Welcome to Day Three of the Peter Beagle Interview!

Peter is the Hugo-award winning author of the strongest and most memorable fiction in the English language! His The Last Unicorn became an animated feature and has recently been turned into an audiobook. If you love good writing, treat yourself and read some of Beagle’s work!

Joy: You’ve been telling me about a number of the animals that you’ve known in the past. The cats, the dog. What’s the one thing you would say, or encourage people to learn, from that? Or that you have learned from that?

Peter S. Beagle: Can’t say about encouraging people — everybody takes what he or she knows he needs. I always think of Walt Whitman’s poem, “I think I could turn with animals, turn and live with animals.” You know, they’re so quiet and self-assured. They do not lie awake at night and sweat over their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, they’re not infected with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another over the whole earth. The thing I’ve always admired about animals is their understanding of who they are. The pleasures sometimes seen that even a cow will take in being a cow, whether it’s scratching an itch, or, two old horses standing out in the pasture, not doing anything, just standing head to tail, keeping each other company. And not needing anything more right then than each other’s shade and each other’s tails to swish away the flies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Day Two of the Peter Beagle Interview! Peter Beagle, as you probably know, is one of the leading literary lights of our generation. If you haven’t read one of his marvelous works, like The Last Unicorn, then treat yourself and get a copy soon!

If you haven’t read Day One of the interview which ran yesterday here on the blog then you might want to take a moment and catch up there first before reading on. We left the interview yesterday when Peter had mentioned that humans tend to ascribe behaviors we don’t like to non-human species. Today he talks more about that and the differences between how dogs and cats relate to humans.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a new interview series! Its been a while since the last one and this is one I think you’re going to enjoy! Our guest this time is Peter Beagle, one of this generation’s absolute best writers. Peter wrote The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place, two classics that would have earned him a place in literary history if he had just stopped right there. But of course he didn’t and we’re all the richer for Peter’s continuing to share his stories, his vision and his beautiful soul with the rest of us.

You don’t have to believe me — ask the folks who know a thing or two like fellow author Neil Gaiman or the Science Fiction folks who awarded Peter the Hugo Award this year at the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles.

By the way, The Last Unicorn is now available on audio book being read by Peter Beagle himself. And he has a fabulous voice for reading! Absolutely mellifluous!

But the one thing I CAN tell you is that interviewing Peter is a once in a lifetime honor. So with that, let me invite you to listen in on our chat about dogs, ducks, cats, horses and life. This is the first part in a series of three parts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Charles DeLint by Beth Gwinn

Charles De Lint is considered by many to be the master of urban fantasy. I am part of that “many.” After reading numerous De Lint titles, I am convinced he is a Dogster at heart so I thought you would enjoy hearing from the man who writes some of the strongest, most believable canid characters in literature.

For those of you who haven’t read his work, treat yourself and pick up one of his books with one of his fascinating canid-human characters who walk across dimensions. Their personalities, failings and beauty arise out of the blend of canid and human that DeLint imbues them with and carries through their time in his books. Here’s what he says about his writing on his website.

The best definition I can come up with for my writing was in a review that described it fantasy for people who don’t normally read fantasy. I’ve taken to calling my writing “mythic fiction,” because it’s basically mainstream writing that incorporates elements of myth and folktale, rather than secondary world fantasy. I’ve written the latter, to be sure, and dabbled in science fiction and dark fantasy, but an overall view of my work will show that such stories are very much the exception, rather than the rule.

Why, at least for me, is De Lint a canid and dog writer? Perhaps its wish fulfillment (haven’t we all wanted at some time in our lives for our dogs to be just human enough to speak to us and show us their realities?), perhaps its awe at the way De Lint weaves the worlds he and his characters know with the worlds we know or perhaps its just falling under his magic. But however he does it, De Lint helps us walk into the minds and motivations of our dog, coyote and wolf friends in ways that no non-fiction writer can ever achieve.

Joy: You have some very important canid characters in your books. How did they come about?

Charles: If you treat a dog right, you have a friend for life. A friend that’ll stand by you, no matter what. (Actually, unfortunately, once you’ve bonded with a dog, you can treat them badly and they’ll still be your friend, but that’s another story that I’m not so interest in getting into because it just depresses me.)

I grew up with dogs. We lived in a rural area and when I was young, I spent more time messing around with them in the fields and woods than I did pretty much anything else. The thing that struck me (beyond the friendship and loyalty) was how *everything* is interesting to them. They can really teach you to see the world differently and I think of them as messengers from the great spirit of the world, reminding us to play and run and see with fresh eyes.

The most important dog in my life was a mongrel named Nikki. We had other dogs at the time, and I was out walking them one Christmas morning, many years ago, and instead of taking a right turn down the frozen dirt road as we usually did, I took a left for some reason. A half mile or so down the road, I found a puppy that someone had tossed into a ditch from a passing car. I don’t know how long he was there, but it was long enough that he ended up with some damage to his legs. He was a kind of collie/shepherd mix, but his legs never really grew, so while he had a normal sized body, he carried it around on little stubby legs that had funny little crooks at each joint.

I nursed him back to health and then the first thing he did, the first time we went outside for a walk a couple of months later, was to plunge himself into a ditch of almost frozen water and get sick all over again.

But barring those early months, from then on he was healthy, and the most amazing friend. Except for when I went to school, we did pretty much everything together–long rambles in the fields, or him sleeping beside me while I read or wrote or played music inside.

So when I think of dogs, I always flash back to those years. We had other dogs before and since when I still lived at my parents’ place, but he was the one for me. So, I suppose, many of my dog/canid characters play back to him. He was always up for a trick, but he could be fierce, too, and as I’ve already said, he was always loyal. And though I’ve met bad-tempered dogs in my time, I could never write about them because they always strike me as anomalies. They’re the way they are, not because of their nature, but because of how they were mistreated, or mistrained.

Joy:`Are we going to see more of the current canid characters? What about new dog or other canid-related characters?

Charles: I’m not sure about the older characters. I feel the need to get away from the regular repertory company I’ve been working with so much over the past few years and finding a new cast to tell different kinds of stories.

As for new projects…I don’t like to talk about things I’m working on, or planning to write, because if I do talk too much about them, I don’t feel like writing the story anymore. Writing–at least my first drafts–are a voyage of discovery for me. It’s much like reading a book to see what happens next, only much slower. But I can tell you that the book I’m working on at the moment (a very short novel/novella for Viking) is called Dingo so you can guess the canids still have stories to tell through me.

Joy: What does it do for you as a writer to write about these kinds of non-human characters?

Charles: Most of my non-human characters actually move back and forth between animal and human shapes, though I do try to keep some of their animal traits as part of their character. I’ve done a lot with coyotes and crows, especially, and I like them because they’re outsiders and survivors and very very smart. One of the things I like he most about such characters is the shock of discovery for the ordinary humans that come into contact with them–how it changes everything they thought they knew about the world.

Joy: What is your next work to be released that features canid-type characters? When is that coming out?

Charles: Dingo, which I mentioned above, is slated for a Fall 2007 release. My current novel Widdershins (Tor Books) has–among a large cast of characters–an abused dog named Honey in it who is learning to deal with the world with less anger than she carried before she was freed from her owner who used her in dog fights. (She was freed in The Onion Girl, to which Widdershins is a sequel.) Her recovery plays against that of the human characters who have had similar traumatic upbringings.

And for those who are interested in such things, Widdershins is dedicated to the memory of another Honey, a dog who lived with and protected my friends Alice and Andrew Vachss.

Thanks Charles for sharing your time and love of dogs with me and the other Dogsters!

Here are some of De Lint’s titles for your summer (and year-round) reading.

Seven Wild Sisters
Wolf Moon
The Onion Girl
The Road to Lisdoonvarna
Forests of the Heart
Triskell Tales
Moonlight and Vines
Someplace to Be Flying
The Wild Wood
Spirits in the Wires
Moonheart
Seven Wild Sisters
The Blue Girl
Medicine Road
The Little Country
Dreams Underfoot
Into the Green
the Ivory and the Horn
Jack of Kinrowan
Trader
Moonlight and Vines

And this is very much just a selection of his writing. If you’re mainly looking for DeLint’s canid characters, look for those books set in Newford, a fictional Canadian-type city with human and non-human characters who live their lives and (eternities) as part of a hodge-podge community.

Welcome to the last installment of the Ken Foster interview series. I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know Ken as much as I enjoyed getting to know him doing the interview!

Drop by one of his book signings if he’s in your area and let him know you “met” him on Dogster!

Joy: How has your relationship with the dogs changed your writing?

Ken: I hadn’t really thought about this until somebody else asked me and I came up with this answer I was amazed by because I thought, “Oh my God, that’s true and yet I’ve never thought of it.” But I think because of my dogs my life has scaled down in a way and I’m not so worried about what the world thinks of me. Also, because I think I’ve gone through so many disasters in the last couple of years, with September 11th and having some friends die too young and having my heart stop and Katrina, it just changes – the dogs did this but also those experiences with the dogs made me realize that so much of what we worry about is a waste of time. And one of those is worrying about what people are going to think of what you have to say in your writing. So I think my writing has become much more direct and much more honest because I’m not afraid of saying things that matter to me. Because if people don’t like me, I’ve got my dogs. I don’t just have my dogs; my friendships with people are much better for the same reasons.

So if I never publish again, who cares? I’ve got these great dog friends and these great people friends and I can find something else to do with my time. And yet because of that I think my writing’s becoming much better because I’m not censoring myself in the way that I might have done before or I’m not writing what I am supposed to be writing. I’m writing what I’m actually thinking and feeling and I think people actually appreciate that much more.

Joy: What else is coming up for you?

Ken: There are some short stories, a lot of which involve animals in some way. A lot of which involve an intense appreciation of life. So I’m working on some more of those. I’m hoping to do this history of the American Pit Bull.

Joy: What is it about Pit Bulls? You’ve almost aligned yourself with Pit Bulls.

Ken: Part of it is that there are so many homeless or abused Pit Bulls so I find them all the time. If you work in a shelter you’re likely to see them all the time; unless you work in a shelter that refuses to help them, which there are unfortunately many of. So it’s a combination of that there are so many of them and the fact that so many people don’t want to help them that has made me feel something more for them. Also, when I realized what a Pit Bull was, because so many people don’t know, I realized that they were dogs that I had known forever and always loved and never knew that was a Pit Bull. They make up such a huge percentage of the dog population, which I think people don’t realize and they’re such a target for hate from people who abuse them and people who want to just kill them outright and make them extinct, thinking that’s going to solve the problem of abuse, which it won’t. I feel somehow, and I know so many people who have rescued Pit Bulls feel this way too, it’s like we share the same blood or something. When I see a Pit Bull, I feel like I’m related to it.

Joy: Tell me more about that.

Ken: I think part of it’s from saving Sulla, who showed up at my door and was torn-up and had heartworms and was sick and sick and sick and every time I thought she was healed she came up with some other kind of parasite. So I would literally hold her as if she was a baby sometime. This was while my own heart was failing and I didn’t realize it so my whole experience saving her and ending up having to save myself seems tied together in this very emotionally intense way. So I’m talking about essentially her relatives. If you’re saying that they aren’t worth saving, then you’re saying that she’s not worth saving and I take that very personally.

Joy: What’s bad about that, saying that she’s not worth saving?

Ken: Cause she’s such a great dog and she’s such a little baby.

One of the things that I realized just recently when someone sent me a slideshow of someone being rescued from the flood waters where they were wading or swimming in some cases with just their heads sticking out of the water. So they didn’t have their dog body; they had just their head. Their heads look very human. They look like either bald babies or bald old men. Suddenly I thought, “Is that what it is? Is that why I identify with them so much is that they have the look of a person to them? Because they’ve got these big skulls, and these wide-set eyes, and they’ve got ears that are sort of on the side of their head rather than on the top. It never occurred to me before but is it partially aesthetic? We have this innate thing supposedly, anyone who looks at a baby feels they need to take care of it. Maybe it’s that they look so close in some way to the head of a baby. I know there are going to be some people reading this who say, “He’s lost his mind.”

Joy: These are Dogsters. I don’t think so.

Ken: They don’t really look like a baby. I am not going to confuse a Pit Bull and a baby if they were sitting next to me. But seriously, the structure is so close, maybe that’s what it is. And they’re so playful and so emotional. So needy. And they really seek having someone to guide them and show what to do. Of course, I sometimes wonder if these same qualities are part of what attracts so many abusive people to them.

After Katrina, the Louisiana SPCA estimated that 62% of all the animals rescued were pit bulls. And there weren’t any stories of people being mauled by them. In fact, when I got back to New Orleans in October, one of the first programs they started was a rehab tent, where the traumatized dogs could be resocialized. Again, a lot them were pit bulls. And we would read to them. Sometimes I even brought some of my student’s work to share. There was one dog, Ethel, who I was particularly in love with, and of course, one day I arrived and discovered that she had been adopted. But it turns out she lives a few blocks away from me now. Sometimes I see her being walked down the street–and she’s so happy, she just gives me a quick kiss and continues on her way.

If you want to read more from Ken and find out where he’ll be appearing check out his web site!

Thanks to Ken for being my “guest!” I look forward to again crossing paths with you in the not too distant future!

Ethel

Welcome to Day 9 of Ken Foster’s interview here on Dogster! If you are just joining us you may want to scroll back to Day 1 and read it from there.

Joy: You’re saying earlier that you get to change the world of not just the dog, but the person whose going to be getting the dog on down the line. How does that make it better for you that you can change the world in this way?

Ken: It’s so much better to change the world than not change it, I guess. I think a lot of people come up with a million excuses, especially when you’re dealing with animals. “There are so many more important things,” they’ll say, “than just saving the life of an animal. There are so many more important issues in the world that we need to address.” And yet those people that talk like that, I never see them addressing any issues whatsoever. If you have the chance to very simply make a difference in an animal’s life or a person’s life, why not do it? Why not spend the couple of minute’s or the couple of dollars or the whatever it’s going to take to do that instead of not doing it? Why would not doing it be a better choice? I just don’t see that, even though I was one of those people who would see a dog on the street in New York City looking for food in the gutter and think, “someone will find that dog,” or, “There are animal control people. That’s their job.”

Joy: What’s different about you now?

Ken: Part of it is that I have dogs so when I see a dog I have an empathy for them that I didn’t have before, cause it could be my dogs because my dogs came out of that same situation and somebody was there for my dog to save it so eventually it could become my dog. So I want to return that favor in a way, even though it’s not a direct return of the favor. And part of it too is that my dogs have made me appreciate more about everything in life so I can’t walk by a life that needs assistance and keep walking because my dogs wouldn’t do it. My dogs wouldn’t walk by a stray dog and not notice that he was there. They would stop and wonder what was gong on. So I stop too. It’s really simple to me. I don’t know why other people puzzle over it quite so much.

It seems so simple, Ken, but it’s amazing how many people don’t stop! Come back tomorrow for the 10th and last day of Ken’s interview.

Welcome to Day 8 of the Ken Foster interview! When we left off yesterday Ken was talking about rescuing dogs and just posed this question about stray dogs he sees on the street: Do I want to spend two hours taking this dog and finding a home for it or do I want to leave it on the street and always wonder what happened?

Joy: What’s bad about leaving the dog on the street?

Ken: You’re leaving the problem for some other person that you think is going to not do what you’re doing, which is keep walking. The other is the dog shouldn’t be on the street. The dog needs to be taken care of. The other a dog on a street might get sick; it might spread disease; it might get hit by a car; it might bite someone because after a certain point its so terrified at its own predicament that is an understandable behavior almost. And so there are a million reasons beyond “I want to save this little animal” to do something when you see an animal on a street. Yet for the most part people don’t want to think about it. And I think part of it too is that people don’t want to think that poor animal needs my help because any time we acknowledge that other people need out help we also need to acknowledge in some way that we need other’s people help. So it’s easier to think that everything takes care of itself. And that way I don’t need to worry either about whether or not there is anyone in the world that will ever help me because everything is going to take care of itself.

Joy: Carrying that forward, what’s bad about thinking that everything will take care of itself?

Ken: Because that’s not the way the world works.

We all rely on each other in our communities and in the world at large to take care of each other that way. Every decision we make or every decision we don’t make affects everybody else. It affects people we know and people we don’t know. So when I rescue a dog I don’t know who its going to end up living with but at some point someone on the other end of the equation gets this dog who is incredibly grateful to have a home and that will always be grateful to them and be their companion until the end of its life. I don’t know who that person is and in most cases I’ve never found out specifically who it is, but they’re there. The fact I don’t know who it is doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, that I’ve done this favor for them.

I’ve got three dogs that somebody passed on to me in some way. I got Brando by adoption. I have Zephyr, who someone picked up after she fell out of a truck on the highway in Florida and I’ve got Sula who really is the only one who came to me completely on her own. I think particularly with Brando and Zephyr, I’m wondering: who are these people in their lives who took the time to get Brando off the street in Brooklyn where he was living and take him to a shelter where I eventually found him or take Zephyr off the highway, get her fixed up at a vet and bring her to a foster group where I eventually found her. I feel like I should send them Christmas cards.

Joy: How does that make you feel that you can be one of those people?

Ken: I guess it makes me feel useful. This is the thing is I don’t really think about it that much. What I think about is that individual moment between me and the dog; the moment where I see, for example, Valentino at a gas station in Mississippi and I could get in and drive away but instead I chase him down the embankment and invite him into my van and have him kiss me the entire way to New Orleans. That’s a dog that I think about almost every day. Not for hours at a time or anything but that’s a dog that is a part of my life, even though I haven’t seen him since then. I saw him once after that when I checked the home he was staying in and I recognized this dog has found his home and its not with me and he’s incredibly happy where he is.

I need to move on so he can move on too. But I think about him all the time. It’s as if I’ve seen him every day since, even though I haven’t. That’s how I think of it. I don’t think of it like I’m such a good person to have helped him and he’s so lucky and so are the people who have him, even though they are. I think of him almost as a part of my life, a part of my extended family in a way.

If you have the opportunity to do some good, why not do some good?

Excellent question Ken! Join us tomorrow for the 9th intallment of Ken’s interview!

If you want to check out Ken’s tour schedule or read more about his life in New Orleans, visit his site.

Day 7 of Ken Foster’s interview and he’s telling us about the day he met Brando.

Ken: Its, it seems funny because he was not really this way at all, but he seems so calm. And he was so shy and so tiny. I mean tiny at the time compared to his adult self, and I don’t know. It seemed, I can’t articulate how it felt, I guess. But it was one of those moments when our eyes met and everything else in the room stopped, which is why I called him my soul mate when I was interviewed on Fresh Air. Really, its because of everything that’s happened since then, but when I think back it was kind of like, “You and I are meant to be together.”

And yet for months afterwards I wasn’t convinced that was true. There were so many difficulties with bringing him home and his anxiety, which was really extremely high. I was determined to try to do the right thing for him. That was one of the things when I look back I can’t believe that I put up with all that. And my friends at the time really couldn’t believe that I was putting up with it.

Joy: How come?

Ken: I was, “Oh, it’s not that big a deal. That’s the way dogs are.”

Joy: What is it about what went on with Brando that made it such a thing that even your friends would even question it?

Ken: He immediately had extreme separation anxiety and became absolutely hysterical any time I left the apartment and would hurt himself. He would get out of any crate I bought. He started in an airline crate. He got out of that within a day. So I immediately thought, “So, we’re not going to be traveling.”

He became absolutely hysterical. He ate razor blades, like several occasions. I made a point of trying to hide all the razor blades and then he got into my luggage and found more razor blades. It was really self-destructive behavior. Plus it was loud. It was noisy. It was my neighbors were complaining and there were times I would arrive home with friends and they would see the destruction that had occurred while I was gone. They had said, “What’s wrong with this dog?” But of course I was, “He’s just getting used to the fact.”

Joy: Help me with this. On one hand you have this life you had lived in New York before, which is dogless and probably not as messy and not as noisy and all the other things that come along with having dogs. On the other hand, here you are living with Brando. What is it about living with Brando that makes it worthwhile going through all this other the noise and the mess and all that?

Ken: I think for a while it was because I couldn’t help the dog in Costa Rica. I wanted to help Brando. Also because he became so attached to me I thought returning him to the shelter and leaving him for somebody else to adopt is not going to make it any easier for him or whoever that person might be. It’s only going to make him more hysterical because his issue is that he was abandoned before by somebody else and he’s worried its going to happen again so I’m not going to do that. And because I was freelancing and working at home so I thought I actually have the opportunity to help this dog that maybe no one else is going to help.

Joy: What does that do for you to help this dog?

Ken: That’s what I didn’t know at the time and I think what I write about in the book, not just about Brando, but about all the other dogs is I started realizing that they started to occur or appear in my life around the time that many other major unfortunate things were going on. And, at least in writing the book, I don’t think this was ever a conscious or even possibly unconscious thought on my part while I was rescuing these dogs, but there are so many things we can’t control in our lives and yet we can so easily help someone else.

It’s really easy, particularly, to save a dog. It might take a couple of hours or it might take you to clear some room in your house to put a crate and to walk the dog every day until you find a home for it or you find a rescue group that wants to take it. But it’s really not that much. Why not do it? Why not take that chance and change somebody’s world. And you’re not just changing the world of the dog, you’re also changing the world of the person who’s going to be lucky enough to actually get the dog on a permanent basis further down the road.

I think for me at least, part of why I do it is not just that I like the dogs, that I respect dogs in the way that I’ve learned to but also that its something I can do. I can look at a dog and say, “I can find a home for this dog.” I can make sure that this dog finds a place and is not put to sleep or get hit by a car or whatever else might happen to a dog on the street and so I do. At a certain point it seems like a really question to answer. Do I want to spend two hours taking this dog and finding a home for it or do I want to leave it on the street and always wonder what happened?

I guess we all know which Ken chooses to do. Come back tomorrow and hear more from this gentle soul, author of “The Dogs Who Found Me,” and “Dog Culture.” If you want to read more before then check out Ken’s site.

Brando on Petfinder

Thanks for joining us for Day 6 of Ken Foster’s interview! If you are just joining us on this series you may want to scroll back to Day 1 and follow the series from there.

Ken has begun telling us about he came to be a dog lover and rescuer. It began in Costa Rica with a dog named Duque. But it was Brando who Ken found on Petfinder who really claimed his heart.

Joy: Let’s go back to Costa Rica. I want you to go to the one point you’re saying to yourself, “When I get home I have to get a dog.”

Ken: Part of it was that I think I was sort of grieving for this dog that I couldn’t bring back. Yeah and I thought to occupy my thoughts–instead of obsessing over this dog that am I going to be thinking, “Is he being taken care of? Is he okay?”–if I can take care of another dog then I can hopefully not worry so much about him. Or at least not obsess about it. Also it was that I came back and wanted to continue to get work done and I immediately noticed that without the dog I just woke up and stared at the wall.

I have to say I spent a couple of days not getting work done and I spent a couple of days where I would find myself going to Tompkins Square and looking into the dog run, past the sign that says “No people without dogs allowed.” And I thought I’m not going to get any work done until I get a dog. I made a decision within days of returning, I’m absolutely getting a dog. I went on to Petfinder. There wasn’t really a long period of time where I was trying to figure this out. I went to Petfinder and found Brando, his little picture.

Joy: As you’re looking at his picture, what goes through your mind?

Ken: When I looked at it then I thought he doesn’t look like any dog I’ve ever seen. I want a dog that doesn’t look like one I’ve ever seen because I don’t want to get a dog that seems like a replacement for the one I’m really missing.

Joy: What’s bad about getting a replacement?

Ken: I was worried that I would have expectations that it would be the dog that I was missing instead of being the dog that it was. Or that I would be disappointed that it wasn’t really like the other dog. Looks like him but doesn’t act like him. I just thought if I get a dog that doesn’t look anything like him then I can’t have any expectations and I can let the dog be who it really is and maybe move forward and not foster this obsession with a dog that’s living in another country.

At the time I still wanted to make sure I was making the right decision and I went to visit. I actually went to several shelters. I went to the ASPCA and there was a dog there named Maury who actually did look a little like Duque and was really big, because he was an adult, and he had some issues and mostly because of his size I just thought, “I can’t adopt this dog. He’s too big.”

Then I went and saw Brando, who was a puppy and therefore not big, and I was convinced that he wasn’t going to get any bigger, because somebody at the shelter told me that. But obviously I wanted to believe that because anybody looking at him would know he wasn’t fully grown. I visited him everyday for a week. I didn’t want to rush into anything. I didn’t want to make a decision I regretted. I didn’t want to have to go back and say I made a mistake. I’m giving this dog back. So I would go visit him everyday and try to take him for a walk but he didn’t won’t to go for a walk cause, I realize now because he had separation anxiety and he just wanted to stay wherever he was. Yet at the same time I completely fell in love with him. Each day he would get more and more excited to see me, even though he didn’t want me to take him anywhere. He would literally tumble out at my feet from his pen. He was so excited that all he knew was to somersault across the floor at me.

Joy: As you see him and he is tumbling out, at what point are you telling yourself that this is the dog who has to go home with you?

Ken: To be honest, when I first laid eyes on him cause I went there and I said, “I’m looking for a dog named Brando,” cause that was his name on Petfinder. And somebody had actually changed his name so the people at the front office there didn’t have that name on anything and said, “We don’t think he’s here but you can look at the dogs we do have.”

So I went over and walked in and I’m looking at these dogs and they were in a temporary shelter at the time so there were no windows and the only light was a bare fluorescent bulb. It was kind of depressing of course. They all started barking like crazy, which now that I’ve spent a lot of time shelters I know means absolutely nothing, but at the time I thought, “I wouldn’t take one of these dogs. They’re all crazy!” As I was turning to walk out, I saw Brando.

I didn’t see the sign that said Brando. I just saw him, the dog, and he was just quietly sitting, staring at me.

I thought, “That’s him.” I hadn’t recognized that it was the dog I had actually gone there to see. I just thought that, “there’s my dog.” Then I looked up and saw the sign and thought, “Oh! There IS my dog!”

See you tomorrow back here for Day 7 of Ken’s interview!

Welcome to day 5 of Ken Foster’s interview with your dog blogger! If you’ve missed any of the previous five days just page on back to read the rest.

Yesterday we left off as Ken was telling us about his interactions with the Costa Rican dogs who opened his eyes to the world of dogs.

Joy: Tell me about one of these times when you’re with the stray or feral dogs in Costa Rica.

Ken: This was sometime later when I was still in Costa Rica. I went down to eat in a restaurant in the village near this farm I was staying at. It was sort of an open air restaurant and they would let these stray dogs come in and sit next to you at your table.

There was a huge long-haired sort of shepherdy dog who came over to my table and I was sort of petting him and talking to him. The next thing I knew he had climbed completely into my lap and curled up. I was like this dog is just so great! I kind of wanted to take them all home and yet my airline wouldn’t let me take any dog home for some reason. Even if I had the paperwork they weren’t going to take an animal. So I had to leave Duque. I had to leave him behind. And actually when word got around that I was going to be taking him, several people including the gardener were furious with me.

Joy: Let’s go back to the point where the dog has climbed up in your lap and you’re telling me this is a wonderful dog.

Ken: Yeah and there were several others who weren’t in my lap, because there wasn’t room for them, but they were all gathered around the table being cute, cute stray dogs.

Joy: What’s going through your mind surrounded by all these stray dogs and this wonderful dog is sitting in your lap?

Ken: I think I was just thinking at that point, I had been there for three months and the intensity of living in Costa Rica where everything was so gorgeous and yet you couldn’t go a day without seeing something really horrible and depressing as well. Poverty, homeless animals. So I would burst into tears at some point every day, either because something was incredibly beautiful or because something wasn’t. That whole period of time just made me intensely aware of the beauty of life. So it wasn’t just the dogs and it wasn’t just the mountains. Everything was part of the whole.

As I’m talking about this I’m realizing a term that I didn’t know at the time. The idea of the sublime. It was part of the gothic and a certain period of American art where its like the person standing completely dwarfed by an enormous waterfall or enormous mountains. That was my daily existence for three months, where everything was bigger than me. Including this dog in my lap. He wasn’t literally bigger than me but somehow the very existence of this dog in my lap made me feel like I’m a smaller part of the world than he was.

I think it all goes back to whether we exist in our heads or whether we exist in our environment.

For so long I lived in New York and I worked in publishing and I was a writer and I had a Masters degree from Columbia and all these things we are taught to think are important and interesting but really aren’t. I think to be taken out of that; cause at the time when I went to Costa Rica I thought, “Man, I’m going to miss so many great parties and I’m going to miss so much good gossip about who’s signing a book deal with whom and for how much and when I got to Costa Rica I never thought of it again. It made me just realize if my entire life is living in a small village with animals, I don’t think I’ll have any regrets.

Joy: How does that make it better for you?

Ken: Cause I think I’m happier and I think I’m actually spending money on things that give something back to me. Whereas in New York, I was constantly striving to prove something to sort of an invisible board of people who I don’t think really existed. Do you know what I mean? It’s sort of like you’re waiting for approval but you don’t even know who you’re expecting to get it from. Whereas with my dogs now, and again this is something I realized when I went back to New York and then got a dog and started taking the dog out for walks and to the dog park, my world even in New York expanded to include a much broader sense of the city that I’d lived in at that point for six years, or maybe eight. Where I suddenly didn’t know just writers, I knew doctors and lawyers and craftsmen, jewelers and students; people that I never had any way of being introduced to except that our dogs introduced us.

I would take my dogs for walks and the city of New York became the outdoors for me, which it never had been before, I would walk three to five miles a day with my dog. A lot of our walks were the same walk we would do everyday but then we would also–because he had separation anxiety so I tried to spend a lot of time with him but I would also try to exhaust him everyday. So we would take these sort of field trips, as I referred to them in my head. “Where can we go that we’ve never gone to before today?‿ Let’s see if we can walk to midtown. Let’s see if we can walk to Times Square and see what he thinks of that.

Joy: What does Brando think of the trips and what does he notice that you don’t?

Ken: He knew there were flowers and a candle here that weren’t here before. “I want to sit here and figure this out.” He slowed me down. He stopped me. He made me notice these things because I wanted to notice what he was noticing and going around New York it was similar. I would see it through his eyes and I would notice the squirrels for example, which I’m sure when I was walking by myself down the street before I had a dog, I would never notice that there are a gazillion birds and squirrels in the city. With my dog, every squirrel we had to stop and stare. Every flower we had to, he would actually walk by flowers planted in the park and would want to stick his nose into each individual flower. These are the things that I would shut out because I don’t have time for flowers. I don’t have time for birds and trees. But of course, I should have time for those things. And so that’s how he taught me.

And there was a pet store. I’m suddenly remembering all the things I had to take him to because he expected it at a certain point. There was a pet store on 14th Street that we would go to and he would go immediately to the back where there were rabbits in cages on the floor and he would lay next to them and press his nose up to them. And the rabbits would press their nose back against his nose and he would just lay there, completely fascinated by these rabbits. (Brando) was an amazing dog to spend time with.

Another time too he had this blue ball he was fascinated by and we would walk down along the East River and there was a little dog park there that he would play in. And then we would take the ball back. One day he kept wanting to carry the ball so I let him but he dropped it and it rolled into the river and, of course, disappeared. But he sat there waiting for the ball to come back. Finally I managed to get him to move and we walked back and went to the 14th Street pet store where miraculously there was a ball just like that on the shelf. I kept thinking that I hope he doesn’t think that if you drop the ball in the river it will appear here everyday, because I can’t afford that.

That’s it for Day 5 of the Ken Foster interview but join us tomorrow for more!