BOOKS: 'Love in the Time of Dinosaurs' An interview with author Kirsten Alene (Mickey Z.)

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Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Feb. 2, 2011 -- Dinosaurs and insightful writers... or am I being redundant? Well, I'm happy to say reports of their mutual demise have been greatly exaggerated. Case in point: Love in the Time of Dinosaurs by Kirsten Alene.

The Portland, Oregon resident is the author of Chiaroscuro (2009), a poetry chapbook and "several stories and poems currently circulating the worldwide web." Most recently, she's penned the above-mentioned Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, a novella from Eraserhead Press, that's been said to portray "a world filled with complex politics, spirituality, history, and a sense of actual existence in some parallel dimension."

As I dug into Alene's novella, I was at the ready for metaphors, allusions, and other buried treasures within the Bizarro context. After just one chapter, I was too busy getting attached to the characters, plot, and pace to analyze. That could wait for the ensuing interview… which went a little something like this:

Mickey Z.: Extinct creatures have returned to wreak havoc using modern weapons. Seemingly pious monks are trapped by long-obsolete paradigms. Limbs and other body parts haphazardly reattached and reanimated with help of magical kung fu. Forbidden love. And so much more. Can you provide a roadmap of sorts through the metaphors and meanings?

Kirsten Alene: All summed up in those words, I would say the only roadmap is that I was very recently a teenager. I will try to say this without being poetic but, to be young is to be at war with the world, isolated, estranged, in conflict internally and externally, and dying all of the time just to be sewn back together again by people you don't really like. That's where that could probably came from. When I was writing it I was just thinking that dinosaurs with guns are fucking awesome. The plastic guns were inspired by a character in Cameron Pierce's Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden who has something like the Midas Touch only he turns things into mannequins.

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