WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Our guest today, Thalia Field, is an acclaimed experimental novelist, essayist and poet, modes of writing she often combines in one text. It’s also likely that historical figures, philosophers, or dog trainers, will walk onto the page to be the connective tissue between multiple distinct texts that span decades. In what follows, we’ll hear Field talk about one piece of her writing as a “braid” of texts or voices – and today Interchange attempts a kind of mimicry.
We’ll look at three books that form a trilogy of investigation and creation – Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions), Experimental Animals (Solid Objects), and most recently Personhood (New Directions). The first and third might be characterized as elastically essayistic and the middle text is a novel, though subtitled “reality fiction.”
Experimental Animals explores the origins of both experimental literature and modern experimental bio-medicine. Based on the marriage of Claude and Fanny Bernard, the novel also features women activists who have been overlooked in science history and focuses particularly on the living animal body in pain (vivisection) as foundational to the history of physiology.
All three books are connected by explorations on science, philosophy, and identity – and with the most recent, Personhood, the consideration of how beings as “selves” are entangled in ways that call into question the arbitrariness and cruelty of human classifications and value hierarchies.
The cast of characters we’ll meet include Claude Bernard, the French “father” of physiology and 
experimental medicine – vile practitioner of vivisection; Anna Kingsford, medical doctor and anti-vivisectionist; Konrad Lorenz, Austrian “father” of animal behaviorism and Nazi bird lover; Vicki Hearne, dog trainer and philosopher; Happy the Elephant; and Adam the Parrot.
Throughout we’ll hear excerpts from all three books read by the author.
The Extended Version includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard and a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists.
RELATED
Personhood (New Directions website)
“TURNS BEFORE THE BEFORE CURTAIN” by Thalia Field
A Conversation with Thalia Field, Author of Experimental Animals (January 15, 2017)
Thalia Field: The TNB Self-Interview (November 24, 2016)
Subjects of Captivity: Personhood Rights and Nonhuman Animals (Interchange with Jeff Sebo)
Ghosts, Dogs, and the Law: On Constructing Criminality and Negating Persons (Interchange with Colin Dayan)
GUEST
Thalia Field is 3rd generation from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. She worked in theater as a writer, director, and producer before beginning to write books. Thalia has lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, and New York, as well as spending many summers in Juneau, Alaska where she helped to start a summer writing project. Thalia has been teaching fiction and multimedia and interdisciplinary creative/critical practice in the Literary Arts department at Brown University since 2000 where she is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing.
MUSIC
All of our music comes from Tim Berne, saxophonist, composer, and record label owner. We range across multiple albums and band lineups. The pieces come from Visitation Rites, Clause & Reflect, Diminutive Mysteries, Sacred Vowels, Sanctified Dreams, and Pre-Emptive Denial.
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
