Best Advice

I was whining. Picture a crippled dog dragging itself into the English office of a university where it teaches a single graduate poetry workshop in which the students disbelieve everything it says and consider their work immune to criticism, a class for which the dog receives little pay and no health insurance. Imagine its hind legs, useless. Of course the dog isn’t really crippled; it hasn’t been run over. But it feels crippled. It’s the dog’s version of an interpretive dance, to show you how it feels.