The Literary Pet of the Month is Dash

Dash’s human, Julia Pierpont, is teaching an eight-week advanced fiction workshop with us, beginning April 24th. Apply now!

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If you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to spend a lot of time alone, and if you’re going to spend a lot of time alone, you’re going to want a pet. For one thing, they like sleep even more than you do, which can make you feel comparatively quite productive. For another, they live for food. As Charles Baxter wrote in the poem “Dog Kibble: A Villanelle,” “Life is never meaningless: there is always food.” Animals are brilliant like that.

I got my dog, Dash, from Animal Haven, a shelter downtown. He’s a Jack Russell Terrier mixed with some kind of lemur, maybe. We think he is about four now but no one really knows. I named him after Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Thin Man, in which detectives and heavy drinkers Nick and Nora Charles have a little dog named Asta who’s always helping them solve mysteries. Actually I think I first gravitated toward Dash because he looked a lot like Eddie, the dog from Frasier, which is a national treasure of television. On the street though, most people call him Wishbone or “that dog from The Mask.”

And that brings me to the real genius of dogs in particular: the walking. I go to the park now. I see more sunshine (also more rain, more snow, it’s a mixed bag). I talk to people, or rather, people talk to my dog. I know my neighborhood better. I have learned there are an incredible number of chicken bones on New York streets. And to a dog everything, everything, is interesting. And that is a very fine thing to remember.

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Enter your own Literary Pet of the Month through our Submittable page.

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