Conversations with Extinct Animals

An experimental narrative by eco-fiction author and poet Patrick Lawler evolves out of the interactions between twenty-four extinct animals and those characters who struggle for significance in the face of their own extinction.

Patrick Lawler’s second novel, Conversations with Extinct Animal, is a dialogue between psychology and ecology—between poetry and story. A suicide note masquerading as a love letter, the novel transcends genres and keeps kaleidoscopically shifting: sometimes it is an elegy, and sometimes it is a therapy session—but always these are the field notes for the end of the world.

As a collection of characters associated with The Facility come to terms with an individual’s death, they must confront their own losses amid the colossal absence of the twenty-four extinct animals. All the characters float between various inexplicable, mystifying “syndromes” that call into question their identities and, ultimately, call into question the elements of story itself. “Looking at pictures of the Extinct Animals, I can’t help but wonder if it is too late to save the world—especially since there are so many different worlds,” observes the narrator of the novel in his efforts to save the unsavable.

Patrick Lawler is author of the novel Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds and a collection of short stories The Meaning of If. He has published seven poetry collections: A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough, reading a burning book, Feeding the Fear of the Earth, Underground (Notes Toward an Autobiography), Trade World Center, Child Sings in the Womb, and Breathe a World. He teaches at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and is writer-in-residence at LeMoyne College.