M.T. Anderson has been liberally lauded for his books for teens (a National Book Award, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, a couple of Printz Honors, etc.). Yet he has been writing for younger readers throughout his career as well, comic adventures for middle graders and thoughtful picture books for youngsters, bringing to all his books a keen respect for the intelligence of his readers. His most recent novel for middle graders, Elf Dog and Owl Head (Candlewick, April 11), finds the author in a gentle mood as he pens a boy-and-his-dog fantasy with heart. When Elphinore, an elf-hound from the Royal Hunt of the People Under the Mountain, arrives in Clay’s life, she brings wonder with her, guiding her new human friend along the “magical paths [and] tracks that led through time” in the New England hills around his home. Anderson spoke with Kirkus via Zoom from his home in rural Vermont; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You and I first met at a library conference about 20 years ago. You’ve changed a lot.
Well, I’ve gone from being a young brat to being an actual adult.
I don’t know about the young brat part. But I felt very keenly the grown-up–ness of M.T. Anderson in Elf Dog and Owl Head.
[My editor] said that it’s the first one of my books that’s actually not ironic. It’s straightforwardly emotional. I do think that’s different, and I’m kind of excited about that. It was based on things that were very real to me and very emotional to me.
Just how much fun did you have writing this?
Oh, total fun, total fun. The whole story is that I had a dog whom I loved dearly who got very, very sick [right before the pandemic]. And the vet told me, “She’s gonna live probably three or four days; let’s set up an appointment to euthanize her.” And then, instead, what happened was somehow she decided she wasn’t going to die. There was this kind of miraculous recovery that took place over the next two months, where we went from her being diagnosed as being ready to die within a few days to her walking five or six miles a day. Then, of course, the pandemic happened. And I live alone, except for her. For the next four months, she was my only companion up here in this little house, up in the mountains of Vermont. And every day we would go in loops all around town, every day, another five or six miles covered. It was just this fantastic time, in a sense, because I felt very cut off from the human race but then there’s this almost supernatural-feeling connection between me and this dog. I had long been wanting to write about the connection between humans and pets. I just feel like it’s one of the most important connections that we have, especially many of us who live alone. So I wrote this book at exactly the time when it takes place. That is to say, in late spring/early summer of 2020. And every day I would live the plot in the sense that I would go out with the dog for a couple of hours, up in the mountains. That’s when I would come up with what was going to happen in the chapter I was about to write. And then we would come back and write it, and it was just so joyful. It had to be one of the easiest, happiest pieces of writing I ever did, because I was just doing exactly what I wanted at that time.
Did you have any boy-and-his-dog books in your childhood library that you remember?
No. I was always frightened of pet books from the time I was in sixth grade or something, because all the pets frickin’ die. You know, they just keep on shoving The Red Pony and Old Yeller [at kids]. And I feel really traumatized by all the pet books I had to read in middle school. Then there’s the book about the kid who had the raccoon.
Yeah, Rascal. I loved that book. I don’t think that Rascal dies. But the kid has to let Rascal go off into the wilderness at the end. In any case, why not just keep the frickin’ pet around?
Did you fight with yourself at any point as a novelist? With the happy ending?
No, no! Why would you inflict another unhappy animal ending on kids? Why don’t you say to them, sometimes you love a thing. And it’s just great. Of course there’s sadness, there’s pain. I even mention death at one point, but I just wanted this to be a celebration. They can read Love That Dog by Sharon Creech if they want to read about a dead dog—that’s a great book.
Speaking of death…when I read that Death’s pale horse was named Trigger Mortis, the first thing I thought was that it was hilarious, and the second was that no kid was going to get that joke.
Why not present the full world of references? Even though most kids aren’t going to get them, one of the exciting things about growing as a reader is, suddenly things that didn’t make sense to you, suddenly you’re like, oh, that’s why that’s there. You know what I mean? Death and the pale horse, that’s a reference that they may not get now, but it pulses through the culture. I think it’s only good to connect the book to wider cultural artifacts, in general, Trigger not necessarily being what I’d call a wider cultural artifact anymore. But you know, the Book of Revelation arguably is. I always feel like, if you can do it without alienating readers or bugging them, why not connect to the world of knowledge?
In your acceptance speech for the 2019 Margaret A. Edwards Award, you say you want to give children “a literature of joy.” Is that what you did in this book?
That’s exactly right. When we first got to know each other, it was this age when White middle-class Americans were all very insulated by a consumer society that wanted to convince us that everything was fine. For me, in that period, I wanted to punch out at those things that were stopping us from seeing the reality that we’re creating. Now I feel like all of those things are out in the open. Every single person is posting this stuff every day, you know, Oh, my God, the Earth is dying, oh, my God, I can’t believe our country is doing this. In a way it feels to me like one of the best things we can do right now is support each other in the battles that are ongoing by saying, look, there are all these ways that humanity can be wonderful. And there are all these ways that life can be fantastic and worth living. I feel like there’s a desire for people to read restorative books right now, books that help you say, Yeah, let’s go forward. And this book is an expression of that.
Vicky Smith is access services director at Portland Public Library in Maine.
