Ramona Ausubel found new inspiration with the birth of her daughter

Ramona Ausubel is the bestselling author of The Last Animal, which was named the best book of 2023 by many media outlets. Her previous books are Awayland: Stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born, and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the winner of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award, and was a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives with her family in Boulder, Colorado.

Her book “The Last Animal” was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Novels.

SunLit: Tell us the backstory of this book. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme come from?

Ramona Ausubel: When my daughter was a few weeks old, she was laying on my chest and I was thinking about how crazy it was to have this brand new, tiny and delicate being. She fell asleep and I opened my laptop to do some work. A news story popped up about scientists working to revive various creatures, including the woolly mammoth. I was overwhelmed with a flood of emotions and questions.

Hubris! Unintended consequences! Why can’t we humans just take care of what we have instead of reaching for the most attractive, expensive, and complicated idea? But here is also a group of people who want to create and care for an animal, just like I did with my new baby. The project was full of tenderness, like everything else.

SunLit: Put this excerpt into context. How does it fit into the overall book? Why did you choose it?

Excerpt: This is the beginning of the novel and I think it is a good introduction to the characters and setting.

SunLit: Tell us about the creation of this book. What influences and/or experiences influenced the project before you started writing?

Excerpt: I’ve been reading a lot about CRISPR, the gene editing technique that scientists will use to bring extinct creatures back to life (or, more accurately, they will use it to create a new creature with a very similar genetic code to the extinct animal). But The Last Animal isn’t science fiction; it’s about a family in the throes of grief and transformation, so I’ve been thinking a lot in that area too. It’s about growing up, about climate change, motherhood, caregiving and loss. It’s about how we care for each other.

SIGNED BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book publish an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

SunLit: How has writing this book contributed to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?

Excerpt: I started The Last Animal just before the pandemic began, and when the world shut down, the book’s world became a much bigger part of my personal landscape than I could have ever imagined. I escaped there when I wasn’t teaching Zoom classes at Colorado State University or babysitting my kids.

A big question in the book is whether we can continue to love the world even when it often breaks our hearts. The pandemic was a pretty impressive living laboratory for this for me.

SunLit: What were the biggest challenges in writing this book?

Excerpt: Every book is a new universe and no matter how much experience I have, the fact that it is always new is both the difficult and the enjoyable part. The challenge this time was partly to balance the emotional worlds of the characters with the backdrop of resurrecting extinct species.

Readers had to understand the project without a huge amount of information, and the characters’ lives and their relationships always had to be the focus.

SunLit: What is the most important thing – a theme, a lesson, an emotion or an insight – that readers should take away from this book?

Excerpt: There is so much magic in this world. So many possibilities. So much loss. It’s everything, all the time, and one part doesn’t make up for the rest.

SunLit: Describe your writing process: Where and how do you write?

Excerpt: Having a full-time job as a teacher and a family requires me to be flexible and adaptable. This spring I’ve been working on a new novel and I’ve tried to write for about 90 minutes most days so I can make tangible progress and stay connected to the project.

But it changes depending on what’s going on in my life and what I’m working on. I write on the couch, at the kitchen table, in cafes – wherever I can! Some days I only have 15 minutes to write, but if I keep typing, even that can be enough. And there have been weeks when big things have come up and I haven’t written at all. That’s when it’s so important to say, “Oh well!” and dive back in without guilt or shame. Life is full, so I have stories to write. It’s important to me to reframe the approach so that life and writing aren’t competing with each other.

“The Last Animal”

>> Read an excerpt

Where to find it:

Sunlit present new excerpts from some of Colorado’s best writers who not only tell compelling stories but also shed light on who we are as a community. Read more.

SunLit: Tell us about your next project.

Excerpt: I’m working on a new novel and it’s too early to give much away, but I can tell you it’s about shapeshifting, open-ocean swimming, wildfires, and the people we become when circumstances push us out of the known world.

A few more quick questions

SunLit: What do you enjoy more about working on a book – writing or editing?

Excerpt: Editing! Once I have the material, I love the long process of building and designing. It’s just as creative as the design process!

SunLit: What is the first written work – no matter what age – that you were proud of?

Excerpt: I was a super shy child and did not feel very confident, but in the 6th^th class we studied poetry and I felt like I had discovered something wonderful. I had something to say! And people receive It!

SunLit: Which three authors from each era would you invite for an interesting discussion about literature and writing?

Excerpt: That’s too hard! Everyone? Shakespeare, James Baldwin and Louise Erdrich? That would change every day!

SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing?

Excerpt: “Follow your madness.” – Jim Shepard

SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your shelves at home tell visitors about you?

Excerpt: That I depend on all kinds of voices to see the world!

SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? Which audio background helps you write?

Excerpt: I like the ambient sounds of a coffee shop and I like music, but I hate choosing music. Gregory Alan Isakov from Colorado is one of my favorite authors, though.

SunLit: What music do you listen to for pleasure?

Excerpt: I’m not the DJ in our house – most of the time my husband and nine-year-old daughter are the ones who choose the music, and I like to listen to what they love.

SunLit: What event and at what age made you realize you wanted to be a writer?

Excerpt: Since this poem in the 6th^th grade, I knew that writing would be a big part of my life. In high school and college, I became more serious, and although I had no idea if or how I would make writing a part of my career, I knew it would be a part of my life.

I remember giving the final reading for a poetry class in a coffee shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I grew up, and looking out at the audience and feeling a connection to them and to myself. That’s magic.

SunLit: Biggest fear when writing?

Excerpt: Slow or accidental stopping. I allow other obligations to crowd out the part of me that knows how to create something from nothing.

SunLit: What was your greatest satisfaction in writing?

Excerpt: The way writing keeps me awake to this wonderful, strange world. When I write, I’m more alive.