I chose the title Dogwalker because that describes me pretty well. I spend a lot of time walking around with my dogs. I'd say the narrator is me in an alternate universe.

I've worked in several different places, most of my experience comes from spending eight summers at a camp for adults with a wide range of disabilities. For six years I spent every summer living in a small cabin with five men with Downes Syndrome. It was just me and these five guys, all in their forties and fifties. We had such a great time.

I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain.

I want the situations and plots to be surprising and unusual.

I'm interested in other animals too though. There's the slug in "Mollusks", and I wrote a story about bees and one about a cat which got thrown out a window by mistake, but those never made it into the collection.

Some of the stories in Dogwalker were written as long as four years ago, but I wouldn't say I've been working on this collection for four years. I have always been a little unsure of whether I could make it as a writer so I've held other jobs and worked on other projects this whole time.

I like people who lead unusual lives, and very often a person with a disability fits into that category.