About the Author
EMOTIONAL RELIEF
Ruth Deming, author of "A Sunny Day at the SPCA "

Ruth Deming's "A Sunny Day at the SPCA" portrays a delicate interplay of familial emotion, both expressed and unexpressed, through the somewhat more accessible vehicle of the family dog, Triscuit. At first merely tolerated by the father, Triscuit waits faithfully by the door every day awaiting his return from work, eventually winning the father 's affection. The dog's behavior is the common thread throughout the piece, weaving together the story of the father's death, family dysfunction, along with the incidentally noted suicide of her brother, as well.

Deming says it was easier to write about the dog's death than it was about the death of her father and brother. "Only through the dog could I reach them; I was so emotionally tied up to them." The description of the dog's behavior lightens the emotional weight on the reader. As Deming describes the deteriorating health of her father due to cancer, she parallells it with the behavior of the dog: ... "he followed my father from room to room ... staying on his little pillow near the bed, napping as my father napped, peering around the room as my father peered around the room, each trying to reassure the other they were still alive." What had not been so evident to Deming was her emotional attachment to the dog. She, and consequently the reader, is surprisingly affected by the death of Triscuit, although it clearly serves as a catalyst for the intensity of all her other feelings to come through: "Big splashes of tears pelted with hot fury down my cheeks".

In one of the final scenes as the women in the family hand the dog's body to the SPCA, Deming casually mentions the death of her brother. Her mother and sister "coo over the dog " speaking to the dog in the same way "they had spoken ... to my dead father and ... to my brother, when he too followed, intentionally, in my father's faded footsteps." Deming introduces this added drama without warning, choosing to handle the brother's suicide in this manner, she says, to make it "mysterious ... elusive ... and more poignant," and to serve the technical purpose of keeping emotional balance in the piece.

Deming wrote this essay 10 years ago and then put it away. After she finally brought it back out again she felt she had to "make it more congruent with who I am today, put more of myself into it." She felt the first draft no longer represented the way she wrote and her goal in her rewrite was to ensure that her work accurately represents her reality. This is also why she chooses to write creative nonfiction. "The advantage of writing creative nonficiton is it 's how I think, it's natural, it comes out because it's an extension of my world and my thoughts."

Deming's writing time is in the early morning before she goes to work. It took her some time to find a spot in the house where she felt comfortable writing. She ended up moving her computer many times before she found the right lighting and the right view. Often she "putters around," but after she decides what to write, the writing process takes three or four days. "I totally obsess with the story and I can't stop working on it." She gets as much as she can down initially, and after that the rewriting process doesn't take very long. "Once I do the main stuff, it's a delight for me to rewrite it. You hone it, decide what's important, and take out what's not important."

There have been about three people who have been encouraging in her writing. They've said "Get out there, do your thing, and believe in yourself." I have to allow myself to know that I can write and do it, but it's a stumbling block, and hearing those people's words in my head when I need to, that 's the most important."

Deming is also a poet and therapist. She publishes a mental health newsletter, The Compass Quarterly, for people with mood disorders.

Jane Liddle