The Elephant of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh

And there’s a story that I did return to again and again, by Edward P. So that was one kind of lesson in revision. Writing about the elephant, I really worked on the metaphors and the description, because there’s only so many times you can describe an elephant as being gray and wrinkled. I think sometimes when we go through hard times, we don’t know exactly what’s saving us during the difficulties. The idea by the end of the novel is that it is a love story between a young woman and an elephant, and her dedication to the animal, and the animal saves her in a way. And as you mentioned, Hettie has different love interests. After I witnessed that, I was like, this is all I need to know to write about someone taking care of an elephant. And they had to basically clean out her rectum because they had to go inside to do the ultrasound, and they were four zookeepers cleaning her out and it was just like a shower of manure, and they were totally calm. The second time I went they were doing an ultrasound, a pregnant female, her name was Tess. It was just like being in Belfast-I couldn’t have written the book without those experiences.īeing a zookeeper is a spiritual job in terms of the discipline, and how you have to be calm for the animal to be calm. And then they let me watch the treatments and the trainings. One of them was named Tupelo, and I got there and they let me wash the elephant, and just the physicality of knowing the height, feeling the skin. They had two three-year-old elephants when I went there in 2013. I was really lucky that they have a great elephant program.

When I got back from Belfast, my next leg of research was with the Houston Zoo.

It took a lot of time with Hettie’s character and finding agency and developing Violet’s character. It was really challenging to write about an animal. But with that said, I didn’t ride horses, I wasn’t requesting to go to the zoo all the time. I remember once, when I was maybe eight, the cat having kittens in the floor of my mom’s closet, and just being fascinated by the mother licking the placenta off the kittens. And I and my siblings all had different connections to animals in different ways. When I was growing up, my mom did suffer from some mental illness. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, and times were sometimes hard. I mean, it just organically happened that I ended up writing about an elephant. When I first started writing fiction, I didn’t think, oh, I’m going to write a novel about an elephant. Kirk Walsh: It’s been really interesting to think about my relationship to animals.

The Elephant of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh