The Dog Who Saved Me
In 1998, I met a starving, sickly German Shepherd named Elsa. She forever changed how I thought about dogs. In an effort to articulate that change, I eventually sat down to write about it. Because I'm me, it became a story about a young woman who found a small gray mutt in a parking lot. After two years of sitting in front of old computers late at night and early in the morning, I finished it and put it aside. From time to time, over the years, I've returned to it, applying the skills I acquired as I continued to grow as a writer. But I had no real illusions about it ever being taken seriously. I was just fond of the story and wanted to do it justice.
In the spring of 2016, someone dumped a small gray dog in the woods near our home. This sort of thing has happened be
