Former gambler, current professional dog trainer and life-long creative M.K. Punky chats with Washington Square Review editor Melissa Ford Lucken. Punky, aka Konik, once a high stakes gambler, discusses how evaluating his intentions led him to living a very different life–one as a professional dog trainer. A lifelong writer, he muses over how his journalist mindset has contributed to his creative vision.

M.K. Punky’s poem, Married to a Crystal Ball, appears in the Summer 2024 issue of the Washington Square Review.

MK Punky’s author website

MK Punky’s dog training website

The giant poetry art project described in the show

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Washington Square. On air is the Audiotown square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal.

Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor of the Washington Square Review.

I'm here today with MK Punky, whose poem Married to a Crystal Ball is in our Summer 24 issue. Hey there, M.K.

Hello, Melissa.

So tell us about your poem. How did you come to write it?

My wife is a physical therapist and a healer who uses a lot of different modalities.

In the last few years, she's more and more gotten in touch with a kind of shamanic approach to healing, and she seems to have discovered a great facility for retrieving the past. So I just thought, what if she could take this newfound ability and retrieve the future? What might we do with it?

And given my background in gambling, specifically on sports, I thought, man, it would be really cool if she could just sort of flash forward a little bit and just tell me the scores of the games.

For sure. I'm really curious about what you said about the changes in her abilities and her being able to kind of tap into the past.

Can you talk a little bit about that and give us a couple examples?

I have a limited understanding of how it works.

My sort of general take on it is that she opens the healing space in her clinic for her guides, who apparently are ancestors and other people that she has some kind of deep spiritual connection with, and they apparently sort of show her or tell her information. She's very much just a hollow reed, a. A channeler.

And I think it was startling to her at first how so much of what was coming to her was then confirmed by her patience. You know, she said, someone is talking to me from your past.

And it all seemed a little bit like, you know, the charlatans who do fortune telling and seances and stuff. But I've seen enough patients exit her clinic, like, floating on air that I started to believe in it.

That must have been really astounding.

Yeah, especially since her training is she has a master's in physical therapy with Western modalities and has done all that stuff, but over the last 10 years or so, really embraced things like Reiki and visceral manipulation and energy work. And this all seems like a kind of holistic and organic transition.

I bet we could talk a lot about that. But the reason I asked for an example and the reason I was saying it was astounding is because, as you said, it's what sparked this particular poem.

How did you interpret that when the poem first came to you? I guess what I'm asking is, were you surprised when the idea for the poem came?

No.

I, like most folks, are musing about all sorts of silly things all the time, and some of those musings turn into poems, Some of them turn into short stories, some of them turn into nothing. But it was one of those. This is a interesting idea.

And to me, there was a kind of humor in it too, because my wife doesn't care about football, really doesn't know anything about football, and I just thought, would it be great, great to have this little portable crystal ball to take around with me?

I would agree. There's definitely a touch of humor to the poem. That's one of the things that I really liked about it. How does it fit in with your other writing?

Well, I wrote a lot about gambling when I was younger. Three of my books are about gambling.

And while I am no longer an active professional sports better, I remain fascinated by the lines and the point spreads and what's going on in the betting markets and what my former colleagues are doing. Everything in that world has gotten more and more difficult. There are fewer and fewer secrets. Everybody has an algorithm now.

Everybody has a supercomputer that can help them. So what's left? Well, maybe your own personal shaman.

You said that you left that particular. Would that be a profession? Was that your main thing? You left it behind? I'm just curious, why did you leave it behind?

Because I had had enough. It had served its purpose, which, frankly, was to earn money. And that's it.

When one is in a profession that does not truly create anything, doesn't help anybody, is of no service. It's a kind of spiritually draining and kind of enervating thing.

And all the time I was making fabulous money and thinking to myself, is this really what I want to do with the rest of my life? Shouldn't I be gallivanting with artists and poets and improv comedians, that tribe?

Or should I just be spending 60 hours a week with bookmakers and, you know, lowlifes? So I would say that was really one of the signal moments in my Life where I walked away. I just said, I've had enough.

I think I have no regrets whatsoever about that.

Was there a particular moment or day when you realized that was the end?

I had some legal problems near the end of my career, some pretty serious stuff. Everything turned out fine.

We never did anything illegal, but it was badly misunderstood by people who didn't really get what I and my group did and subpoenas and grand jury testimony and stuff. And I was like this, no, okay, I don't want this. And that was pretty much it. Yeah, I wrote about it in a memoir I wrote called the Smart Money.

And I do remember seeing a car outside my house that I didn't recognize. And it kept showing up there. And whenever I would sort of like pull the blinds back and look, it would pull away. And I.

I thought, this is not worth it.

Right, right. That's understandable. How did you get into it in the first place? Because I know you were a musician in your earlier days.

Yeah, I was actually a. I was a journalist and writing many freelance articles.

Turned out I got a bunch of assignments that were gambling related and I sort of threw myself into that world, tried to learn everything I could, interview everybody I could without actually being a participant. At first I was sort of acquiring all the expertise of a. Of a participant.

And then eventually I was invited by some of the people that I had previously interviewed. Pretty much it was like, hey, you want to make some serious money?

And as we ink stained wretches know, there's a lot more money in casinos than there are in literary pursuits, I.

Would imagine, quite a bit. You mentioned interviews a couple times.

Are there any that stand out to you as, like, some of the conversations you had in the beginning that just really made you curious? Because when I'm listening to you talk, it sounds like one of the things that appealed to you about this gambling world was just the.

The learning aspect, the kind of looking behind the curtain.

Yeah, all these people I met were sort of larger than life, Damon Runyon type characters, I think. One that made a great impression on me, the man that I interviewed recently died, actually. But he was a kind of became a legendary figure.

He was a man named Archie Karras who took a borrowed stake of $10,000 and ran it into $17 million from gambling over a course of several months. A legendary story and a legendary figure. And that interview made a strong impression on me.

Not because of the great success that the guy had, but it sort of hit me that there really are human beings who truly have no Respect for money. They do not care. Win, lose, Rich, poor, they just want to be in action. They just want to have it all online.

And I realized I'm not one of those kind of people. I'm. I'm actually, I think, rather risk averse. I only want to gamble when I have the best of it.

And it was fascinating to meet him and several others who it was like, the point was the action, not the winning.

Mm, yeah, that makes sense. It does, yeah. What?

And it. It taught me that it's a reason why you, Melissa, or I, Michael, will never win $17 million.

When we started with 10,000, because if we were lucky enough to run that 10,000 into 20,000, we'd probably say, like, oh, my God, I have doubled my money. Or we would at least like, put away 5,000 and okay, I'll just gamble with this.

So this guy turned it into 20 and turned it into 50 and turned it into 100,000, but he didn't want to stop. Turned it into a quarter million. He didn't want to stop. Etc. All the way up to 17 million. As the.

I wrote about him in my book, the man with the $100,000 breast. He eventually gave almost all of it back, which was pretty much preordained.

Like, you knew that was going to eventually happen, but it was sort of thematically consistent. He didn't care. It was just. I want to just be known as the biggest, sickest gambler ever. Wow.

That is a really different way of thinking about money, for sure.

Yeah. And reminding me that, like, those of us who are healthy or have a proper perspective on money. And I'm using that all very loosely.

It's interesting to meet people like that who just view the world a lot different than we do.

Do you think that that worldview is. Is that connected to what you were talking about when we first started on this subject, saying that that's kind of why you left it behind?

Yeah, I. I felt like I wanted to create things. I. All the time that I was a successful gambler, I was still an author. I published five or six books.

Not about gambling while I was still gambling. The gambling was a way for me to be someone with literary and artistic aspirations who didn't have to live the bohemian.

Okay.

Starving life. And I felt very good about that. Like, I can have all the comforts and dignities that most aspiring artists don't have.

They have to suffer the indignities of trying to be a creative person in this society.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I felt like this is cool.

Because I can be who I really want to be, which is a creative person, someone who's interested in being useful to others, helpful to others, compassionate and kind to others, but not have to do a bunch of things just to keep a roof over my head. I had gambling for that.

Yeah, that's an absolute truth that most writers do something else. Very rare that someone is just making a living off of their writing. Yeah, yeah. So how do you make a living now?

Certainly not as a poet.

I don't know. Does anyone do that?

Oh, I don't know. Now. I'm actually a dog trainer. I still am writing my books and writing poetry and doing all sorts of fantastical artistic projects.

But I'm a dog trainer.

I have been my whole Life, more than 40 years I've been training dogs and sometime around Covid, I was strongly encouraged to turn it into a profession, not merely helping out friends and neighbors. And it's been a great joy. Anyone who has ever had a dog knows how much joy and beautiful energy a dog brings into one's life.

So imagine every day being surrounded by six, seven, eight, nine of them. It's wonderful, just the greatest. And I'm happy to tell you right now, as we are chatting, there are seven dogs in my office.

And what are they doing?

They are blissfully napping. I made sure they got a nice big hike and romp before our chat and hopefully they will just snore through the whole thing.

Nice. So do people bring the dogs to your home and you work with them there?

Yes, I have a school and they're dropped off in the morning. They spend the whole day with me and picked up in the evening.

Describe a little bit how that morning goes. What's your typical routine?

Once all the dogs are here and everybody has had a few minutes to go bananas and be excited to see each other, we put the leashes on and we go for an hour long pack walk again, whether there's five dogs or nine dogs, they all walk together. I train them all individually so they speak a common vocabulary, they have a common energy and it's really beautiful.

They all move together as a unit. They all respect each other's space. And when we come back from our morning walk, everybody usually wants a little bit of a rest.

That gives me a little time to write poetry, do whatever other creative pursuit I'm doing at the time. And if I have a new student after that, that dog gets a lot of personal one on one attention. I do pack training.

So all the new young dogs get their behavior modeled by the older, more trained dogs. And it works very efficiently, very quickly.

And it's quite beautiful because all humans are just sort of like translators, whereas the dogs are speaking a non verbal language that we don't really speak. And they're able to tell each other things that I'm not able to. And it's phenomenal how, how well this all works.

Can you give an example of that?

Yeah, sure. How about just like teaching a puppy how to say sit and stay instead of me telling it sit. And instead of like trying to put it in that position.

My technique is to ignore the puppy, put my attention on the trained dogs, give them the signal to sit, reward them, and do it over and over. The new dog observes and seems to have the question like, well, how do I get this treat? How do I get involved in this? And they just sort of.

They first they come in and they try to get it and I just take it away. And they figure out very quickly, oh, I see. If I just put my butt down like the other ones do, I get that thing.

And it's stunning how quickly the dogs can learn just by watching how other dogs. I think the technical term is social learning and dogs are very good at that.

That sounds pretty amazing. What's the maximum number of dogs you can have together at once?

I can have together at my school a dozen dogs I have found just because of the way width of sidewalks in my neighborhood. And about nine is what I'm comfortable walking at one time I have had and it just. Yeah, there's a lot of feet. Leashes.

You must turn a lot of heads when you walk.

Yeah, I think the neighborhood's by now pretty used to seeing me and my entourage.

Well, I'm glad to hear that the dogs will let you do your writing. Let's talk a little bit about your writing. What kind of stuff are current projects for you?

And by March of that year I was like, I'm really glad I started this project. This is cool. So I wrote 365 poems that year, published very good amount of them, close to 50 of them, and I collected them all.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

And it was called the Year of when, because each poem began with the word when. And so since I started that, I just felt like I was on such a. A role. And this is something I. I want to say to fellow writers.

We all know that when you do something a lot and do it regularly, it becomes, if not necessarily easy, it becomes a little less effortful. When you are doing it all the time, and it's a. You know, someone sits down and plays the piano every day, someone who crochets every day, some.

Everything just becomes a little bit more flowing and free. And I felt after that, like, not only did I feel like my writing muscle was stronger than ever, but I also felt like my.

My ability to allow whatever was floating in to come through and go out was very graceful. It. I never had any kind of writer's block or. And so I thought, I'm just going to keep rolling with this.

And so I've been writing a lot of poetry, and it's a pleasure because it's not like pulling teeth. It's not like, you know, when is the muse going to alight upon my shoulder and whisper in my ear? It's not like that at all.

It's more like the switch goes on and let's see what happens. It's been wonderful.

I was thinking, as you were describing the project, which started kind of accidentally a little bit, it sounds like, I mean, you had no idea that the world was going to go the way that it did. Do you think the end result had a special depth to it because you worked on it over a series of years?

And to look back on that now, four years later, with certain other current events, adding more, shall we say, to the memories. I look back on that and you recall, like, there were times where we didn't know that it wasn't necessary to wash your grocery packaging.

Like, do you remember that like washing our grocery packaging and not understanding. And we also just. Everything that unfolded and happened at the time, it was so surprising, shocking, enraging.

Everything about that year had so much power. And to look back now, four years later and to see art and literature that grapples with what is going on, it's very poignant to me.

What you described from the first year writing the poems, it was like a special energy that changed as the year went on. Right. So it wasn't always the same kind of energy, but it was always intense.

Yeah. And I want to stress, like, while the project is very much a kind of historical document, not every poem is about current events whatsoever.

There were many days where I. I didn't want to write about current events. I literally just kept a little notebook and I would start filling it with potential first lines.

Basically just ideas for poems that had nothing to do with current events. So I'd say about half the poems are not current related at all. They just happen to begin with the word when.

Where did you get the inspiration from for those?

Good question. I was looking through all the poems I had published in the last 10 years, and I noticed. I was like, this is weird.

It seems like almost one out of three of them begin with the word when. Like, is this some sort of weird rhetorical tick? Or when? What is my attraction to this? And I still don't really have the answer.

It seems like it's something about that setup sparks my imagination when this happened, when that happened. And it sort of allows the most fantastical thing to be realistic.

Because when you start with, like, when so and so did this, it sounds very journalistic, but it's all imaginary.

There's an interesting thought. How does the journalism background play into the poetry?

Yeah, that is an interesting one. I feel that my journalism background has been very useful for all the writing I do, whether it's my novels or. Or poetry.

There's something very useful about the who, what, where, when, how. Just being real clear on that helps the story be told in a way that is clear, but leaves space and ellipse needs to be filled in with cool stuff.

Where do you find the cool stuff? Where in your life do you pull from?

Everywhere.

Well, the dogs, obviously. Right?

Yeah. And, Melissa, I think most writers will tell you that even when they are not in the chair at the keyboard, writing is happening all the time. Even.

Even as perhaps as we sleep and dream, writing is happening. For me, writing has always been about organizing thoughts and feelings, just organizing it. They're all racing around this addled head of ours.

And writing is a way of sort of taming them and organizing them. And so even when I'm not at the keyboard, the act of writing, I am writing.

Do you think the factual stuff, the who, what, when, as opposed to the emotional stuff? Does the factual stuff for you come first and then the emotion gets layered on, or do they happen together?

I have never really thought about that process. I. I feel like it all just sort of comes at once. I. I actually think, like the journalistic stuff is more really just a.

Kind of informs my style in that, I suppose I don't want to be sort of opaque and. And difficult to decode. It doesn't mean I want to be explicit necessarily, but I want clarity.

And I think the journalism helps bring some of that to even my most esoteric writing.

Interesting structure, perhaps.

Yeah.

Okay, I got a question for you before we finish up. What's your dream project? If you could do any creative project, what would you do? This doesn't have. You don't only have to pick one.

I would love to write another dog book that shares my secrets, my insights into training dogs, but in a way that is not a how to book.

And perhaps is poetic, perhaps his magical realism, all the kind of stuff that my wife, the Crystal Ball says is the reason why it won't be a bestseller. And, you know, because I have considered, like, I should just write a how to, just doesn't excite me.

But doing it in a way that plays with form and something that hasn't been done before does excite me.

I also know that if one is looking for large advances and big publishing companies to be interested in your work, straying from the usual forms is not. Not a good move.

Yes, that's why it's a dream. Yes, that's why it's a dream project.

But it sounds to me, the way that you interact with the dogs and the way that you teach them, I could understand very easily why you would rather write. You know, I don't know even know what you would call it. It's not like a directive. It's more like a. I don't know, like an experiential.

Experiential experience. I don't know, but I guess I never thought of it that way. But that does sound. I would read it. That's what I'm trying to say.

So if you write it, you'll sell one, at least to me.

Yay. Hooray. All right.

If people want to find you online, where is a good place for them to look?

My name Michael Koenig K o n I k.com and my dog training site is mk my initials mkdogmagic.com Nice.

We'll be sure to add those links in the show notes. Thanks a lot for coming by and talking with us today.

It's been a pleasure. Melissa, thank you for your leadership.

Thanks for stopping by the audio Town Square of the Washington Square Review until next time, this has been Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu.wsl. writing is messy, but do it anyway.

Sam.