Lee Harrington started life as a visual artist, and received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After college, however, she found it difficult to support herself as an illustrator, and therefore took a mundane office job.  Three years of doing this (what she called “working to buy clothes to wear to work”) led to an existential crisis at age 24, when she began to question who it was she was meant to be. Friends and family members encouraged her to try writing, so she entered the graduate writing program at Emerson College in 1991. There, she wrote a few horrid short stories that got ripped to shreds in her creative writing workshops. But eventually she learned enough about technique and craft to write stories that won awards. She won first place in the Playboy College Fiction Contest, and first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, plus a number of smaller awards, grants, fellowships and residencies.

After receiving her MFA from Emerson, she moved to New York City, along with 800,000 other young writers, to try to make it big.  She wrote in a void for the next ten years, publishing stories and essays here and there but never managing to sell her screenplays and novels. Discouraged, she got married, got a job, and got a dog.

It wasn’t until 2000 that she began to get noticed because of a small column called “Rex in the City.”  The series appeared in The Bark magazine—an award-winning literary quarterly about life with dogs—and it was popular from the start. “Rex in the City” chronicled her experiences with her emotionally disturbed shelter dog, and the difficulties she and Ted had trying to manage the dog in a 300-square foot apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The column is still appearing in The Bark, which is now a bi-monthly. She credits her dog for her success, because “his love opened me up to the vast wonder of life, and to the poetry and humor and wisdom that exists in every mundane detail.”