Animal Husbandry

In her new essay collection, Animal Husbandry, Emily Hipchen writes about the fraught relationships between people and animals: a husband and wife run their canoe aground on a stack of homicidal alligators; a college student enters a freezing pond fully clothed in an attempt to rescue a drowning duck; a backyard farmer attempts to figure out whether the baby chickens she’s adopted will be hens (hint: not all of them); a dog lover confronts her dogs’ violent nature. And some of the “animals” in this collection are actually people: a pedophile parked beside a playground; a truck driver who nearly kills the narrator’s husband; a pair of ambivalent biological parents; the narrator herself fumbling through a poetry class, bewildered by love. There are awkward friendships, weird dissections, bouts of synesthesia, trials by food and fire, marriages, adoptions, separations, death—and the consequent grief and nostalgia for what’s been and been destroyed. In language both precise and poetic, these stories capture beginnings and endings, attempting to understand relinquishment in the context of memory and expression, which exist to undo it. Emily Hipchen is a Fulbright scholar, the editor of Adoption & Culture, co-editor of the book series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture (OSUP), and an emeritus editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She is the author of a memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (2005) and of the scholarly monograph Frankenstein’s Kinjob: Adoptive Life (forthcoming, OSUP, 2027). Her essays, short stories, and poems have won multiple awards and have appeared in Fourth Genre, AGNI, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University, where she teaches nonfiction. Read more