The essays in “Ghost Dogs, On Killers and Kin” by Andre Dubus III are pieces of memoir.
They were written between 1988 and 2023 and focus on family and work, guns, dogs, the pandemic, sudden success, falling in love, and the life and craft of writing.
But devoted readers of Dubus will have the added pleasure of recognizing people and places in these essays that were eventually transformed into his works of fiction.
In many cases, readers are also exposed to something unique about the real person that wasn’t part of the fictional character.
Dubus, a Haverhill native who now lives in Newbury, will discuss his latest work April 12 at Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, then April 26-28 at the Newburyport Literary Festival, followed by appearances Sept. 19 at the Danversport Yacht Club in Danvers and Sept. 29 at the Andover Bookstore. For details on these and other presentations in the region visit www.andredubus.com.
In Dubus’ essay “Blood, Root, Knit, Purl,” we meet a woman with a $2 million trust fund who seems identical to the ex-wife of disabled carpenter Tom Lowe in the novel “Such Kindness” from 2023.
She is mentioned in several essays in “Ghost Dogs,” once by first name, where her relationship to Dubus is just as destined for failure as the one in the novel.
But in an unexpected touch, in “Blood, Root, Knit, Purl,” she teaches Dubus how to knit, so that he can make a homemade Christmas gift for his aunt in Louisiana.
It is not clear which is more unlikely, a woman with lots of money who takes the time to knit scarves and sweaters, or a rugged working man who would knit anything.
But their practice of this humble, domestic art brings them together in a way that makes their backgrounds less important than the quantum of love that they share.
In some cases, however, a connection to previous works by Dubus doesn’t tell the reader much, or prepare them for what happens in an essay.
That is true of “The Golden Zone,” which recalls a figure who appeared in the 2011 memoir “Townie,” who has a second job as a bounty hunter and takes Dubus to find a brutal killer in Mexico.
The plan is to turn the killer over to authorities who will take him back to the U.S. to stand trial, but someone finds Dubus and his partner first, and busts into their hotel room when they are out.
It’s one fight that Dubus is happy to pass up. But he doesn’t leave Mexico without regrets about things he did there under the guise of gaining “experience.”
“I vowed I would not be coming back here, not like this, a tourist of other people’s misery, a consumer of it,” he writes.
As Dubus writes several times in “Ghost Dogs,” both his father and mother were born in Louisiana and most of his “kin,” to emphasize the term from his subtitle, are from there.
In spite of Dubus’ identification with the Merrimack Valley, “Ghost Dogs” makes clear that this southern element is important to his self-image.
Dubus explores this connection at length in “Pappy,” which is about Dubus’ maternal grandfather, Elmer Lamar Lowe, a former construction foreman from Fishville, Louisiana.
Dubus traveled to Louisiana with his mother and siblings for vacations but rarely got a chance to relax, as Pappy would set Dubus and his brother Jeb to work clearing timber and tilling garden beds.
Rather than resenting these demands on his time, Dubus appreciated the value Pappy placed on hard work, and the masculine role model that he provided.
This was during a time when Dubus’ father, short story writer Andre Dubus, was mostly absent, as the son recorded in detail in “Townie.”
The identification with his grandfather becomes so strong that Dubus tells his aunt, when she asks what he wants to be when he grows up, “I don’t want to be a writer. I want to be a working man like Pappy.”
It is later that a mature Dubus realizes he wants to write, and a story, “Last Dance,” in his first book, “The Cage Keeper” from 1989, is both about his grandfather and also dedicated to his memory.
It treats an incident that also appears in the essay on Pappy in “Ghost Dogs” in which Dubus, his grandfather and some men trap and butcher a loggerhead turtle.
In the essay, where Dubus is just an observer, the incident appears as an example of Pappy’s rugged resourcefulness.
But in the story a main character, Reilly, who is clearly based on Dubus, becomes the center of the action and wades into water to snag the turtle with a hook at the end of a pole.
The physical challenge is matched by emotional struggles that Reilly carries with him, which are captured in a brutal final image.
But if the work of fiction intensified the incident, “Pappy” fits it into a larger pattern that doesn’t become explicit until the last paragraph of the essay.
At that point, Dubus makes it clear that he relies on some combination of his grandfather and father in everything he does.
“I feel my grandfather’s eyes on me, my father’s too, the working man and the writer,” Dubus writes.
