Dogs of Cuba

Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Edie Meidav’s Dogs of Cuba in 2027.

I have often sat at tables of writers only to discover all of us entertained some issue with speech as children. Some mute, some stuttering, but all of us felt silenced by forces as simple as the potent dogmas the elders issued. Coming up with such angled relation to speech, I tried every art, especially choreography and music (though will never say I sing). 

Entering college as a biology major, I hoped to study neuroscience in order to understand motivation at the level of the cell. It took a while to understand that the very realm in which you spin both dreams and community might be identical to your future professional life. For a brief span, in college, a painting major, I spent endless city hours drawing the gestures of the conversations of people on barstools, diner stools, any chairs really, busstops, as if by the rubbing of magic charcoal some of the alchemy of human conversation could be transcribed. Of course these gestures matter, and maybe DOGS OF CUBA concerns a taxonomy of gesture, all the relationship skirmishes you can note, all the impossible love you find in certain couples, in a boxing ring or between nations. 

Meanwhile, I’ve had almost every job, including being, simultaneously, copy editor for Ms. and Esquire magazines, story editor for the producers of the movie Valley Girl, and will share here that I was fired as a waitress in Venice for being too social. These days, I feel lucky to have been teaching for a good spell among the talents of the UMass Amherst MFA program, and used to direct the MFA at the late storied New College of California. DOGS OF CUBA is a book I researched with my little family during Fidel’s rule of Cuba: we were almost not allowed to leave the country, suspected of being agents coming to steal boxing talent or CIA agents, though our joke was that the pool must have been scanty for scruffy us to have been picked. Having also researched in Miami and Nicaragua, I wrote a book back then only to revisit it more recently and I will hope that time has made its story deeper.

Some of the recognitions which have offered a bit of oasis along the path include these other books: ANOTHER LOVE DISCOURSE (MIT Press/Terra Nova), the hybrid collection KINGDOM OF THE YOUNG (Sarabande),  the novels LOLA,CALIFORNIA (Farrar Straus Giroux), CRAWL SPACE (FSG); and THE FAR FIELD (Houghton Mifflin), and I am grateful that sections from and around the writing of DOGS OF CUBA have been published in the excellent journals Zyzzyva and Conjunctions. I also felt fortunate receiving time and faith with a Bellagio residency from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel, the Big Other prize, and year-end editors’ picks, as well as support from the Fulbright Program (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, VSC, Fundación Valparaíso and elsewhere. Additionally, I have been collaborating on an opera libretto , TIDES OF THE WOLF, with the experimental chamber group Ghost Ensemble. 

When I have served as a judge (for Dartmouth, Yaddo, the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Juniper Prize, Howard, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and elsewhere), I keep feeling cheered by the community we all might yet create together, despite everything, and have felt this as well in my affiliation as a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions.Within the UMass Amherst MFA program, I have been glad to found and advise the Radius MFA project, helping bridge the academy with its communities, and to begin the Archipelago project, a collaboration with the University of Azores. More on any of this might be found on my web site, or on Instagram.  

Only connect, Forster may have said, though not the first or last to believe in connection, and in this spirit, I look forward to seeing what community might yet be formed by plucky Regal House, by you as readers, and by whatever literature we create in this next future of ours that can be so elusive to understand, as if it were some kind of broken mirror Nina of DOGS OF CUBA might have found along a childhood street and used to create a new mosaic.