In early 2021 I was missing the pleasure of writing in cafés. And so I went down to the basement, found some plywood and a 2x4 and some dark stain, and built myself a little table. I put it in the corner of my small study, on a little rug, beside a photograph of two dogs wrestling, one looking into the camera, in a forlorn rural landscape. (Many decades ago, as editorial assistant on the Canadian Forum, I was given the task of returning unsolicited artwork from an overflowing file. The photograph had no name or address attached and so I kept it.). Here was my own little spot, which I named the Lonesome Dog Café.
The table wasn’t large enough for a computer but only for a manuscript and pen or a notebook. Wanting to inaugurate it with some new bit of writing, I opened a fresh notebook and sat there wondering what to write. I don’t remember how I came up with the idea of writing individual sentences to capture a character but after that first session I decided that I would try and write five sentences about “Henry” every day. I had no design or plan, no sense at the start of who Henry might be, nor even the tone that I was hoping for. Very quickly he became this rather hapless, naïve man with grandiose and unrealistic plans and a flawed understanding of other humans. Many of the lines seemed rather comic to me, although I wasn’t trying for humour. Perhaps comic in an uneasy way. I didn’t overthink it; I just let the lines come.
If I could put my hands on the notebook, I could tell you how many lines I wrote in the end. Just under ninety, I think. Later I typed them on my laptop, revising along the way. And over time I played with the lines, adding a very few, cutting out more, changing the order, until I finally arrived at Fifty-Two Lines About Henry. Not poetry, or a short story, at least to me. Just its own modest thing, a small portrait of a dreamy, mildly deluded man who, if life is kind, won’t do too much harm to himself or anyone else.
Cary Fagan’s first chapbook was published in an edition of six copies, all typed by him. Some forty years later he is a co-editor of the chapbook house, espresso. He also publishes books for adults and kids, most recently The Animals (Book*Hug). He lives in Toronto.