::mslexia workshops::

Write on the Wild Side #23
a writing workshop with Linda Anderson

THEME: DOGS

INTRODUCTION

MY FORMER writing tutor was the least prescriptive of teachers but if anyone introduced a dog into a story or poem, he would sigh or frown and his first suggestion would be: ‘Can’t you just drop the dog?’ He liked dogs, even owned one – it was dogs in writing he couldn’t stand. It’s not hard to know why. Writing about dogs can be horribly arch and sentimental. Famous Authors Tell You about their Beautiful, Loving, and Nutty Dogs is the toe-curling title of a book I found on the internet.

Even worse than soppy accounts of canine charm are pieces of writing from the point of view of a dog. The problem is that if we have a talking or thinking dog in a piece of writing, we will usually project human characteristics on to it and the results can be coy or moralistic. But instead of banning the doggy point of view, we might ask whether there is a way to write such a story without falling into the usual traps? An interesting example to consider is Virginia Woolf’s Flush, the ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barratt Browning’s spaniel. It is written as a conventional biography, from birth to death, and includes information about his pedigree, his life with the writer Mary Mitford, his subsequent sojourn in Elizabeth Barratt’s sickroom, and his later travels with the Brownings in Italy. Their courtship is defamiliarised by presenting it from the dog’s point of view, in terms of his ousting from the position of chief-beloved.

This ‘biography’ has been perceived by critics as a minor, light-hearted piece. But it is clever and even audacious as a way of investigating the position of the subordinate in Victorian society. It can be read as a covert testimony to the neglected lives of the Victorian women poets. It doesn’t avoid the problems outlined above – it contains a lot of doggy whimsy – but at its best, it focuses on the ways in which the dog is utterly different from us. Woolf evokes the dog’s heightened sensual experience, particularly his powerful sense of smell. Grapes have a ‘purple smell’; goat and macaroni are ‘raucous, crimson smells’. He feels the texture of drapery, marble and cobbles with his tongue or paws.

EXERCISES

#1
A dog's point of view
Write a dog’s experience of a trip in the car or a walk in the park. Focus on the dog’s ‘otherness’, its acute sense of smell and hearing and its ability to decode non-verbal cues. For example, it can smell new hairs on your brush and the perfume of mascara being applied two rooms away, ‘guessing’ from these that you’re about to go out.

#2
Love ’em or hate ’em
An Irish wolfhound recently saved his owner who got stranded during a hill walk. He covered her with his body and his heat prevented her from dying of hypothermia. Rescuers praised the dog’s loyalty and instinctive wisdom.

The Osbourne family mansion is overrun by a horde of untrained dogs who relieve themselves everywhere, a posse of poopers. In a recent repeat of the real-life television documentary, Ozzy Osbourne looked at his dung-dotted floors and said: ‘I’m living in an eight-million quid turd.’

Two extremes illustrating the best and worst aspects of doghood. Dog-lovers will always tend to think of dogs’ nobility, intelligence and friendship; dog-haters focus on the perpetual poo, the barking, or the way they eat the house if you go out without them.

Get it out of your system now. Write an ode (a praise-poem) or a diatribe against one known dog, a particular breed – or the entire species.

#3
A dog's owner
Write a character portrait of someone who is revealed through their attitude to one dog or to dogs in general. For example, you might choose someone who uses a dog as a fashion accessory; or a dog hoarder, who keeps acquiring strays. You might write about someone who resembles his or her dog. (Elizabeth Barratt Browning had long loose locks like spaniel ears.) Or you might create a character who is markedly unlike his or her dog. Perhaps the dog expresses some repressed part of the person?

'A Surprise in the Peninsula’ by Fleur Adcock (Poems 1960-2000, Bloodaxe Books, 2000)

When I came in that night I found
the skin of a dog stretched flat and
nailed upon my wall between the
two windows. It seemed freshly killed –
there was blood at the edges. Not
my dog: I have never owned one,
I rather dislike them. (Perhaps
whoever did it knew that.) It
was a light brown dog, with smooth hair;
no head, but the tail still remained.
On the flat surface of the pelt
was branded the outline of the
peninsula, singed in thick black
strokes into the fur: a coarse map.
The position of the town was
marked by a bullet-hole; it went
right through the wall. I placed my eye
to it, and could see the dark trees
outside the house, flecked with moonlight.
I locked the door then, and sat up
all night, drinking small cups of the
bitter local coffee. A dog
would have been useful, I thought, for
protection. But perhaps the one
I had been given performed that
function; for no one came that night,
Nor for three more. On the fourth day
it was time to leave. The dog-skin
still hung on the wall, stiff and dry
by now, the flies and the smell gone.
Could it, I wondered, have been meant
not as a warning, but a gift?
And, scarcely shuddering, I drew
the nails out and took it with me.

#4
Make it different
Given so much clichéd writing about dogs, the challenge is to dream up something truly original. Fleur Adcock’s poem (right) is impressive in this respect. It is unsettling and mysterious. Despite the confiding tone, we never find out who the speaker is, or why s/he is there. The dog is dead and decapitated; it’s been turned into some kind of ‘message’ but one which cannot be decoded. The speaker can only try to guess it by pondering the contradictory meanings of a dog – is it menace or protector? Finally, it seems more like the latter when s/he takes it away like some kind of talisman.

Write a poem or story which depends on some paradox about a dog. For example, a dog as both liberating and tying down; childlike and uncannily wise; rescued and rescuer.