This summer, I have an essay coming out in Bark Magazine. It’s the story of losing my three elderly dogs within two years of each other. In case you’ve never heard of Bark, it’s a magazine for dog lovers but with a literary bent, sort of a Dog Fancy meets Poets & Writers.
I’m excited that the essay was accepted. It was hard to write. In fact, it took me three years and something like 50 revisions before I felt it was ready to send out. It’s had many different titles, some awful (“Rubber Airplanes” comes to mind), one promising (“The Lives of Dogs”) but too similar to the title of an existing book, and one that had to be thrown out (“To Tell the Truth”) because I ended up cutting out the reference to the old game show entirely.
Revision is often difficult but almost always rewarding, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about ever since we made the decision to sell our house on Missionary Ridge and move to Lookout Valley. Just as we’d done four years earlier, when we moved from Chickamauga to the ridge, we dispensed with many carloads of clothing, furniture, dishware and gadgets and replaced them with a few choice new things. It felt good to put some thought into what we still loved, what was no longer serving us and what needed replacing.
Dana ShavinLike the essay I worked on for years, some things we owned were harder to edit out than others. I threw away the first real painting I ever did as an adult, snapping a picture of it before feeding it to the landfill. But I stopped my husband from throwing away his old journals. I got rid of notebooks full of my old art images, because while I once thought it a useful historical record of where I’ve been, I now see it as a waste of space. I did save my art festival ribbons; my husband, however, threw his away before I could stop him.
It’s either testament to the fact that I make good decisions for myself – or possession of a brain committed to resolving cognitive dissonance – that I find myself progressively happier with each life revision. My days seem to flow better, my narrative feels cleaner and the narrator herself – i.e. me – seems to be clearer about what she’s trying to achieve. That’s a good thing. I never want to feel that my story was more interesting or more powerful in the past tense.