Friday from the Archives: “Learning to Write: Feline by Feline” by Constance Pierce by from NCLR 5 (1996)
As we eagerly await our new batch of interns and assistants, we share a piece from Abby F., one of our students who wrapped her internship last semester. The 1996 “Cats and Their Writers” feature remains a perennial favorite.
Author Constance Pierce shares her experience growing up with cats and their influence on her upbringing. From her first cat, the feral Teeny, to Elvis, an old barn cat, Pierce writes of the love, the lessons, and the loss her cats have shown her.
“Now all I have is an old barn cat, Elvis, named for the curl of lip that traces a lost fang. Some time back I began to favor the robustness of dogs, their different brand of companionship born of a more thorough domestication, a more thorough dependence. But you lose them, too – to speeding cars, poachers from biological laboratories, the ravages of time, which are beginning to ravage me also.”
In her essay, Pierce shares the “themes of my [her] writing and my life illuminated – at least partially – by cats.” She shares that she wants some rest from love and its losses, but without loss, how can there be change? Pierce quotes, “These mental processes – necessary in every life, part of the requisite of loss of innocence and the beginning of a tempered belief, a skeptical hope – were reshaping me.”
Pierce wrote two pieces for NCLR, this and the fiction short, “The Lost Colony” published in our 2007 issue.
Read the entire article on Gale Cengage or purchase a copy of the 1996 issue.
