I’m thinking of a calendar – “The Women Of Battenkill Books.” It was inspiring to look up and see Maria, Connie and Marilyn Brooks organizing this massive signing and ship-out of orders for “Going Home.” Connie and her family have been working long and late hours to sort and file book orders, get packaging, work with the Post Office and get the books signed and shipped. They are also spending a lot of time on the phone taking orders and talking to people. They work well together, are organized and efficient.They stay cool and remember to have fun. I hope the orders keep coming in. If independent bookstores are to survive, we have to do more than just complain about their struggles.
I love the women of Battenkill Books. They all nixed the calendar idea but got a good laugh out of it.
Whatever Connie’s struggles have been, she hasn’t spoken of them. She is not one for sympathy-seeking or struggle stories. I am often struck – in my writing life and my personal life – by the powerful and much needed values many women bring to work. They work in concert, understand the emotional context of the people around them, believe in teamwork and can make work creative and fun. I realize this is generalizing, that all women are not like this, but many are, and I often get the feeling when I look out at the world beyond the farm, that the world would be a better, more humane, peaceful and prosperous place if women were running it.
That is surely true of my life. For signed and personalized copies of “Going Home” and the “Going Home Video” you can call the women of Battenkill Books at 518 677-2515. I’m hoping for 500 books sold there. About 75 away.
Connie Brooks is not generally a demonstrative person, but she was dancing around the bookstore today with the Post Office receipts for the first shipment of “Going Home” to about one-third of the people who pre-ordered it. She wrapped the receipts around her and she and her mother Marilyn were beaming. I signed books until dusk today and it is happy wrist-soaking time. More books are arriving Saturday. As before, a bunch of people came by to say hello and get their books signed.
Our experiment is shaking the trees. I had two interviews today from publishing publications wanting to know how Connie has done this. It was her idea and it was a good one. We are going to run with it, and with some more. This bookstore will hang in there.
We are having a blast. Maria joined me today and it was wonderful spending the afternoon with her, signing books and recognizing some of the names from e-mail and Facebook. So far, more than 400 orders for signed and personalized copies of my new book. People are voting for independent bookstores to survive and Connie has all sorts of plans to make that happen. We are all a bit taken aback by the volume of orders, coming in by e-mail – [email protected] – and phone – 518 677-2515. This seems to have taken on a life of its own. Connie will continue taking orders for “Going Home” and for my other books and for the “Going Home” video as well. I’ll be back there Saturday and possibly Sunday morning. Got to get them all signed before I head out on the traveling part of the book tour. Thursday, noon talk and signing at the Open Door, Schnectaday, N.Y., At 7 p.m., talk and signing at the Half-Moon Library in Clifton Park.
Farmers know better than to give livestock names. One farmer I know shoots his dogs when they get old and sick, arguing, as his father did, that it is the quickest, most humane- and cheapest – way for them to die. His wife says it is not easy for her. He has no problem with it, even though he loves his dogs dearly. Farmers are careful about their emotional relationship to animals. They name few cows, no barn cats, and rarely any sheep.
Animal writers know that they need to name their animals because that what gives them focus and personality, and creates characters out of them. I love doing this, and am good at it, even as I understand the pitfalls. Once I name an animal, I’m off on the journey. I permit myself to study them, grow fond of them, write about them and photograph them. They take on identities and personalities for me. They drive the stories in my books, photos and my blog. Simon is a powerful example of an animal who makes his way into the hand’s of a writer and photographer.
He gets a name, a personality and a following. His story is true, and I never dreamed he would evolve into the touching symbol he has become. But there it is. If he had landed on a real farm with a farmer who didn’t name him but put him to working hauling word or guarding sheep, noone would have ever heard of him.
Even this approach sometimes collides with reality. We name Alice and a hawk came out of the sky and left nothing but a few feathers. We named Winston and he started pecking at Maria and other people. This might well cost him his life one day, and I wouldn’t hesitate for second to do it. In my ethos, animals do not hurt one another or human beings. If they do, they leave, to a new home if possible, to a quick end if not.
I know better than to name sheep. The sheep who summer here are mostly going to market, and I will not see them again, so I am careful about the photos I take and the things I write about them. They have no names. And there is Bartleby, who we helped birth and who we did give a name, who keeled over and died in the pasture one afternoon this summer. People e-mail me all the time saying they mourn Bartleby and loved him dearly, and this puzzles me, since I did not know him well and didn’t care for him much. Where does this love come from? I think people fill in their own blanks when it comes to animals. I know I do.
I do not provide funerals or memorial services for sheep or chickens. They go out in the deep woods to feed the wild creatures, an offering from the farm to the spirits out there. It is not that I am a hard-ass, quite the opposite. I am a mush. I am protecting myself, I know the real life if animals too well, and it is no more perfect than mine.
A month ago I asked people on Facebook if they thought it was okay to feed chicken to chickens. Almost everyone – except for people who lived on a farm and had chickens – said they thought it was horrible, cannibalistic. Maria felt that way too. Last week, she tossed chicken curry and an egg to the chickens without even thinking about it. And they happily wolfed it down. They were not concerned with human ideas of propriety. Our ideas about animals, evolve, as they ought to, at least if we are open-minded. Of course, much of our culture is not open-minded – not about animals, religion, politics or medical care. Not about anything much. The very idea of free thinking seems antiquated, some duty Thoreau notion.
I got a Swiss Steer and named him Elvis and that was an awful mistake. 3,000 lb steers are not pets and are not bred to live long and Elvis’s legs started to go and I sent him off to market. I am asked about him everywhere I go, and I take responsibility for this because I named him and wrote about him as if he were a cute little lapdog. His death horrified some people, who expected him to live out his life like Ferdinand at enormous expense until the end of his days.
There is a schism between people who live on a farm and people who don’t. People who live on a farm are forced to see the real lives of animals. People removed from them often cannot. I am a writer, not a farmer, but I have lived with goats, sheep, cows, donkeys, dogs and cats. These animals do not live in a no-kill world. They eat poisonous things, trip and fall, get cuts and infections, are stalked by predators, mysterious diseases and heart attacks. They come and they go.
There is much irony in the “no-kill” ideal, a very new idea in the world. On the book tour, I meet many people who happily watch newscasts where countless humans argue, hate and and are blown up or slaughtered, but cannot read a book if an chicken or mouse dies in it. This irony is very American – we are tough on people, but are coming to worship animals. Animal rescue is one of the most interesting and active sub-cultures in America. The idea of human rescue has become almost heretical. People stumble all over one another pointing out why we can’t afford it and shouldn’t do it.
In urban areas particularly, the impulse is for a perfect world for animals, a “no-kill” world, a nearly insane but popular idea that has poor and unwanted dogs locked up in crates for years while adoptable and needy dogs perish for lack of a place to go.
This hypocrisy is especially epidemic in animal shelters, where space and money-pressed directors routinely send animals off to die in vet’s offices and special clinics, but seek out contributions in the name of a “no-kill”fantasy world. Many people tell me their fantasy in life is to buy a ranch and offer haven to animals for the remainder of their lives. I have yet to meet a person who harbors the fantasy of a human rescue ranch. In hard-pressed America, hard choices are being made all of the time. For me, the middle ground, the ideal, is for a good and humane life, as long as it can last. I’m with Thomas Aquinas. Our humanity is judged in part by the way we treat the animals around us. I don’t think he would have gone for the “no-kill” thing.
I feel this tension all of the time on book tours, but almost never where I live, or from a rural area where people understand that animals do not ever live in a “no-kill” world and where life and death live side by side, and are seen often. One is a part of the other for them, as it is for us.
For me,there is no final landing place on these issues, no black-and-white. I do not believe I am right about things, only at a particular place at a particular time.
At my first reading in Colonie for “Going Home” , a visibly upset woman shouted walked out on my talk because I said I didn’t believe dogs mourned other dogs the way humans mourn people. There are just too many dogs who are happily re-homed each year. I hope she writes her own book.
One of the things I love about writing about animals is that there are so many different ways to see them, love them, grieve for them. Another thing is that no animal would dream of having these kinds of conversations, or worries about them. They are too busy accepting and living their lives.
This morning, you are invited to get up with me and my wonderful former girlfriend and come out to the barn, to hear Simon’s joyous call to life and love,and spend a few quiet seconds with these wonderful creatures and with Maria, a wonderful creature in her own right. I never tire of seeing this loving woman and the emotions she shares with animals. Come and see, an I am heading off to the Battenkill Bookstore to sign some of the hundreds of books waiting for me.We will get them done as soon as we can.
I have often seen that a writer doesn’t know what a book is about until it is published and people tell him or her what it is about. I am getting the word about “Going Home,” in reviews, e-mails, social media postings and at book events,including my first last night in Colonie, N.Y.
This book is about empowerment, I am hearing, and that makes sense to me, as it was my hope and idea. “Empowerment,” like closure is one of those words you hear a lot but whose meaning can get obscure. It has become something of a social cliche. But it is, like many cliches, a powerful idea. Several people last night, and many more this week, have said the book is empowering. This is why:
“Going Home” says that it is okay to grieve. That it is not ridiculous, foolish, weak or indulgent – all hammers used against animal lovers for years – to feel great grief and pain over the loss of a dog, cat, horse or other animal we love. A social worker told me last night that the grief of animal lovers has been disenfranchised by a culture that trivializes mourning for animals and forces it underground, where it festers and bleeds. “Going Home” says it is okay to bring it into the light. To acknowledge it and feel entitled to it. Don’t beat yourself up or second-guess yourself for grieving an animal. Ever.
Beyond that, I am adding yet another idea. It is also okay to feel better, to heal, to move on when you are ready and in your own time and way. I tried to assemble specific tools in the book to help people feel good as well as sad. I celebrate my life with dogs, from beginning to end, and never want to lose that sense of joy and gratitude. Whenever I think of my dogs, living or dead, I smile. Try it.
“Going Home” also focuses on guilt as a useless and often inaccurate and self-destructive element of grieving for animals. The people who feel guilty, I’ve noticed, have almost never done anything wrong. Guilt is not an emotion that exists in the animal world, and it taints our glorious life with animals. It is rarely true or justifiable. People who abuse animals rarely feel guilt.
Psychologists say our wounds over the loss of animals who provide us connection and love in a disconnected and harsh world is very real, very justified, and quite understandable. I believe the book provides some insights and self-awareness that is both healing and essential to understanding our grief and loss. Many people who have lost dogs seek sympathy and understanding, but they need to know where to go to find it. And to understand that few people want to spend much time around grief and mourners. Not many people want to hear your story, and not for too long. That is one of the lessons I learned in hospice. Ultimately, we must turn to ourselves if we wish to move on, to get to a better and less painful place.
So I like the idea of “Going Home” and empowerment. It is okay to feel sad, to cry. It is okay to feel good, to move on. It is empowering to have the tools to be self-aware and to heal ourselves.
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I wanted to share with you this review of “Going Home” from today’s Baltimore Sun. I am grateful for it and for your support:
“Katz has earned a reputation as one of the more eloquent dog writers around. In a world polluted with way too many dog books without soul or style, Katz is the real thing.”
