Senior reader Andrew Kane talks with NER author Lauren Acampora about hypocrisy, the rich symbolism of the suburbs, human-animal relationships, and her story “Dominion” from issue 45.2.
Andrew Kane: Since “Dominion” focuses on a pivotal character from your novel The Hundred Waters, I’d like to start by asking about both character and characters. This story—which nimbly handles exposition, backstory, and present-day plot while being firmly rooted in an exploration of Roy’s personal worldview—feels to me like so much more than a creative writing exercise to better understand a significant, if spectral, character from that other novel. Indeed, the main action of “Dominion” receives, I believe, a single sentence in THW, but on these pages it unfurls into an entire world. Could you talk a little about how this story came to exist? What about Roy led you to further explore and develop this character?
Lauren Acampora: Well, Roy came first. That is, I conceived of Roy independently—and then inserted his character into a later revision of The Hundred Waters. I’d been working on “Dominion” around the same time I was reshaping the novel, and it occurred to me that his character could and should share that same world. Sometimes this happens in my writing practice, which is almost never straightforward or chronological.
But, weirdly, I never consciously intend to connect my work or characters . . . They all begin innocently enough, as independent characters and self-contained stories. Only later, once I’ve finished a story or novel and lived with those characters for a while, do they become “real” in my mind, kind of like the Velveteen Rabbit. And once they become “real,” they start wanting to meet each other. So, after “Dominion” was finished and starting to concretize, I realized that Roy Fox’s estate was of course in Nearwater, and that my teenaged artist/environmental activist Gabriel Steiger would obviously know him—and have some pretty strong opinions about him.
I should also mention that “Dominion” is loosely based on a true story. The characters of Roy and Marilyn Fox are themselves entirely invented, but when I was a kid, a classmate’s father arranged for a tiger to visit my elementary school. And in more recent years, my own young daughter was clawed by a wildcat in front of my eyes while visiting an exotic animal estate. Thankfully, she was wearing corduroy overalls and wasn’t hurt! But I knew I’d write about it someday.
AK: You do an incredible job of showing us who Roy is throughout “Dominion,” largely through revealing flashes of his thoughts and behavior. He keeps a menagerie of (at least partly) rescued animals, yet he eats steak sandwiches, wears ostrich boots, and considers the lowly public-school families “crabs.” His hubris and negligence lead a child to harm, yet he sees himself in the attitude of a saint when he kneels to staunch the child’s bleeding. He views himself as a sort of benevolent gentleman farmer, yet a character in THW describes him as “the kind of person who thinks everything is his to take.” Roy’s near-total lack of insight, to me, suggests the collective willful ignorance required to hurtle headlong into climate crisis and mass extinction—themes explored in both “Dominion” and THW. What was it like to write a character so opaque to himself? What role do these sorts of “blinders” play in the meaning of such a character, such a story, and such a world?
LA: I think all of my characters are at least somewhat opaque to themselves. In fact, I’d venture to say this opacity is what drives a lot of my fiction. Everyone wears blinders when it comes to seeing themselves. Most of us are generally well intentioned—or at least I like to believe so—even when we might be doing catastrophic damage to others, or to the world. I think that spending time with characters who can’t see themselves clearly or understand their actions in a larger context is a way to recognize our own blind spots and find empathy for others. Maybe this is why I love linked stories with overlapping characters so much. In viewing characters from both the inside and the outside, a reader gains multiple perspectives—some of which might be startling. Of course, external views of characters can be just as warped as internal views. No angle is fully accurate on its own, because it carries the biases and presumptions of the viewer. The truth about any individual is complex, and maybe only a kaleidoscopic combination of perspectives can come close to capturing it.
This complexity is especially interesting to me at our cultural moment of deference to the notion of lived experience and personal truth. It strikes me as a very modern and individualistic idea that inner experience naturally trumps the observations and opinions of outsiders, and this is fascinating to me. It’s true, of course, that no one else can fully understand or access another person’s inner world—but it’s equally true that no one can fully understand or access their own outward aspect and external impact. No one ever really knows the full truth of how other people see and think about them. I find it eternally interesting to juxtapose what a character believes themselves to be with what another character believes them to be. And such wonderful conflicts arise from these clashing sets of blinkered views.
Of course, in the case of a powerful figure like Roy Fox, these personal blinders can be responsible for some pretty big damage. Like, a major oil spill and widespread environmental destruction. Still, Roy insists on his innocence and his well-meaning intentions. He sees himself as a successful, self-made man who has earned his comfort and entertainment in later life, and who is doing a service to the community by sharing his bounty. Yes, his company may have been responsible for a spill, but that’s an unfortunate cost of doing business—and it really wasn’t that bad compared to the other spills. To him, it’s all relative, and like all of us, he tends to compare himself favorably to his peers. Also, he sees his critics (such as his own daughter) as hypocritical. They are quick to demonize corporations while remaining dependent on their products and comforts. They may protest oil and march for climate change, then take a flight across the country.
The truth is that we’re all hypocrites to some degree. And I suppose I see hypocrisy and willful delusion as inherent to the human condition. We lie to ourselves in order to carry on, because we have to—on a deeply existential level. We have to have selective vision in order to live from day to day. Just as our brain filters out the lion’s share of sensory input in order to focus on what matters for our survival, so must our brains filter out the lion’s share of the truth in order to survive psychologically and not collapse into despair. It would be debilitating to try to process even part of the truth: our miniscule place in the solar system, the myriad consequences of every decision we make throughout the day, the infinite number of outcomes, our incredible power and our powerlessness to stop all the catastrophes that are happening around the world every second. And as access to information has exponentially increased with technology, our blinders have to be pulled ever closer. We all tell ourselves fictions in order to get through. Maybe these can be thought of as bigger, existential blinders that sit on top of the personal ones. And maybe, in the end, that’s the basic engine of character, where pathos comes from.
AK: Much of your work explores the darker interrelations between city and suburb, as well as the roles of art and activism in the face of contemporary life and, for lack of a better term, evil. In “Dominion,” you seem to take that conversation a step further, examining the relationship between suburb and wilderness, and looking long and unblinkingly at the architect of so much modern ill in the character of Roy. I’ll try not to ask you to philosophize outside the scope of your own writing—unless you’d like to, in which case, by all means—but what can you say about how some of these concepts come to bear in the world that “Dominion” and THW share? How did these considerations shape the decisions you made in crafting “Dominion” in particular?
LA: My characters often use art and activism as strategies to confront, escape, or simply survive contemporary life. Many of them share a feeling of helplessness in the face of global chaos, calamity, and evil. The suburbs are meant to represent a kind of haven from both the unpredictability of urbanity and of rural existence within nature. Suburban life is meant to be a protective bubble: comfortable homes set upon cultivated land within well-defined property lines. You could see the suburbs as the best of both worlds, straddling city and wilderness, or as a futile attempt to retreat from the vagaries of the urban and the wild. In either case, I love the suburbs as a setting because it’s a sweet spot with great tension and rich symbolism (and I happen to live in the suburbs myself).
More than a few of my characters feel restless, or unsafe, in their suburban bubbles. The drumbeat of contemporary life never fails to seep in. Some characters want to join that drumbeat, rush toward the city. Others want to retreat into nature, into a kind of antediluvian state of innocence and safety. The manmade artificiality of the city can mean chaos and risk, or it can mean excitement and pleasure among other humans. The wilderness can also mean chaos and risk, or it can mean safety from humanity’s vices and violence.
The pull toward nature also represents, to me, the animalistic core of humanity. In fact, “Dominion” is part of a story collection in progress that explores human relationships with animals, and the animal nature of humanity.
Animals are driven by self-interest in the purest sense—following instinct without moral calculus—and so are innocent. They do what they do to survive, and that’s all. Humans share this instinct. Maybe what I’m trying to show is that humans are like this, too, and are fundamentally innocent, at the very deepest level. Even someone like Roy Fox, who we might see as near the bottom of a moral hierarchy—and, indeed, as a figurehead of civilization in fueling the contemporary hunger for engines of urbanity and convenience—is simply following his animal instincts of survival, like anyone else. Striking at prey, taking what he can take. He feels a kinship with his creatures, such as his wildcats who are tame, until they’re not.
Well, I could go on and on. But I’ll just quickly go back to what I was saying about art being (a singularly human) instinct and coping mechanism. I do think that creativity might be the only life raft we have in the tsunami of contemporary existence. Of course, in the face of looming destruction and darkness, who can really believe that creating an art installation (or gluing oneself to a Monet) will make a bit of difference? But the alternative is despair. Maybe the beauty of art is its paradoxical futility and vitality.
AK: I’m struck too by the story’s use of religious language and imagery: the inscription in the gate, which also supplies the story’s title; Roy’s saintly vision of himself; the menagerie as both Eden and ark; and Roy’s final confrontation with the brother which parallels the crucifixion: he is spat on (maybe), and even develops a kind of stigmata. How do you view the relationship between religiosity—or at least the mantle of religiosity—and the Roy Foxes of the world? What do you hope readers take away from this aspect of “Dominion”?
LA: The idea of “dominion” in the Bible has always struck me as a pretty big problem, in that it seems to literally give humanity license to dominate animals—which they’ve gone on to do in some rather unkind ways over the centuries. Roy doesn’t see an issue with the dictum, whose words he takes at face value and engraves upon his gate. He never questions his role as collector and keeper of creatures. In fact, he considers himself a benevolent steward of beasts who is doing an additional service by “rescuing” certain members of his preferred species and shipping them to his luxe estate. This idea of “dominion”—this strain of entitlement endemic to the human-animal relationship—is what I wanted to spotlight in this story.
The Biblical verses and Christian trappings are integral to Roy’s character. I think they serve to illustrate his obliviousness to his own sins. He considers himself to be a generous citizen, sharing his wealth with the less fortunate, helping to fund the children’s hospital where his wife is on the board. He’s excited by the idea of opening his property and menagerie for the public to enjoy—and he’s excited about collecting the gratitude that will surely follow. In his mind, he is indeed saintly, and undeserving of all the scorn heaped upon him. The uber-wealthy really do inhabit a kind of saintlike station in our society, capable as they are of establishing charitable foundations and strewing money like blessings upon causes of their choice. Roy thinks of himself as fulfilling his Christian role of serving others, and so he feels unfairly demonized, crucified by the public for a sin that is not truly his own, but rather the sin of humanity. He isn’t the one demanding cheap oil, humanity is. In his mind, yes, perhaps he is somewhat like a Christ figure, suffering for our sins. He’s not right—but he’s not wrong, either. All of us are innocent and guilty, both.
AK: You mentioned earlier that your writing practice is neither especially straightforward nor chronological. Could you tell me a bit about what that practice does look like these days?
LA: I’ve heard it rumored that some authors sit down and write one sentence after another until a story or book is finished. Suffice to say, I don’t do this. Not only do I fail to write one sentence after another, but I can’t seem to write one story after another, or even one book after another. Instead, they all coexist in my mind in a kind of swirling galaxy. After I finish a draft of something, I put it away to cool while I work on other pieces. And sometimes, in the process, connections emerge between the pieces. This means that I find myself hopping around between stories and books and weaving their worlds together, whether I like it or not.
My publishing schedule doesn’t seem to happen in chronological order, either. For example, my first book, The Hundred Waters, was the third to be published. And, as I mentioned earlier, “Dominion” was in the works as I was revising that novel—and Roy Fox pushed his way into it.
AK: I love what you said about humanity’s “animalistic core,” and I’m personally incredibly excited to hear that there’s a new story collection in the works. I can’t help but think of some other semi-recent publications—Lucy Ellmann and Henry Hoke jump readily to mind—that explore similar themes of our relationship to the natural world in a time of climate anxiety. (Of course, these themes are perennial in art, and will likely remain so as long it continues to be made.) Are there any other works, contemporary or otherwise, that you see your work as being connected to or in communion with? Or are there any stories or novels that you find yourself turning (or returning) to as you explore these themes in your own work?
LA: Thank you—I’m glad you’re excited! So am I!
I admit that while working on the new collection, I haven’t been actively seeking out related fiction at all. I’ve even avoided reading some similar-sounding books, for fear of external influence. That said, I’ve encountered and admired several wonderful novels and stories that touch on human-animal relationships. A few that come to mind are T. C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done and his story “Dog Lab” from I Walk Between the Raindrops, Christian Kiefer’s novel The Animals, Andrew Krivak’s novel The Bear, David Means’s story “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog”, and Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend.
The stories in this new collection are inspired mostly by news reports and personal anecdotes about animals that I’ve heard and experienced over the years—everything from the rhinoceros poaching crisis in Africa to the spotted lanternfly plague in the northeastern U.S., to my own neighborhood’s controversy about suburban deer hunting, and my family’s experience adopting a dog. There’s so much to explore about our lives with animals—so many stories, so little time—and I’ve been having a blast writing these. The hardest part about building this collection will be stopping.
Andrew Kane is a writer and social worker living in Los Angeles, California. A senior fiction reader for NER, his writing has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, the MacGuffin, National Public Radio, and elsewhere.
Lauren Acampora is the author of three books of fiction published by Grove Atlantic: The Wonder Garden (2015), The Paper Wasp (2019), and The Hundred Waters (2022), a novel in which Roy Fox of “Dominion” also features as a pivotal character. Lauren’s short fiction and essays have previously appeared in New England Review and NER Digital, as well as the Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Guernica. She lives in New York.
Photo of Lauren Acampora courtesy of Sarah Landis