Writing Hard Stories by Melanie Brooks

Author:Melanie Brooks [Brooks, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7882-2
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2016-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Mark Doty

• Heaven’s Coast

George drops the tattered tennis ball a few inches from my feet and sets his expectant gaze on me. I bend over, pick up the ball, and toss it down the grass-tufted dirt path ahead. George charges after it, floppy ears bobbing, and wrestles the ball to a stop. He trots back, shaking it to the death, and sets it like a prize at my feet again. Bedlington terriers were originally bred as vermin killers, so it’s only natural for George to see his task as more than simple ball retrieval. I throw it once more and laugh as Ned, a bulky, loveable golden retriever, emerges from his explorations of the overgrown bushes that line the path and joins in the chase.

“This is really beautiful,” I say to poet and author Mark Doty as we amble behind his dogs. Though fog shrouded the Cross Sound ferry on my early crossing from New London, Connecticut, to Orient Point, New York, and wind-swept swells made my stomach churn in the enclosed cabin, forcing me out onto the misty deck, a warm midday sun has since burned off the clouds. It’s turned into a gorgeous day.

Springs Dog Park in East Hampton, New York, is touted as one of the largest fenced-in dog parks in the country with its twenty-plus acres of trails and open, grassy fields. Just down the road from where Jackson Pollock’s studio barn sits, its floors spattered still with evidence of his creativity, and a few miles from Doty’s charming weekend-retreat home, it’s a pristine and appropriate backdrop for us to begin our conversation about his memoir work. Dogs, after all, have been sources of steadfast comfort for Doty as he’s journeyed through moments of profound grief.

Doty’s most recent memoir, Dog Years, published in 2008, offers an intimate glimpse into the relationship he had with the two dogs, Beau and Arden, he credits with keeping him alive when the darkness of loss threatened to swallow him whole.

We’ve only just met, but there’s something comfortably familiar about this tall, handsome, sixty-year-old man strolling at my side, head bald, his gray goatee trimmed close. Maybe that familiarity is a natural offshoot of reading someone’s memoir, but with Doty, I suspect it’s more. We share some strikingly common ground.

Doty’s partner of twelve years, Wally Roberts, died of a viral brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, PML, which can affect people with AIDS. That was in January 1994, less than two years before my father died of pneumocystis pneumonia, PCP, another AIDS-related illness. Though the circumstances of our stories and our losses are distinct, our journeys took us at the same time, down the same road paved by an epidemic riddled with acronyms that Doty fittingly calls, “A bad hand drawn at Scrabble, letters which we can figure and refigure and still make nothing,” in his award-winning memoir, Heaven’s Coast.

I’m here to talk about the genesis of that book, so stunning in its raw portrayal of grief, so moving in

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