Washington College Magazine

Currents: Some Things About Me

By Joshua Wolf Shenk

Meet the new Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House, Joshua Wolf Shenk. A lecturer in English, he teaches creative nonfiction.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Here are some things I have never done.

I never ate a fried lizard.
I never went to sea.
I never beat a man with a stick.
Nor a woman.
Nor a lizard.

Here are some things I have broken in anger.

An acoustic guitar.
A cordless phone.
The door to the linen closet in the hallway outside the bedrooms in my childhood home in Cincinnati.
A salad spinner.

Here are some names I have given to inanimate objects.

Chauncey (the fireplace in my childhood home, so named after my mom and stepfather converted it to gas over my objections)
Roger (the cushion with a hole in the middle that I sat on for a few days after getting hemorrhoid surgery; briefly my best friend; now I can't even remember which closet he's in).

Here are some names I might give to a dog if I got one.

Charlie Brown.
Clarence (after Clarence Clemmons).
Sarge

Here is the name of my imaginary friend, an elephant who lives in Brooklyn Heights.

Morris.

Here are the parts of my body where I hurt the most, in order.

My temples.
My gut.
The back of my legs.

Here are the things I like the most about Chestertown, in no particular order, but just as they occur to me as I write.

The Finishing Touch.
Driving fast on Route 213 north of Kennedyville.
The term "chicken-necker."

Here is what I miss most about New York.

Being able to pretend that I'm still a boy in my mom's house and I can call her up and say, "Mom, I'm hungry" and 20 minutes later have great food—only in this pretend situation, my mom cooks like a native in Mexico City, Shanghai, Harlem, Beirut, New Delhi, Bangkok and New Orleans, among others.

Here is the time that I'm writing this.

2:06 a.m.

Here is the reason it's so late.

I lay on my couch most of the day and night hating myself and fearing I would never write again.

Here is something I said once that I thought was funny.

A colleague in a meeting was going on about a program that he thought ought to be reorganized in some significant way, but he thought it would be difficult to do. He kept saying, "We can't just shoot them," referring to the employees of this program. I think he meant to say that they couldn't be summarily fired. Or perhaps he meant to say that they needed to be treated with respect. I wasn't sure what he meant. After he said it a second time—"We can't just shoot them"—something came to my mind. And when he said it a third time—"We can't just shoot them"—I paused just a moment and said, "Maybe we can shoot their pets."

Here is a secret about me, something I'm really really ashamed about, and hope you won't use against me, and which I plan to erase from this piece before it's finished.

I pick my nose.

Here is probably my biggest problem.

I want to be understood and keep thinking it's possible.

Here is the name of my childhood dog.

Sheyna.

Here are some true things about Sheyna.

She ran away all the time.
She was a golden retriever.
She had a congenital hip disorder.
She killed many cats.

Here are some things that Sheyna never did.

She didn't talk my parents out of getting divorced.
She never explained about the cats.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I go home, and so much time has passed and it's amazing, Sheyna is still alive. In the dreams, I don't marvel over her. I just walk past her on my way through the kitchen or something. I take her for granted. She's something solid in my life, something I don't have to grasp for.

Joshua Wolf Shenk is the author of Lincoln's Melancholy (Houghton Mifflin Company) 2005.

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