New Puppy

Posted byKendall DunkelbergPosted inPets

Brody, the new pupWe are hosting our third foster dog from the humane society. He’s on a program called Homeward Bound that takes pets from the South, where not enough people spay and neuter, to the Northeast, where there is a shortage of pets to adopt. It’s a great program that saves a lot of lives, but their pets need to be in a home, not a shelter, for at least two weeks prior to departure. So we’re losing sleep again, caring for a 5-month or so German Shepherd mix puppy. He’s great, but has been in the shelter for the past month, so he’s not exactly house-broken. Thinking about this, while reading for and working on my Poetry Writing syllabus this morning with the dog at my feet on the porch, led to a draft of a poem on house training. If the pup doesn’t eat the page I wrote it on, while I’m inside working on this post, then it might become something….

Published by Kendall Dunkelberg

I am a poet, translator, and professor of literature and creative writing at Mississippi University for Women, where I direct the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, the undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. I am Chair of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy, and I have published four collections of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as a collection of translations of the Belgian poet Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus, and the textbook A Writer's Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. I was born and raised in Osage, Iowa, and have lived for over thirty years in Columbus, Mississippi, where my wife Kim and I let wildflowers grow in our yard to the delight of spring polinators and only some of our neighbors.

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