totally. I wanted to be like a princess and a mermaid. I wanted to be a psychiatrist for like 10 minutes when I was eight-years-old or something. And I thought I was going to be an English teacher for a little while; when I was in high school I thought maybe I would get my teaching certificate. But that lasted for like 12 seconds. I really wanted to be an actress; when I was in high school I was in all the plays, but I'm pretty realistic with myself, and even then I knew that I did not have the talent required to make a career.

A: Right. Well, I definitely loved your book. Thank you so much for talking to me about it.

AK: Oh yeah, thank you.

Visit Aryn Kyle's Official Site, as well.