The Saddest Dog Story in the World

And now, a mere nine years after I first promised it to you, I present "The Saddest Dog Story in the World."

You can read about why this one was so long in the making here.

To listen to the story, click on the arrow in the media player below, or click on "The Saddest Dog Story in the World" underneath the media player to open the file in a separate window.

The Saddest Dog Story in the World

Loquacious: "The Diphthong 'Thang'" by Jodi Paloni

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

During the editing of this guest essay, Jodi Paloni told me, "I took out the parts you suggested and guess what I found? Sex!" This does not surprise me at all.

Let me explain. Jodi and I met in grad school, and it seemed like every reading we attended together inevitably featured someone (usually a man) reading a piece that involved a sex scene (usually badly written) or descriptions of the female form (usually vulgarly expressed). It became a running joke between us, and now we can't help but think of the other when we hear certain bawdy slang terms. Jodi mock-threatened to write a guest post in this same vein, but I'm pleased to say that she's done something delightful and not at all in bad taste: written a useful essay on the craft of writing with a fun and sexy flair. Jodi's short stories often center on the tension that occurs when innocence flirts with something darker, a penchant you'll see in the fantastic examples she created for this essay. Here's looking at you, diphthong, you sexy thang!  

The Diphthong "Thang"

By Jodi Paloni

Lately I am taken with words that sport the illustrious diphthong. Sounds kinda sexy, right? Because they are. A diphthong is a vowel team that creates a monosyllabic gliding, slippery sound, or simply stated: two vowels, one sound. Consider words like roil and embroil, enjoy and destroy, blouse and scout, pouch and slouch. Consider frowning clown, or even simpler words such as boy and out. They make your lips purse and curl and pucker.

They cause the tongue to slow down.

Take a word listed above and find a non-diphthong replacement. Roil: churn. Enjoy: delight. Blouse: shirt. Then think about how you want your word to heighten the landscape of your sentence and to what effect. Consider the following:

When the borrowed doll slipped from her hand into the muddy river, her stomach roiled.

When the borrowed doll slipped from hand into the muddy river, her stomach churned.

The word that fits best depends on the passage. Do you want the character's experience to linger in the slithering sounds of the word roil, as if a moment longer could prolong the denial of her consequences? Or do you want the character to face her mistake with an abrupt realization, an abruptness that the word churned, with its harsh and final sounds, conjures up?

Here's another:

He imagined the feel of the fabric buttons sliding through the narrow slits of her blouse, as if practicing the art of undressing would help to calm him when his actual opportunity arose.

Exchange the word blouse for shirt. Blouse creates a slow-moving, sensuous action, which is what this sentence is about. (It also alliterates with other words that have that same slow, sensuous feel: blossom, blowing, blood.) Shirt, on the other hand, implies, to me, an everyday quick-and-dirty that may take little imagination at all.

Or, consider a combination of sound-play:

She stepped from the river having rescued the filthy doll, her shirt clinging to her torso like the vines on Aunt Edith's house, the vines that twirled the ladder giving her nightly access to my room.

The hard sounds of the underlined words, stepped, rescued, twirled, nightly, deliver action. The passion of the current moment (no pun intended) suggests a future possibility in the dark of night. Torso, house, and access are the soft words here. Shirt keeps the movement tense and up-close. Exchange shirt for blouse, and slow it down. By playing around with both soft and hard sounds, you can push and pull, speed up and slow down, seduce or ravage, all in one sentence.

All of this, of course, is subjective. The writer is the artist. Each word and every combination will inspire unique pleasure in the reader.

I will add that I also admire diphthongs because they stretch the rules of basic phonetics in which one letter makes one sound. Breaking rules can be sexy, too.

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Jodi Paloni's writing appears or is forthcoming in Whitefish Review, R.kv.r.y Quarterly, Carve Magazine, upstreet, Monkeybicycle, Spartan, Shadowbox Magazine, and The Lascaux Review. In 2012 she placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She lives and writes in southern Vermont and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Jodi curates the forum 365 Short Stories in 2013 in which she reads and comments on one short story a day at Rigmarole.

Verbal Snapshots #2

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what kind of picture can I paint in 140 characters or less? (What are Verbal Snapshots? See below.)

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Wind at Work: A red-and-white-striped patio umbrella on its side at the bottom of a grassy hillside.
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White petal confetti on wet spring green grass.
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Oreo cow.
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Two fuzzy brown ducklings on a green slope littered with stale bread.
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A white plastic bag floats, like a ghostly balloon, in the wind above a cemetery.
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3 llamas in a field: One chocolate brown. One vanilla white. And one choco-caramel-swirl w/ an ebony head & white eyebrows.
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Tiny parade route: Dozens of flags festoon neighborhood lawns, marking utility lines in red, blue, green, orange, yellow, white.
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Man & woman in full hiking gear, including huge backpacks & trekking poles, stroll along a street in a suburban subdivision.
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The In-between Season: A robin hops among chunks of snow twice his height.

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What are Verbal Snapshots?

Sometimes there's no time to snap a picture. Sometimes the scope of what you want to capture is too big, too small, or too fleeting for any camera. I wrote my first Verbal Snapshot on Twitter a year ago when I saw an elderly man in a suit riding a red and silver bicycle. I didn't get a photo of him, but I wanted to capture the image, so I described it and called it a Verbal Snapshot.

Verbal Snapshots are the word equivalents of Instagram and all those photo we take with our phones on the go. Recently I've made a practice of describing the moments in time that catch my eye, my heart, or my fancy. Language is how I make sense of the world, and so much of what I write blooms from simple moments of beauty, joy, wonder, or oddity. These little "Language-grams" are my reminders to pay attention to the world around me and to look for the stories waiting to be told.

Follow me on Twitter or Facebook to see these snippets as I publish them, or come back here to the blog where I'll collect the newest together every few weeks. (See other posts in this series.)

The Lifecycle of Stories

Some stories are like grasshoppers: Fully formed and jumping from day one. (A little bit of time and revision is all they need to earn their wings.)

Some stories are like butterflies and moths: The first draft doesn't look much like the end result, but the metamorphosis from a small caterpillar of an idea to the bright final product doesn't take all that long.

And some stories are like cicadas: Hatched above ground on a slim branch, fed by sap, they then drop to the ground to burrow beneath. They live in this quiet, subterranean way for a long time -- one year, two years, sometimes seventeen years -- feeding on the roots of the tree where they were born, and waiting. And then one day, they emerge as nymphs from their underground hiding place, take again to the trees, and transform once more into something winged and wondrous.

(Pretend for a moment that cicadas don't give you the creeps.)

Like cicadas, some stories need a long time away from the light before they're ready to come out of hiding and sing their song.

Don't like insects? Forget the metamorphosis metaphor and choose your own. Stories need time to: hibernate, gestate, mature, ripen, age, mellow, ferment, distill.

Take, for example, The Saddest Dog Story in the World.

The real-life events of this story occurred in the mid-1980s. It entered my repertoire of anecdotes some time during the following 10 years. Within another 10 years the anecdote even had a title: The Saddest Dog Story in the World. I actually mentioned it in my very first blog post back in October 2004, promising to tell it at a later date.

I've been trying, sporadically, to write this story ever since. A few years ago I tried valiantly to shape it into a story to tell at The Moth StorySLAM, but I couldn't make it work. It refused to transform from anecdote to story.

The Saddest Dog Story in the World was a good anecdote, the kind that is so sad it's almost funny. But an anecdote that works at dinner parties doesn't automatically translate into a story that works on the page or the stage. To craft life into art, which is what we're doing when we create stories from our lives, we need more than anecdote.

We need meaning.

Anecdotes are a series of events: one thing happens, then another, and another. Stories, though, go deeper. They combine anecdote with reflection to unearth and convey the meaning of the events at hand. {Ira Glass, host of the radio show "This American Life," explains these story building blocks in this video. Author Sue William Silverman calls these two building blocks the "voice of innocence" (anecdote) and the "voice of experience" (reflection) and applies them to writing creative nonfiction in this essay and in this book.}

It seemed that no matter what I did, I just couldn't get to the heart of The Saddest Dog Story in the World. So for years, it remained something more akin to The Sad But Funny Anecdote About the Only Dog I Ever Had.

During those years, I'd also been trying to craft a stage-worthy story -- any story, not just the sad dog story. But something about the live storytelling genre eluded me. I'd wrongly assumed that creating stories for the stage would be an easy jump from writing them for the page. But every time I tried to make that leap, the distance between the two felt like a dark, yawning cavern -- mind boggling and impossible to cross.

And then three months ago I went to New York City and gave a short talk about something completely unrelated to the dog story or any of the others I'd been trying to tell. The presentation ended up being like the love child of a Moth story and a TED talk, but it seemed to flip a switch in my creative brain. 

The very next day, while brushing my teeth in the closet-sized bathroom of my Soho hotel room, the Saddest Dog Story in the World crawled out of its underground hiding place, sprouted wings, and started to buzz.

The anecdote I'd lived with for 15 years coalesced, formed itself into a story, and showed me its heart. I still had to shape and refine it, but I finally understood what the story meant, which finally made it more than just a sad-funny story to tell over drinks.

Some stories are like this. You carry them around for days, weeks, months, years -- decades even. You write the beginnings of them dozens of times. You know pieces of them inside and out, and yet something essential to them remains hazy, elusive. 

This isn't just about trying to work in a new genre (live storytelling versus written essay, for example). This is about the lifecycle of stories -- of any kind of art, really.

I think that sometimes stories (or paintings, films, songs, etc.) come to us before we know how to bring them to life. They come in snippets, half-hidden, in a scatter of details.

Without faith in the idea, you might not trust that there's anything there at all.

Without faith in yourself, you might not have the courage to keep trying.

But just because you don't see something doesn't mean it isn't there.

Just listen through your open window on a warm summer night.

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I know. Now you want to know The Saddest Dog Story in the World.

Soon.

I promise.

In the Thick of It

You forgot to pick up the book at the library, the one with the four-month wait list. They waited five days and then moved on to the next person.

You didn't get enough sleep last night. Today you drank a coffee at breakfast, and then a double iced soy latté after lunch.

You finally have one central "to do" list, and it's keeping you organized. You add three new items for every one that you cross off.

As long as you look only at the computer screen in front of you, you can believe that your desk and studio are clean.

Last night you were full of creative zeal and project plans. Today your mojo fizzled before you even started.

You reorganized your closet a few months ago -- a major accomplishment. Right this minute a good chunk of your wardrobe sits wrinkling in clothes baskets.

You keep losing and gaining the same four pounds, when you have ten times that much to shed.

And yet --

Today the sky was blue.

Today you had breakfast and dinner with the person you love most in the world.

Today you read a few chapters in a favorite childhood book.

Today your mother called just to see how you are.

Today you curled up with two grey cats, their fur soft against the pale inside of your arm.

Today you had clean running water, electricity, a fast Interent connection, comfortable clothes, abundant food, a nice glass of red wine, the sound of people laughing, health in body, strength of mind, kindness of spirit.

So I say this:

So what the piles of papers, the never-ending list that comes with living?

So what the dust bunnies of cat fur even though you've just vacuumed?

So what the hurry, the rush, the go?

So what the wrinkles and the extra pounds?

So what the yawns?

So what the forgetfulness and the falling behind?

So what it all?

This is all there is.

I don't mean that we're left wishing for me.

I mean this -- Listen: This is all there is.

All that there is, is here. Everything at once. It's ours.

The grit and the shine of it. The thick and the thin of it.