I had the honor of being in Andre Dubus III‘s fiction workshop at Aspen Words. Great group of writers led by Dubus, a dynamic and compassionate workshop leader. He will be featured at the Longleaf Writers Conference on the Gulf.
Just got my hands on a copy of Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin (Norton), a memoir that opens with Dubus as a younger man working a small job in Louisiana, building a gate and fence. A local girl, nine or ten years old, decides she will help him:
“She straightened and looked at me, the shovel hanging in her hands; her mouth hung partly open and in her eyes was a tentative light. I’d seen that look on my two-and-a-half-year-old son whenever I would try to explain away something common that frightened him, like a balloon or a clown’s face; when each word I spoke was a step on the high wire over the valley of his normal fears and terrors. She blinked and looked at me harder, and for a second I was afraid my choice of words would be wrong, that I’d stumble and drop her into a worse place than she’d been before….”
In chapter one, “Fences and Fields,” Dubus is awaiting the birth of his second child, a daughter. He considers his positions as father and stranger to a young girl who decides to help him set a post in the dirt. The girl is “hardtime” as the narrator describes, caught up in some trouble at home, something involving her mother’s boyfriend. Both the narrator and reader are left to ponder, but, the trouble might be easily assumed by the girl’s mannerisms and the few details she allows. In this juxtaposition of the now and the near future, Dubus contemplates his role as protector, knowing that he cannot be everything this girl and eventually his daughter will need, as much as he will try. Again, Dubus delivers transparency of position and perspective with great care and brilliantly displayed in Ghost Dogs. READ MORE
About Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin
During childhood summers in Louisiana, Andre Dubus III’s grandfather taught him that men’s work is hard. As an adult, whether tracking down a drug lord in Mexico as a bounty hunter or grappling with privilege while living with a rich girlfriend in New York City, Dubus worked―at being a better worker and a better human being.
In Ghost Dogs, Dubus’s nonfiction prowess is on full display in his retelling of his own successes, failures, triumphs, and pain. In his longest essay, “If I Owned a Gun,” Dubus reflects on the empowerment and shame he felt in keeping a gun, and his decision, ultimately, to give it up. Elsewhere, he writes of a violent youth and of settled domesticity and fatherhood, about the omnipresent expectations and contradictions of masculinity, about the things writers remember and those they forget. Drawing upon kindred literary spirits from Rilke to Rumi to Tim O’Brien, Ghost Dogs renders moments of personal revelation with emotional generosity and stylistic grace, ultimately standing as essential witness and testimony to the art of the essay. READ MORE
About Andre Dubus III
Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in June 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories, (Godine, 2023.)
Mr. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. READ MORE
