Elena Passarello

Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us. We feel the pull of them before we know to name them, or how to even fully see them. It is as if they are always waiting, crude sketches of themselves, in the recesses of our bodies.

Animals Strike Curious Poses

There is a joke in Elena Passarello’s 2017 virtuoso essay collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, that involves nipples, pickles, peekaboo, and “Purple Rain.” It’s entirely drawn from the vocabulary of Koko, the western lowland gorilla who used more than one thousand words of sign language. There’s the tale of Mike, the traveling headless chicken from Colorado, and the swirl of existential questions about his will to live eighteen months after he met the chopping block in 1945. There’s the creative collaboration between Mozart and his starling, who in 1784 heard the maestro’s Piano Concerto in G and sang it back, rearranged and improved, hesitant grace notes replaced by confident crotchets, a fermata added to the end of the first measure to add dramatic pause—all revisions Mozart retained. And there’s the opening story of Yuka, the 40,000-year-old strawberry-blonde Pleistocene woolly mammoth discovered in 2010 by tusk hunters in the softening permafrost of the Siberian wilderness.

Animals Strike Curious Poses—a line borrowed from Prince’s song “When Doves Cry”—examines our relationships to animals and the ways they reshape our relationship to the natural world. In each exquisite essay, some traditional, others genre-bending, a famous animal is profiled. Not knowing how Passarello will craft one essay to the next lends the reading experience an unexpected pliability, akin to attending the Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe and not knowing what acts will appear on stage.

Each animal featured in this modern bestiary has been named by humans in some way. Each animal is a performer in some way, too—even the mummified mammoth, on display so long after her death. Passarello’s interest in the performative nature of each animal is an extension of her ten years in regional theater and professional voice-overs prior to her second career as a writing professor at Oregon State University.

“I’m very drawn not just to human bodies in performance,” Passarello tells me, about the connections between theater and writing, “but to other creatures forced to live before audiences.” This theme is also seen in her wildly inventive debut essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat, an exploration of vocal expression and how a few famous voices such as Marlon Brando’s “Stella!” and the Wilhelm scream became cultural icons. Her own voice is distinctive, both as a writer and an actor. (Don’t miss the performance that made Passarello the first woman to win the annual Streetcar Named Desire Stella Screaming Contest in New Orleans.) She explains, “My interest in (or receptiveness to) changing the form, voice, and mode of each essay that I write, rather than honing a signature style, probably comes from theater as well. As an actor, you change nearly everything about your presentation as you move from role to role. Over the course of a year’s worth of jobs, your entire universe reboots several times over.” As droll and witty in person as on paper, Passarello is a virtuoso essayist known for her highly researched pieces, which have earned her much praise, including the prestigious Whiting Award for Nonfiction, a grant intended to help emerging writers focus on writing full-time.

Animals Strike Curious Poses is the best book on animals I have read. It’s also hilarious. I’m talking laugh-out-loud, alarm-other- patrons-in-the-cafe level humor. Passarello’s writing is playful, and a tender poignancy underlies each story. Her work reflects a depth of empathy that may be related to her ability to inhabit different characters on stage, and her spirited style reminds me of what Ellen Meloy once wrote: “A great deal of nature writing sounds like a cross between a chloroform stupor and a high mass.” Not in this menagerie. Most of Passarello’s essays face outward, but in one of the few personal memoir pieces, she reflects upon her childhood memories of “Lancelot the Living Unicorn.”

That same year as the Humphrey story and the zoo camp, my grandparents took me to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. This was their year of Lancelot—“the Living Unicorn,” as he was billed on the 1985 souvenir program. I bought the program with three dollars of my own money and, after the circus, thumbed through it for weeks until the glossy pages fell to pieces. It said the Living Unicorn had just wandered into the big top one day the previous year, provenance unknown. Lancelot was ageless; there were no facts to weight him down other than the fact that, according to the program, he ate rose petals for dinner. In the full-color photographs, he usually stood next to a spangly, Miss-America-cute woman, his long white hair—not so much a mane as a suit of poodle curls—gleaming and very possibly permed.

The horn at the top of his head was prodigious: twice as thick as that of the title character in The Last Unicorn. It was also covered in opalescent pink paint, trunking up from Lancelot’s forehead in a glittery shaft. In one photograph, he appeared with two children about my age. The blond boy in the photo smiled out toward the photographer, but the little girl next to Lancelot stared right at the unicorn with unabashed awe, like she’d forgotten all about the person taking her picture. Lancelot himself gazed into the middle distance, looking like a little, white Rick James. Who knows what he was thinking.

The program also featured a pullout poster that I taped to my closet door. It was a Lisa Frank–style portrait of Lancelot in a hot pink frame, above the caption “I Saw the Living Unicorn!” I’m not certain how many differences I noticed, back then, between the illustrated poster unicorn and the photographed one. But now, it’s obvious that the drawn unicorn is horsier, with a straight-up mane, a fuller muzzle, and a longer, broader neck. The eyes are much less hircine, and they stare straight into the viewer.

At the circus, Lancelot didn’t gallop in; he rode. His entrance was on a hydraulic float trimmed in Grecian curlicues, with a curved dais at the top of it, slathered in gold paint. On the dais was a waving handler, dressed sort of like Glinda the Good Witch, who stood beside Lancelot. The unicorn himself had a tiny gold pedestal atop the dais, on which he could only arrange his two front feet.

A follow spot stuck to the vehicle as it zoomed around the ring; Lancelot stood erect, but sort of jostled in the motion of the float. Schmaltzy orchestral music boomed from the Civic Center speakers. From my seat, Lancelot was little more than a white furry blob. But when his shellacked horn, firm and proud on his cranium, caught the spotlight, everyone around me inhaled. He was much smaller than a horse—maybe pony-sized—which, being small myself, I found exciting.

I now wonder why the circus didn’t just strap a horn to an actual pony. They could have easily used showbiz magic to sell that trick from an arena-sized distance. But the circus was working a different angle with this critter that, even from yards away, was no horned horse. Perhaps they needed a horn that would look more legitimately rooted in photo close-ups. They knew I would obsess over that program, so they wanted a unicorn that would read biologically true at home, away from the smoke and spotlight. But I think it’s more likely that they wanted to surprise us over anything else, even if that surprise involved a ridiculous specimen. It’s brilliant circus logic: that this jarring, not-horse-body was so weird, it would make sense when you learned it subsisted on flower petals. In other words, the circus hoped the more unnatural Lancelot looked, the happier I’d be.

This philosophical concern for the ways we humans need and use—as well as misuse—animals runs through the collection. Was the intention to form a larger meditation? “Yes,” Passarello tells me in conversation. “In order for all that to work, a collection’s overall subject needs to be nimble, layered, and open to multiple approaches. Animals, with their consistent presence throughout human culture, had that kind of potential.” She modeled this on the bestiaries of medieval Europe, which added the restriction that she couldn’t have multiple essays on the same species. “Like a bestiary,” she continues, “I made sure each essay was a mix of both biological fact and the ‘facts’ of a particular human’s or group of humans’ imagination. I tried to make a series of wild essays that built a portrait of humankind looking at animals for the past thirty-nine millennia.”

“I’m as likely to write about the social practices of birdwatchers as I am the birds they seek,” Passarello says of her fascination with the nature of human thought and obsession, be it a song, a speech, or a salamander. When I ask her about her next steps, she says, “I’m challenging myself in two ways. I want to try to make a book-length work, rather than a collection. I also would like to try to do some kind of task or attempt a trade that I have no business attempting, in hopes of writing a sort of George Plimpton–esque memoir of failure. The thing I do will probably involve performance.”

Whatever her next project, I know it will be exquisite in construction, rich in research, and strong in voice. Encore!

More Animal Life

Brenda Peterson

Peterson is a memoirist, novelist, and nature writer in the Puget Sound area who has authored twenty books, many reflecting her interest in the relationship between humans and animals, including Living by Water: True Stories of Nature and Spirit (1990), Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals (2001), and Wolf Nation: The Life, Death, and Return of Wild American Wolves (2017). Her anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (1998), co-edited by Linda Hogan and Deena Metzger, features original stories, essays, and poems by female nature writers and scientists.

Miriam Darlington

Written with a delightful, self-deprecating sense of humor, Otter Country (2012) chronicles Darlington’s search for and encounters with Britain’s sleek and whiskered wild otter. In similar terrain, Owl Sense (2018) records Darlington’s second wild-animal quest—this time to see all thirteen native owl species in Europe. Among other exciting journeys, readers travel with Darlington to Finland to find the eagle owl and to Serbia to sight the long-eared owl.

Jennifer Ackerman

Author of seven books on science, nature, and human biology, Ackerman travels around the world to report, in highly entertaining ways, on cutting-edge research and shifts our understanding of what it really means to have a bird brain. The Genius of Birds (2016) was described by Scientific American as a “lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence.”