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Walking the Dog and Other Literary Endeavors
You have to do more than write. You have to live.
It was Hemingway who said, in so many words, that a writer has to experience life to write about it in an honest way. You must live a life. Love, lust, travel, endure poverty and heartache, find joy and experience the the tragedy of death, find and lose friendships—and myriad other experiences to fill a writer’s tool box. Go do things. Cry, laugh, follow your heart. Certainly not all of us are going to live a Hemingway life—war, safaris, plane crashes, world travel, and many loves. But, just as he did, we can take from our own experiences, of which we all have many, to help spark our own writerly muse whether it be fiction, nonfiction, memoir, essays, or poetry. Those experiences do not have to include battling a giant marlin off the coast of Cuba. Art may be born from something as simple as walking the dog.
A couple of years ago, I took to writing most every day after walking my dog, Sam. I sat down within an hour after each walk and recorded my thoughts. Certainly, I had walked my dog before, but in these times I was determined to be more present, to observe and contemplate, to think and consider. It was a good time to take on this project, as I was on sabbatical from my college teaching and I was also growing older. It was time, I believed, to consider where I had been, where I was going…
