Lost & Found
Page 24
Animals play a large role in this book. Did you know that a dog would become a major character?
Although I had grown up with dogs and cats, it was not until I was 25 and living in Chicago, working with street kids, that I met my first extraordinary dog. He arrived with my future husband. The dog was a gorgeous golden retriever mix. He never wore a leash or a collar; he heeled so perfectly that people often imagined that he had a leash on. It wasn’t long before I realized that I could walk anywhere in Chicago, at any time of day or night, and feel perfectly safe if I had Poncho with me. His full name was Poncho Rafaelo Jesus Gonzales. He blissfully pranced the sidewalks with a tennis ball in his jaws, but if he didn’t like someone, he’d drop the ball and get between the person he had profiled and me. I once wandered into a deserted industrial area of the city and as we walked under a trestle, a man suddenly appeared out of the shadows and demanded to walk with me. He made the mistake of trying to shoo Poncho away by stomping his feet. Poncho lunged at him, growling and displaying every impressive fang. The man fled and Poncho covered his fangs once again with his golden retriever smile. Something changed for me in that moment. This dog would fight for me and protect me in a way that was immediate and non-negotiable. I had not trained him to do this. He had chosen me and I was his. My heart grew larger that day as dusk set and we emerged from the most desolate stretch of Chicago. He never bit anyone, but I knew that if he had to, he would.
We moved from Chicago to Oregon and Poncho was my constant companion for hiking, running through Douglas fir forests, and camping. My husband accompanied me for most camping adventures, but I felt perfectly secure camping only with Poncho. He taught me about loyalty, forgiveness, and the pure joy of reveling in the moment. There were times, as he and I followed animal trails in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, when I became more dog and he led and I followed. And there were times when he became more human, learning the human rules of an Easter egg hunt and following the traditions perfectly, eating the collected eggs only when I said so. I tried to learn his language: a raised eyebrow, a dropped tail, rear end up, a slight turn of the head, a two-wag instead of a three-wag greeting. And he made every effort to learn my language. He forgave me when I came home cranky and unloving and I forgave him for eating a freshly baked peach pie. We were both contrite, ashamed of our bad behavior. He mended and expanded a part of me. I threw a lot of balls and sticks for him.
The second exceptional dog was a great barrel-chested black lab named Spud that belonged to my sister and brother-in-law. He played soccer amazingly well with my three nephews, visited (on his own initiative) a home day care center to the delight of the children, and as he matured, exhibited what I could only call a heroic personality. Spud weighed over 90 pounds and was clearly a powerful animal, yet he never fought with other dogs, instead he calmed them. He once escorted two ferocious Rottweilers from my sister’s yard by simply herding them in the most congenial manner. He looked like a good-humored bouncer guiding the drunks out to the sidewalk. He continually stayed between my sister and any unknown visitor. He also knew how to be careful around our fragile mother in her later years. Our mother regarded him as the ultimate hero after he deflected the above-mentioned Rottweilers when she was out walking an antagonistic ankle biter sort of dog.
In my stories, and in this novel, animals are a presence and a personality. They are a part of the plot. They may be hero, martyr, or rascal, and in the case of the dog that Rocky finds and saves, they often have their own say. It is understandably risky to give a dog a point of view in fiction. It could potentially go so badly. We hear several chapters from the point of view of this dog, and we get a taste of his inner world and the depth of his emotional sensations. Early readers told me that I simply should not, could not do this. But I could no more deny this dog a point of view that I could refuse the invitation to hurl myself along animal trails with my old dog Poncho. The viewpoint was there all along.
But did I imagine that the dog would take such a front and center role? Absolutely not. Much as dogs do in real life, this dog brazenly walked into this novel and persistently revealed his personality until I paid attention.
READ ON
Have You Read?
Truth, a novel based on the life of Sojourner Truth
“Truth rings as true as the original words of the incomparable Sojourner Truth on which this novel is based. It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck!”
Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
Born a slave, survived a free bondswoman, reborn an outspoken abolitionist, Sojourner Truth died a heroine of graceful proportions. But the story of her inner struggles is as powerful and provocative as her accomplishments and could only be captured in fiction. This emotionally searing novel beautifully infuses the historical atrocities of the 1800s with the psychological speculation of who Sojourner Truth really was, beyond her social and political persona.
In a feat of literary ventriloquism, Sheehan puts the story back in Sojourner’s voice, lending the telling a naked, crystalline quality that transport the reader to a time when survival could mean sacrificing little pieces of one’s soul.
Women Writing in Prison, an anthology
Edited by Jacqueline Sheehan
“If courage is grace under pressure, then these poems are graceful expressions under the real pressures of confinement. Poetry’s acclaimed power to liberate is vividly exemplified in Women Writing in Prison; each poem is at once a private act of escape and confrontation.”
Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate
After working with women in prison teaching writing workshops, Sheehan edited an anthology of their work. The project is run by Voices From Inside, a group designed to bring creative writing to incarcerated women and to bring their voices to the outside world to increase awareness about the human cost of incarceration.
What do women in prison write about? They write about food, home, family, planting gardens, the men who have beat them, the smell of grandmother’s hair. They make funny rhymes, laugh at old boyfriends, long to pee in a bathroom with a door, and breathe fresh air. They write with honesty and freshness that is only lightly edited to maintain their unique voices. Part of the bondage that many incarcerated women face is drug addiction, and they write about this with searing frankness. The purchase of this anthology funds continuing writing programs for women in prison.
Acknowledgments
I called on the good will and generous spirit of others for their expertise. Suzanna Choi Adams, a superb psychotherapist, read for clinical accuracy. Joann Berns and Joanne Blanchard, both physical therapists, offered insights into their profession. Police Chief Paul Scannell, of Westfield State College, provided information about tasers. Lee King, retired Animal Control Warden of Woodbury, Connecticut, and Carol Hepburn, Animal Welfare Officer of Amherst, Massachusetts, shed light on animal care. Tom Dussault, Agawam Sportsman Club in Massachusetts, tried to give me archery lessons, and Linda Randall, DVM, Cloverleaf Animal Hospital Medina, Ohio, spent hours on the phone correcting my mistakes about dog anatomy. I take all the credit for mistakes in each area.
Special appreciation goes to the members of my manuscript group who read every page: Marianne Banks, Kris Holloway, Celia Jeffries, Rita Marks, Brenda Marsian, Elli Meeropol, and Lydia Nettler. The members of the Great Darkness Writing Group also listened with care: Jennifer Jacobsen, Alan and Edie Lipp, Patricia Riggs, Morgan Sheehan, and Marion VanArsdell. I thank Sharron Leighton for her encouragement and Patricia Lee Lewis for the spaciousness of her international writing retrieats. Thanks to Mary Ellen and Jeffrey Zakrzewski for sharing their dog, Spud, with the rest of us. Carrie Feron and Tessa Woodward at Avon Books and Jenny Bent at Trident Media are a brilliant team of brains and heart.
About the Author
I grew up in Connecticut and live in Massachusetts today, where I divide my time between writing, teaching writing workshops and yoga, and running a
small psychotherapy practice. But I spent twenty years living in western states: California, Oregon, and New Mexico. For most of my childhood, I lived in a single-parent home, after the early death of my father left my mother with five kids. My siblings were 8 to 13 years older than I was at the time, so they really had a different childhood, complete with two parents. My mother was a nurse by day, but she had the spirit of an artist. My first memory of her was watching her paint at her easel on her day off. She was one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met and even as a child, I was aware of my good fortune to have landed in her nest.
Which is not to say that childhood or my teen years were easy. They were not. I was impulsive and wild, slipping out of my bedroom window at night to meet friends, smoke Newport cigarettes, and drive with boys in fast cars. After unsuccessfully attempting to rein me in, she wisely took another approach and gave me a very long leash, which was what I needed. At the end of my second year of college, a girlfriend and I hitchhiked across the country and to her amazing credit, my mother actually drove us to our first highway entrance and dropped us off.
At college in Colorado, I studied anthropology and art, preparing me for few jobs. During the summer I worked at an institution in Connecticut for people with mental retardation. This was truly the Dark Ages in how we regarded people with developmental delays and we clumped them all together under the umbrella of mental retardation. People of all ages were warehoused in large buildings in awful conditions. College students who worked there in the summer were acutely aware of the injustices done to residents and we plotted many small and not so small rebellions on behalf of the residents.
My career path after college did not lead straight to writing, but instead took a sometimes dizzying route. Among my more illustrious job choices were: director of a traveling puppet troupe, roofer, waitress, recreation worker and lifeguard for handicapped kids, health-food clerk, freelance photographer (the low point was taking pictures of kids with Santa, the high point was photographing births), substance-abuse counselor with street kids in Chicago, freelance newspaper writer, and something about baiting sewers for rats in Oregon, but that one is always too hard to explain. After the birth of my daughter, I returned to graduate school to study psychology, eventually earning my Ph.D. and working at university counseling centers.
As soon as I settled in with psychology, I began to write fiction. Short stories, long stories, novellas, novels, essays. I woke at five A.M. to write before I left for work, spent part of every weekend writing, most holidays, and parts of every vacation that I could squeeze out of my very full life. I have now switched the balance; writing is my primary occupation and private practice is my part-time job.
When people ask me how I find time to write, I am always puzzled, because finding time is not a huge problem. Pat Schneider, a wise writing teacher, once said, “You would find time for a lover, wouldn’t you? That is how you find time for writing.” And possibly the image of my mother, happily painting at her easel on her day off made an imprint on me that said, here is what you do with your life, do those things you love.
I have a backlog of stories and novels that are yammering to come out and I am doing my best to keep them in an orderly line. I am currently working on a novel that came to me in nearly complete form while I sat daydreaming on a ferry from the Isle of Skye to the mainland of Scotland.
www.jacquelinesheehan.com
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By Jacqueline Sheehan
LOST & FOUND
TRUTH
Credits
Cover photographs by Petography / Getty Images, Dominic DiSaia / Getty Images.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LOST & FOUND. Copyright © 2007 by Jacqueline Sheehan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition April 2007 ISBN 9780061748684
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