Some relationships are strong enough to completely reorganize our lives, even if they seem to interrupt them for far too little time. For previous California Book Club author Elaine Castillo, that relationship was with her dog Xena, a rescue German shepherd who entered Castillo’s life in 2020 and left it in 2022, when she died of cancer. Living alongside Xena, and later her dog Vincent, introduced Castillo to a specific type of love that she captures in her essay-cum-novella-cum-ebook, Good Girl: Notes on Dog Rescue, part of a series curated by Roxane Gay for storytelling subscription service Everand.
In Good Girl, Castillo explores the historical connections between her beloved German shepherds and violent policing, debunks the alpha male myth that encourages aversive dog training, and sidebars about the Druid wolf pack in Yellowstone. The result is both responsible and devoted in its love for canines.
Castillo and I spoke over Zoom, with Vincent resting just off camera, interrupting briefly to alert Castillo of a nearby squirrel. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
This is a genre-bending project—part book, part research paper, part personal essay. How did it come to be?
I’m a long-form writer. The idea of writing a short story is like climbing Everest to me. But if that’s your modus operandi or if that’s how you work, it does sort of foreclose you from a lot of venues that aren’t writing a novel or writing a collection of essays, writing a book-length thing. Roxane Gay, who’s the series curator, just gave us free rein: write a nonfiction piece about anything.
Losing a dog is this very deep grief that can feel communal in some ways and separating in others, because you had this one unique relationship. Did you consider not writing about Xena because of the heartbreak and grief?
My previous experience of this level of grief, which is when my dad died, in 2006—the hole that put me in was such that I didn’t want to write about it. I didn’t want to make art out of it, and I didn’t want to make something beautiful out of the hole. I didn’t want to be productive with that grief. It wasn’t a grief that I could be productive with when my dad died. When Xena died, immediately after, I was extremely depressed—I canceled all of my events, book events, teaching events, everything that I was supposed to do.
But after that—and even when Xena was alive—I did have the sense that I wanted to write about her, that I wanted to put into words the things that I was feeling at her side. It transformed my life so much that it felt it would be impossible to not write about it. Later, when my mom told me that my dad was a dog person in the Philippines, I was like, If I had known this when I wrote America Is Not the Heart, that character would’ve been a dog dad.
The language that you use about your relationship with Xena is intentionally realistic and not romantic. Is that something that you’re thinking about constantly as a writer?
I think that is something I think about constantly. When you said that the book wasn’t romantic, that’s one of the biggest compliments you could give me.
It wasn’t fetishistic or romantic. I feel like those are the two words that I’m not. Those are the two words I least identify with. I have a severe practicality that accompanies the kind of overwhelming love that I also feel.
Yeah, it’s impressive to write a love story, which is what this essay is, and not romanticize it.
I think it’s the over-romanticization of dogs and dog rescue and dog training that really does dogs a disservice. It does dog history a disservice—that history does have ownership and bondage and violence attached to it as much as it has love and companionship and partnership, and it also has responsibility.
So that sense of responsibility is very much core in me because I love that relationship. I love my dogs. That love asks more of me than to romanticize them. That love asks me to be commiserate to them. That love asks me to tell the truth about them and their history and my history and why that love matters.
Do you draw any connections between dog guardianship and being a Californian?
That’s so interesting that you asked that because I feel like when I adopted Xena, it did connect me and my partner, who is not a Californian, to California in a completely different way. I grew up in an immigrant household in Milpitas. We didn’t go to Tahoe. We didn’t hike, ever. I’d never hiked so much in my life [before] Xena came along. Every weekend, we were in the hills or on the beach. I was like, Wow, I’m a North Face–wearing Gorp-core dog mom. I’m a Bay Area mom now. I’m a NorCal lady now. I love it.
How is Vincent doing?
He’s doing so, so good. To see him essentially transform how he is in the world, to see that the world that he previously thought was scary is not so scary, to rehearse all of that behavior with him, in a way, is also rehearsing all of that behavior for me.•
Join us on June 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Javier Zamora will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Solito. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read the opening pages of Javier Zamora’s Solito. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
In case you missed last week’s gathering to discuss Gary Snyder’s books, read a recap or watch the video. —Alta
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
After you finish reading Snyder’s poems and essays, here are four movies on similar themes of environmentalism to watch. —Alta
“DEEPER INTO THE UNDERBRUSH”
CBC host John Freeman writes about the development of Snyder’s voice and use of language across his poems, essays, and translations. —Alta
MILLENNIAL DESIRE
CBC assistant editor Jessica Blough reviews Anna Dorn’s novel Perfume and Pain, about a lesbian writer who keeps falling into a messy love life, commenting that Dorn’s “characters are fully developed and completely themselves, bold even in their neuroses.” —Alta
BIG SUR
Climate change threatens one of America’s most literary highways, Highway 1. —New Yorker
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Jessica Blough
Jessica Blough is an associate editor at Alta Journal. She is a graduate of Tufts University and former editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
