Four minutes to read.
Everyone is a part-time psychopath about something. For some people, it’s career, money or religion. For others, it’s dark chocolate. For me, I’d kill to be a better writer.
When my yellow lab Magellan died from old age five years, two months and four days ago, I turned to writing fiction to fill up the empty page in my life. In the dark hours, long after my students’ history tests were graded, the creative act of telling lies on paper allowed my mind to travel to a world where dogs never die.
Fiction writers are travel writers. In my headspace, as I type out paragraphs, I am traveling with my readers to other cultures, happier countries, better times. In storybook worlds, I make up thrilling rides and crushing realities, heartthrobs and heartbreaks. Always there’s a supply of dog biscuits.
On a stormy February day, on Michigan Avenue south of Chicago’s Riverwalk, the air smells cold, clammy, grouchy. Nature’s leaf blower sweeps away the leaves and litter from Millennium Park.
Across the street from the Art Institute, I am cocooned in the warmth of the American Writers Museum. I am here for a needed fix of inspiration. I am seeking reassurance that, if I write, I am a writer.
The Chicago nexus with authorship is as strong and enduring as its stockyards and its skyscrapers. Carl Sandburg’s poetry Chicago defined his career. Chicago native Ernest Hemingway told us that his childhood neighborhood had “wide lawns and narrow minds.”
Did they think their greatness was great? Did they bulldoze their brains, moving self-doubt away? Did they keep secret journals filled with frustration and failure?
The museum has all the modal elements of a writer’s den. The museum is as silent as an unwritten book. As secluded as a writer with a blank page. As quiet as parchment drying.
I look to The Art of Racing in the Rain for encouragement. I have a literary crush on the book’s narrator, a dog named Enzo. In addition to speaking and writing exceptionally well for a dog, Enzo is a philosopher of life and living. He sniffs around for his better self, considers the afterlife and not incidentally rescues his master.
Writing is a fevered rush of pleasure and pain. Like the benefits and burdens of canine companionship.
In my make-believe world, Magellan is curled on the carpeted floor of my study. Comfortably for him and comforting for me. He doesn’t realize that I feel like a drying drop of ink on a pristine journal page.
This morning in my hotel room, I chose a dark green tweed blazer, sea-grey turtleneck and khaki slacks. In my mirrored reflection, I pretended to see an author at the Aspen Institute Literary Festival or perhaps a literature professor behind his classroom podium.
In the museum, I stand alone, avoiding eye contact, fearing conversation. No one mistakes me for a writer. At best, I might look like an avid reader.
I’m carrying a dog-eared journal that I bought in a thrift shop. There are no words in it. Yet.