Emeline Atwood
Author of A REAL ANIMAL
Emeline Atwood photographed by Jacob Atwood
Emeline Atwood’s A Real Animal begins on the branch of an oak tree, suspended high above campus. Lucy, a university student, is no longer a woman but leopard, awakened by a cacophony of sirens and concern from onlookers below. The world feels different as a leopard: the clarity and ferocity is all-consuming. Appealing. Overwhelming.
In a fearless debut that winningly defies conventional form, readers follow Lucy across a decade of her life, from Indiana to Hawaii to Texas as she navigates relationships with partners and family, including her nescient older sister and a boyfriend whose pernicious nature is difficult to shake. Writing trauma and self-discovery with a galvanizing tenderness, Atwood stuns with sentiments like, “I could be in Thailand! Living! Living! I felt so confused. He had no idea—I had a sky in my stomach. I had an endless cavern. I contained birds! Great migrations took place inside me.”
An intense and unpredictable novel about the bestial essence that simmers within us, A Real Animal showcases the entrails of the human spirit—when the human is a woman with a certain kind of heart, navigating the summits and trenches of her twenties.
How did A Real Animal come into focus for you—what was your introduction to the world of this novel, what inspired you to begin writing?
I am pretty sure I started writing this book underwater. At least, the first line of the book (“As the leopard, I had no memory of ever having been anything other”) popped into my head as I was watching these clown fish dart in and out of a patch of pale pink anemones covering the top of a reef pinnacle.
For a while I tried to wrestle Lucy’s story into a more “classical” arch, but the leopard transformation, and her rape, kept resisting being “centered.” The leopard transformation didn’t want to be positioned as a climax, and Lucy’s story didn’t want to be one of just aftermath either. Finally, I started to accept a more episodic structure, one that embraced ellipsis and circuitousness, that decentered what one might think should be centered, that distributed emphasis more evenly across the many moments, big and small, that make up who we are and who we become. It would be so nice if we each had the luxury of tethering ourselves to a single narrative to explain who we are—but we all contain so much. I like thinking of a story as a container, not as a straight line.
Understanding Lucy’s story not as a tale of “overcoming” and “arriving,” but instead as a tale of opening and returning—of finding a way back in—allowed me to follow a more poetic logic, by which I mean a logic informed by image and rhythm and rhyme —rhyme as in things repeating and evolving, rhythm as in Woolf’s wave in the mind, and image as in objective correlative, which is a principle that deeply resonates with me and definitely informed the endings of my chapters, which I hope end not in resolution, but in evolution.
How did Lucy first arrive to you as a narrator, and what was the experience of writing her like?
One night, seven years ago, I was driving to the airport to pick up a visitor, after having lived in Austin only a month, and I got caught in a mess of construction happening on 183. I ended up stopped on a slice of road between the right lane of the highway and the exit ramp. Vehicles were swerving around me, speeding past on both sides, going so fast, making my car shudder violently. I remember watching this endless line of headlights through my rearview, and losing my breath—I really was worried for my life, unsure how I was ever going to get my little Civic back on the road. That’s when all the construction cranes around me suddenly turned into dinosaurs.
The first extended passage I wrote in Lucy’s voice originates from that moment on the highway. I started to understand this connection between terror and transformation, which gave me a way into Lucy’s mind and body—a body that, when under stress, has the power to summon back the extinct, to transform the world into a wilderness of creatures and beasts. Lucy survives not by disposing of her fear, but by using her fear to re-inhabit and re-imagine the space she’s in.
"It would be so nice if we each had the luxury of tethering ourselves to a single narrative to explain who we are—but we all contain so much."
—Emeline Atwood
What surrounds you (either physically, or in an abstract sense) as you write?
Open space, open air. I like to write in the middle of things. If I’m working on my laptop, that means I’m sitting at the kitchen table or on the couch, since both are in the dead center of the house.
Then, the first thing I do to bring myself into a scene is picture where the light is, feel how light is entering the space (if there is light). That’s usually enough to get my body there.
My best stuff comes to me when I am semi-conscious, or asleep. I feel like a lot of the times I’m “writing,” I’m actually doing something else, like driving or biking or reading or diving. The best stories shy away from the spotlight—you usually find them in the places just outside your field vision, in the peripheries where everything and everyone
else exists.
Which novels, films, or songs do you feel could act as companion pieces for the reader who wants to linger in the world of A Real Animal for a little longer?
Read Is a River Alive by Robert MacFarlane. For too long I’ve been trying to step around what I perceived to be the tripwires of anthropomorphism, and only after reading MacFarlane’s book did I realize I’ve been completely missing the point. Our imagination and consciousness are these incredible tools we can use to recognize and remember our fellowship with others, with any body also capable of death and decay, which is all bodies – anything also made of matter. Ursula Le Guin says in her gorgeous essay Deep In Admiration, “I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look at where objectifying it has gotten us.” Subjectification does not have to mean subjugation. It can mean recognition and reverence.
For fiction, here are some great works that I can only ever aspire to be in conversation with: Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere, Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Largesse of a Sea Maiden. Rachel Ingall’s Mrs. Caliban. David Szalay’s Flesh.
What has excited—or surprised—you most about publishing your debut?
It is an astonishing, nerve-wracking, utterly unreal experience to have people you don’t know read something you wrote. I am constantly learning new things about Lucy, and about this book. Readers keep opening up this book for me in wild ways. I’ve always dreamed of having work out in the world like this, and I really can’t believe it’s happening.
One thing I wasn’t expecting—which feels crazy to admit now—is that people would find the book so visceral, but that has helped unearth an ambition of the book that I hadn’t been recognizing, and a new way of understanding Lucy. I now like thinking about this book as a way back into body—maybe all books, poetry certainly, are, at their core, experiences that guide us back into the sensorial, somatic world.
I find myself less interested than I once was in what happens to a mind that’s been liberated from the body; I am less interested in the narrative voices that choose to explore dissociated spaces over embodied ones. It feels so urgent now, instead, to be inside minds that are trying to reattach themselves to their physicality, to re-embody, to recapitate. I just want people to read my book and feel anything at all. It’s one of the best feelings in the world when readers tell me this book made them feel seen in some way. That knocks the wind right out of me.
It’s also been my first time ever having an Instagram account. I can certainly see now why it’s a useful thing to have when publishing a book—but that’s been a surprising and bizarre experience all around…finding out how social media works.
Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. She lives in Austin, Texas.
To buy a copy of A Real Animal, consider supporting one of Emeline's favorite bookstores in her hometown of Austin, Texas: Alienated Majesty, First Light Books, BookPeople, Black Pearl Books, Vintage Bookstore, Reverie Books.
Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
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