Dinosaur
I wrote Dinosaur in a cabin on an island during the winter—a generous residency made possible by a close friend and his family. For much of those three months, I wrote material I ultimately couldn’t use. But toward the end of my stay, Dinosaur arrived suddenly and unconsciously, with a strong voice of its own. I had to write through my mental preconceptions of what this work was supposed to be before what needed to come could finally emerge.
Told in the style of magical realism, Dinosaur follows a young boy on a quest to cure his father of demonic possession. He lives with his family in what appears to be a modest home—one that, in fact, expands infinitely within. He is guided by the ghost of his grandmother, who teaches him divination, the language of inanimate objects, how to travel through art, and how to access the realm of the unseen.
The second half of the novel shifts in style and tone. Set later in the boy’s life, it becomes a road trip narrative about the dissolution of a romantic relationship—a contemporary retelling of Knut Hamsun’s Pan.