Full Body Wag

Big Willie ruffled the dog’s fur affectionately, and Thor wriggled with pleasure under his touch. “Full body wag,” BW noted. “When you got more happiness than tail.” Among the many forms humanity takes are dog aficionados. Happiness is their common quest, but it’s not always as easy to get as a good scratch. This trail of tails brings together a group of Santa Fe women, led by the dog-obsessed Ms. Sioux Ashe, who hijack a community college creative writing class, and a scruffy pack of men filming an independent sci-fi horror movie in Cow Springs, Arizona. The adventure begins after the mangiest member of the film crew, one-eyed Big Willie, undergoes a cataclysmic conversion that transforms him from a fleabitten sweat-hog into a charismatic healer on the canine circuit. When Big Willie's gift brings him and his sidekick screenwriter, Gap, into the sphere of Sioux and her dog-loving dilettante companions, Gap takes up his quixotic pursuit of the writing instructor, Dena, who was his senior prom date twenty years earlier and remains his one great love. LISA GRAY FISHER has lived in Santa Fe since 1984, and prior to that in El Valle, near Penasco, during the mid-1970s. She and her husband Rick also spent eight years in Boston, where Lisa worked as an editor at Houghton Mifflin. After they returned to the Southwest with their two children, Kristina and Eliot, Lisa taught at Santa Fe Community College (though none of her classes met in a teepee) and then found her home teaching English at Santa Fe Preparatory School, where she has also served as Department Chair since 1995. Fisher’s poetry has been published in a number of journals, including THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, MEDIPHORS, and SAGE TRAIL.