Follow Your Friend

For a while now I've wondered about gathering the animals from my writing into an animal book. This summer I finally began that roundup. There are a lot of them! They're hiding in novels, poetry, essays, and short stories. I couldn't catch them all, but here are some favorites. I realized there are animals in everything. They arrived on their own and they walked themselves onto an ark I didn't know I was building. Mostly there are animals from around our neighborhood: birds, rabbits, deer, owls, and coyotes. There are also elephants, lions, dinosaurs, unicorns and the like (and I'm not sure if mermaids count but they're here too). This isn't a zoo with the occupants put in order by continents, it ordered itself while I went through stacks of Good Deed Rain. You'll find migrations across these pages. Animals helped with my own migrations too, from Seattle, to Portland, to Ohio, and back to the Northwest. There's a reason you find them on totem poles, invisibly guiding or otherwise. Finally, in order to keep this from becoming "The Best of the Animals," the book ends with the release of a new collection of animal stories, "Octopus Motors." I hope you find more friends waiting for you just ahead, in this inspired illustrated collection of animals from sewn, stapled, and printed books spanning 34 years of writing.