Follow Your Friend

<p>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.</p>