Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley believes horses have feelings and a point of view.
But was an animal communicator right when she said Smiley's dogs were conspiring to steal crackers out of her kitchen cabinets?
"I don't know," Smiley said to the audience Friday night at UND Chester Fritz Auditorium. Smiley was the guest during "A Great Conversation" that was one of the final events at this year's UND Writers Conference.
Smiley, who won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for her novel "A Thousand Acres," read from a couple of her books and answered questions about her books and the writing process from the audience and from Sally Pyle, UND associate professor of biology and director of the honors program at UND.
Dogs' conspiracy
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The theme of the Writers Conference was the relationship between humans and animals, which made Smiley, who often writes about horses and other animals, a natural as a visiting author. Smiley also taught creative writing at Iowa State University -- a land grant university devoted in large part to agriculture -- from 1981 to 1996.
Smiley began the evening by reading from her 2009 novel "Moo," described at Amazon.com as "a wickedly funny novel" about Moo University, located amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, with an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons and academic one-upmanship.
The excerpt she read was written from the standpoint of a pig named Earl Butz, who was the subject of a privately-funded experiment designed to discover what would happen if you fed a hog an unlimited amount of food.
Smiley now lives in Northern California and owns horses and dogs.
She described a woman she called an animal communicator who claimed she could communicate with Smiley's two dogs, a Great Dane named Sterling and a Jack Russell terrier named Casey.
The woman told her that Casey had been on the kitchen counter numerous times when Smiley wasn't around to see it. In fact, she told Smiley, remember that empty box of crackers on the counter last week? Casey had been the one who'd gotten the crackers out of the cupboard and eaten them.
When Smiley said the claw marks on the box looked like the marks of a Great Dane, the woman told her: "Sterling said it was Casey's idea."
Higher education
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Smiley is author of novels for adults and young adults, many about horses, and essays for magazines such as Vogue, The New Yorker and Practical Horseman.
"Moo" was, among other things, a critique of higher education.
Pyle asked Smiley, how does she think higher education today stacks up to what she described in "Moo"?
"I think it's gotten worse, and for a reason: The Legislature doesn't want to pay," Smiley said.
As a result, education has gotten more expensive for students and private citizens and businesses pay for the research that is done at universities, which leads to the likelihood of favorable results being published and less favorable results being hidden away, she said.
Today is the final day of the Writers Conference. Community workshops are set to begin at noon.
Reach Tobin at (701) 780-1134; (800) 477-6572, ext. 134; or send e-mail to ptobin@gfherald.com .
