What was the inspiration for your new novel Johnny Red?
David Barringer: An ad parody. I was helping a friend make a magazine as a gift for his girlfriend, and we used ad parodies as filler. I made up an ad hyping a prison memoir written by an inmate of the Sweetachewa County Poultry Farm, published by Fowl Publishers of Chicken, Alaska. For some odd reason, the idea of writing a prison memoir from the point of view of a rooster stuck with me, and I wrote just to get the ideas out of my head.
While the idea came from that ad parody, I didn’t have to stick with it. I could’ve switched to dogs in a pound, fish in an aquarium, animals in a zoo. This is the stuff of animated film. (In fact, after I wrote the first draft and started sending it to agents, the movie Chicken Run came out; now that my novel is published, the movie Chicken Little is about to come out.) I had a hard time justifying my decision to stick with chickens, but I was tempted by the freedom to imagine an entire fictional world, to create it and its inhabitants without worrying about any future reader saying, "People don’t live like that. People don’t talk like that."
Writing about talking roosters also has a long literary history. When I discovered that Chaucer wrote about the rooster Chauntecleer and his hen Pertelote in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” I thought, "Ah, hell." And so I kept digging and found roosters everywhere in literature and religion: ancient Egypt and Rome, in Celtic legend and the Gnostic texts, the Bible and the Koran, Confucius, Rabelais, Cervantes, on and on. It seemed I wasn’t crazy.
Read more about Barringer’s Johnny Red here.