We owned a magical dog once and she was the inspiration for
this book. The story itself came to me in a series of early morning
images that appeared last spring over a period of months. No
matter how hard I tried to ignore them they continued to re-appear
with a vividness that compelled me to act. I outlined the story and
then began looking for an illustrator who could bring the story to
life. After a futile two-month search I wandered into a student
exhibit at the Tweed Museum in Duluth and was immediately
captivated by the artwork of Ginny Maki. I contacted her and briefly
described the story to her and without a moment’s hesitation she
joined the project. Her initial drawings had an uncanny, even eerie
resemblance to those first images that had haunted me months
earlier. The writing process that followed was joyful as the story
flowed through me almost verbatim as it appears in the book today.