University Times

An unnamed narrator is mucking horse manure on a farm in the Everglades. “We all have to start somewhere,” she’s told by her companion and mentor, Beau.

This is how readers are introduced into a disconcerting, but enticing world of flora and fauna, ‘gators and iguanas, dogs and ibises, by Pitt staff member Dana Killmeyer in her semi-autobiographic first novel, “Paradise, or the Part That Dies.”

This Paradise is a plush garden, but one apparently existing after “The Fall”: red ants torture the human inhabitants; dogs tear the heads from birds; a hen rides the back of a turtle; an iguana seems to have dropped from the sky. The places in Paradise also carry exotic names, such as Robert Is Here, the Shade House and Shark Valley.

Killmeyer’s unnamed protagonist, unsure and unsteady but as observant as a poet’s eyes, is searching. But for what? Why is she here in an ironic Paradise? From what or from whom is she escaping? Is this farm a commune? How does she know the others? Will friendships develop into intimacy or deteriorate into uneasy tolerance? Just what is going on here?

“In the beginning, I wanted the reader to sense her confusion,” Killmeyer says. “She’s asking, ‘Where am I? I’m trying to take everything in. I don’t know these people too well.’”

I wondered about the time, my place here, the others.

The weather had invoked a deep conflict: a plea to surrender. My skin crawled, but not the way the ants had made it. It was a stagnant stirring, a festering, like a fire smoldering beneath the flesh. I smelt my stench: the mulch, the blood, the welts, the horses, the horseshit, the heavy cream, the Robert, the ripe fruit, the underlying decay, the here, the now. I was knee-deep in it, and sinking. … I sighed and silently cursed these new surroundings.

“After about the middle of the story,” Killmeyer says, “she’s more together; she feels honorable and feels she can return to that place she’s left behind. The novel is about that realization.”

In an unconventional first-person presentation, time is consolidated into two-plus seemingly ordinary days in the lives of the farmhands.

The book is not about physical characteristics, but about character. In addition to the protagonist, the main actors are a delightful concoction that includes Beau, the guide who never makes his companion feel uncomfortable; Ginger, the bonding girlfriend; Thomas, the dancing whirling-dervish who shows the protagonist wonderful sights; Alejandro, laid-back, private and mysterious, and Mariposa, the stand-offish, scattered farm owner who pops in and out unexpectedly to check on her charges and mumble complaints.

“The way I picked these characters is that they represent parts of me, so although they’re somewhat based on real people, they’re also based on aspects of myself,” Killmeyer says. “And the characters all in their own way are spiritual, whether it’s sitting in a field meditating, or going off to India to teach children, or doing yoga.

“Spirituality played a large role in writing this book. I was raised Catholic; I tried to reject it. I was looking for a place I fit in. I think Buddhism is great, there are a lot of beautiful concepts, but just about the time I was writing this book, I thought, ‘But Christianity is where I’m from, I can’t reject that. If I reject that, I’m rejecting part of who I am.’ Resolving that conflict plays a big part in me not searching any more. Maybe I don’t fit it anywhere, I’m just me.”

The discovery of the protagonist’s past, which helps explain her current quest, and the lessons of life’s impermanence are played out from the protagonist’s vantage point.

Above, stars shifted and collided, slowly settling into their predestined positions. It was as though the sky had been superimposed upon itself. Like deja vu, the universe appeared imperceptibly crisp, the memory of a past filtered through time, this present experience. I pressed my form into the warm Earth, acutely aware of the planet’s relative motion. For a moment everything was in deep focus; I was no more than a fly squished against the curve of a very large crystal ball, a smudge; and then it dissolved into distance. Everything divided: the heavens from the earth, the wind from the fire, sound from light, salt from sand, the soul from the self, and suffering.

And a seed that was divine.

Paradise is a real town in Florida where Killmeyer spent about eight months over two stints working on a farm in exchange for room and board.

“When I initially wrote the novel, a lot of it was to hold on to that experience,” she says. “I didn’t want to forget about it. But I think writing also is a way of letting things go. You’re finding something and giving something up at the same time. That’s the part that dies,” she says, referring to the book’s title.

As a field research supervisor at the University Center for Social and Urban Research, Killmeyer trains and observes about 35 temp-pool staffers who conduct phone survey research.

She earned her degree in fiction writing at Pitt and, following a number of odd jobs, she started at UCSUR in 2004 as a temp caller herself, and later was hired as a supervisor.

“As a supervisor, it’s my responsibility to observe and give feedback. I listen in some times and advise the callers,” Killmeyer says.

“When a project starts, normally, we get a script that includes who is funding the study, why it’s important, and that everything’s confidential, of course,” she says. “There’s a meeting with the interviewers and the project coordinator and the center’s directors and we go over the script and make sure it flows well. Usually, an interview takes about 20 minutes, with about 50 or 60 questions, and these are mostly cold calls, which means that the job requires phone skills.”

Those skills may seem far afield from the highly personal, intense writing that is her domain in the novel. Not so, says Killmeyer, a compulsive writer since her grade school days, who has dabbled in everything from journals and short stories to poetry and now novels.

“I thought this job would be a good challenge,” she says. “I like interacting with people, but often times I find myself as a writer becoming more introverted, so I thought this would be a good way of preventing that, of forcing myself to have interactions and improving my interpersonal communication skills. I felt I was overcoming a fear that I was uncomfortable with in myself. I’m not shy exactly, but talking in front of people is not something I would seek out normally.”

She also teaches SAT preparation classes part time, which helps her interactions as well, she says.

“If I wanted to have a career in writing eventually, and I do, I knew I needed to communicate with people better and especially become a better listener,” Killmeyer said. “It’s helped me a lot in my writing: picking up on people’s cues. I’ve found a lot of similarities between the way people speak and how they look, how they carry themselves — less their physical details, more their body language.”

In high school, the Pittsburgh native dreamed of being a writer and jet-setting all over the world. “Now I’m pretty happy here. I could move somewhere else, but, you know, you take your problems with you. There might be better night life or more things available elsewhere, but ultimately what you’re dissatisfied with in your life is what you carry with you.”

She tries to write every day, she says. “I do like working in poetry, but not too many people read poetry anymore. Still, it gives me pleasure whether it’s published or not. Normally, my poetry is a one-shot deal. I may go back and revise it later, but if I’m walking somewhere and the muse comes I have write it down right then,” she says.

“With my fiction, it has to be attended to. Otherwise I get too far from it, which is easy to do. I have so many pieces that are five-to-10-page short stories, and the last five pages just never got written and then I forget where I was going.”

It took her about five months of sustained effort to produce “Paradise,” she says. “Once I started writing it, I became very excited by it. The emotions were bubbling up, and the people started taking shape as I remembered what I’d gone through. It was an emotional experience. I’m pretty happy with the result.”

—Peter Hart