My essay ‘The dog of fiction and the wolf of memory’ was published as one of six ‘online only’ pieces in Griffith Review 34 The Annual Fiction Edition in October 2011
The essay discusses my experience of writing fiction that has a real event in my own life as a starting point.
The story I’m writing takes the form of a dog that runs close alongside a flimsy barbed wire fence that separates me (and it) from the time and place of its origin. On the other side of the fence, in the dark forest I escaped from, runs the grey wolf of real memory; red-eyed, ferocious, still carrying the whiff of childhood terror. On my side of the fence, where the world is light and open and I am free, my grey dog lopes. This grey dog of wolfish ancestry is friendlier, tame, in my service, though still inclined to run free of its own will. The dog is based on a template of the wolf.