a personal essay i wrote about the bird hospital went live on a massive lifestyle website a few fridays ago. i'd pitched it as a service-y health piece with personal details, something to the effect of how i work with filthy animals and it's perfectly safe and actually quite delightful; the angle my editor and i settled on was more introspective than that, and i worried that i would sound self-involved. (what are blogs for, mmm?) i also worried that i might have misrepresented the center's feelings about rats by opening with a story about one; i love rats very nearly across the board, but they aren't especially welcome among the birds. (a healthy rat got into the songbird flyway last year and came dangerously close to biting bird ben, my beloved northern cardinal pal, prompting the—and here's some trivia—one and only oh fuck that rat that's ever escaped my lips.)
one of the center's interns came downstairs this afternoon: "we've got a rat." everyone cringed. "no, like a lady brought it in. it's in intake." wait, like a pet rat? or a lab rat? what did it look like? "brown." i crept up from the basement an hour later, and there she was in a little pet carrier on the floor, cage card and all. VIRGINIA (RAT). DEHYDRATED, DISORIENTED, WOUND ON ARM. i hadn't noticed R behind me, and i jumped when she spoke: "cute, isn't she?" a black-eyed cinnamon mound, just visible in the gloom. yes, she was. subway-colored, street-colored, like the rats people trap and poison and abhor. we don't usually take rats, R said, but we'd hold on to her for a rat expert who'd agreed to come for her in the evening. virginia! wound on arm! how lovely it would be if she made it to that cage because someone misunderstood me; how lovely it would be if she made it to that cage because someone understood me.
6 comments:
Are you going to tell us where it was published? or link to it?
i'm still maintaining the fig leaf of distance between writing here and writing-writing, which is ridiculous, i know; you can find it on my pro website or via my IG (or email me if that's too vague)!
I thought it was a great piece! It fit in well with the site content in general, and if it was a little more personal than some of your paid work, well, I liked it. And the illustration was perfect.
thanks! i do want to write some more explicitly personal essays, i just didn't expect this one to work out that way. i try to skew things about the hospital in a very "the hospital is awesome" direction because, you know, i want people to give them all the money. and to be nice to pigeons and rats.
the "personal" thing is very odd with essays; in many cases (and with contacts i already have) it's much easier to pitch "it happened to me"-ish pieces than it is to sell researched and reported ones, or hybrids, which feels very odd for me, given my background with more reported pieces when i was a magazine staffer. i get that that is the way a certain branch of mainstream writing is going at the moment, and making the personal instructive and writing what you know are both well and good, i just...am not sure how far out on that branch i feel like building something permanent?
this is a roundabout way of saying i've been thinking about a piece on WWI and giving women the vote, and also have a cat story coming out tomorrow.
I loved the bird story. As I do this post. Sorry to be such an easy audience.
'DEHYDRATED, DISORIENTED,' - oh Virginia. My heart. (I'm rooting for Virginia.)
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