I have used this excerpt from Jon Franklin’s book “The Wolf in the Parlor” (copyright 2009 Jon Franklin.) as an example of why the kind of writing we talked about on WriterL is important. Jon inherited a dog, a standard-bred poodle named Charlie, with his marriage to Lynn.  At the time, they were living in Oregon and Jon regularly walked the dog through the woods there – Stuart Warner.

We pick up the story on one of those walks:

These were the 1990s, the years when the once-grand newspaper business was beginning to crumble around the edges.  Some of us, me included, saw catastrophe ahead.  I was visiting newspaper organizations to argue that journalism needs to be more reflective of the everyday world, which was emotional.  In other words, one could report emotion as accurately as one could report fact.

The counterargument, embraced by practically every editor I knew was, “Sheesh, who needs that stuff?” As readership fell, they fired their best (and most expensive) writers first.  This made papers all the more dull, and readership slid further and further.  Somehow I could not get through to the editors that emotional satisfaction would bring readers back.

Part of my problem was that I didn’t know quite how to articulate my point.  To editors, emotion seemed like fluff; that was their peculiar blindness and I didn’t have a metaphor that spoke to them.  Then, one bright Oregon summer day, Charlie gave me a lesson in psychology that perfectly fit the bill.

It was our practice in those days to take an afternoon walk through the forest.  Homeward bound, we approached the house from the valley.  From this aspect, the high deck jutted out over the walk-in ground floor.  I’d strung bird netting from the ground up to the deck, hoping to train a clematis to climb the post. Clematis grows wonderfully in Oregon, and I had visions of blossoms draping the high deck.

So far, though, only one clematis tendril had begun to make its way upward.  Otherwise the netting was bare.

On the day in question, we were returning from the forest when, about a hundred yards out, Charlie emitted a yip and took off toward the house.  I charged after him, pumping and panting.  By the time I reached him, he was in full point, his nose aimed at a spot about four feet up the bird netting.  There, trapped in the netting, was a full-sized gopher snake.

Once I saw the snake, Charlie broke his point and started jumping around, woofing and whining and yipping ecstatically.  The snake, on the other hand, was not pleased at all.  The more he thrashed, the more tangled he got.

Gopher snakes are not venomous and are generally laid back.  This one, though, was in a foul mood.  I had a sharp pocket knife to cut the netting, but no gloves to protect my hands.  I went to get them, leaving Charlie to guard the snake, practicing his whole range of barks and growls.  When I got back, sometime later, his excitement was undiminished.  The snake, for its part, had given up and sagged against the netting.  When I started work, of course, the snake revived with a vengeance, trying to get an angle where he could bite me.  I started, prudently, at the tail, cutting away one plastic thread after another.  I mean, this guy was really tangled. 

Charlie was neither still nor quiet for a single moment during this process.  It was quite a scene, barking dog and writhing snake and highly focused human trying to dodge the fangs as more and more of the four-foot creature was freed.  Finally, I got my glove tightly around the snake’s neck, snipped the last piece of plastic and let the snake drop to the ground.

For an instant I feared Charlie would be on it and would get himself bitten.  But I’d underestimated him.  He stepped back a respectful distance while the snake got itself together.  It didn’t coil to strike, either, because it was just sick and tired of the whole thing, but instead slithered away downhill in search of a friendly gopher hole or something.  Charlie followed, not barking now but instantly curious.  He came when I called him back, but reluctantly.

That was life in Oregon with the poodle.  After a while, he settled down and, utterly exhausted, curled up in the sun and went to sleep.

But if the snake was gone, it was not forgotten.  The following day, as we returned from our walk, Charlie again broke for the house a hundred yards out.  He ran directly to where the snake had been the day before, and scoured the vicinity with his nose.  He waited in tail-wagging excitement until I got there and did an inspection.  Nope.  No snake.

No snake, but Charlie had had great fun anyway, just in the anticipation of snake, in the memory of snake past and the possibility of snake future.

So it went the next day and the next, until it became obvious that while the snake itself may have been exciting, the memory of snake also made the canid blood run hot.  And memory of snake, unlike snake, was lasting.  All summer and into the winter, Charlie continued his daily investigation of the snake scene; well into the following year, that corner of the house held a disproportionate interest to him.

After a while I realized what I was seeing.  There were two things: snake and memory of snake.  Snake is exciting.  Everybody is excited by a snake, which is why young boys carry them into classrooms and wave them around. 

But we overlook, or at least I had overlooked, the power of the other thing, memory of snake.  To Charlie, memory of snake could be more powerful in the long run than snake itself.  Finally, all this was going on in the mammalian brain, which humans and dogs share.  So the dog story could apply to people, could be used as a metaphor.

When I next found myself trying to convince editors that an occasionally zowie-knock-‘em-dead feature story was worth it no matter how much it cost, I invoked the snake.  Give the readers a story with emotional impact and they’ll find themselves looking at the paper the next day as well, and the day after that and the day after that.

An occasional editor got it; most didn’t.  Was I saying people were like dogs? Yuk. Yuk. Yuk. Which I supposed, looking back, is in itself a sad metaphor for what befell a once grand industry.  Maybe an epitaph.  Editors are apparently not as perceptive as Charlie, but, unfortunately for them, their readers are.