The Dog of the North - Elizabeth McKenzie Achieves Escape Velocity

Interview with the author of 2023’s best comic road trip

Penny Rush is a woman on a mission— if only she could get herself in gear. Her marriage is kaput, her grandmother in Santa Barbara has gone crackers, and her own parents have disappeared in the Australian outback, with all the leads gone cold.

Also, she’s broke.

So opens Dog of the North, Elizabeth McKenzie’s third novel: a road trip, a shaggy Pomeranian story, and the revelations of a woman who is neither entirely brave nor wise, but who can sometimes nail the truth like none other.

Elizabeth McKenzie, out of the car and in front of Bookshop Santa Cruz. © Poppy de Garmo

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Last month, pouring Sherman’s dirty clothes into the washer, I discovered a slightly worn pink thong. “Yuck, what’s this?” I said.

“Oh. I found a bag of stuff at a bus top. Thought maybe you might like it.”

Repulsed, I held up the abbreviated scrap. “But the back part went up somebody else’s buttock crevice.”

“Can’t you just say ‘crack’ like everybody else?” Sherman said with disgust, peeling back yet another layer of his true feelings toward me.

“Sure. Whose crack was it anyway?”

Nothing but anguish would compel me to say a thing like that.

— The Dog of the North

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I published McKenzie in our 2018 anthology Santa Cruz Noir, where we became friends and kibbutzed about what her next novel might be. I knew it would be something special!

This April I spoke to Elizabeth about her inspirations for Dog of the North, and how a comedy of aimless searching and scratching takes on its own existential wit.

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SB: What are the qualities of your own road adventures, that you brought to your Penny’s time behind the wheel, and sleeping rough?

Did you ever get inspired by “road trip” novels, in addition to Charles Portis’s Dog of the South?