Wednesday, May 8 - Alisa Slaughter

Wednesday night at 8 on KPFK 90.7 FM:  ALISA SLAUGHTER.  My guest this week has somehow dramatically amplified what should be most obvious and unremarkable about our lives in the Southland – our clumsy sharing and easy noncooperation with animal lives --- and served it up to us in perversely, delightfully proto myth: “varieties of animal story, anthropomorphized morality and crypto-poltical tales,” Alisa Slaughter has herself called this.  Cougar goes to a ball game, Raven is foreclosed, Coyote is a downtown street vendor.  It’s hard --- by which I mean, easy and fun and rewarding! --- to try and tell where they end and we begin in Slaughter’s accommodating fictional worldview.  She is author of the new collection Bad Habitats, winner of USC’s Gold Line Press chapbook collection.  Teacher and essayist, and now author of a debut short story collection, Alisa Slaughter has produced an ongoing, evolving if you will, revisionist history of our relations – pun intended - to the creatures and places around us.  Bad Habitats is only six stories but with a much larger vision indeed, of a Southern California you will recognize if you look carefully, as she has, where human animal and wild animal residents interact, share and fight for resources, where easy transformation and cooptation and sometimes reluctant empathy are all part of survival across the Southland.  Thanks for listening on the radio, online, or as a download free from the KPFK station archives.  Friend me on Facebook.