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.

Sometimes the autobiographical link in each story is very literal, like I did work at The Texas School for the Blind, and I did once lose a mattress out of the back of a friend's truck.

I'm not very disciplined. I tend to write late at night because I get distracted during the day.

I write most of my first drafts on an old manual typewriter, a really old one. It's a big black metal Woodstock from about 1920. I try to write everything down at once, in one sitting. The longer stories in this collection are divided up into sections. Each section represents a different sitting, a different idea for the same story.

I'm just a dog person. I love dogs very much, especially big ones, hounds, and retrievers. I think they are funny and often have good senses of humor. Plus, they give unconditional love.

I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity.

Dogwalker is a book of fiction, with characters based on the types of people who truly exist in the world. I've seen them and know them - some of them I know really well. Although the stories are sometimes gritty and unsettling, my hope is that in the end they hit a positive note.

I have many stories which don't make it to the computer. When I put it into the computer I make some changes and often add a few sentences here and there. I like the typewriter for first drafts because it means you can't change anything right away, you just have to put it all down.

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.

The first story I wrote was Catface which was later selected for The O. Henry Collection, so that gave me some confidence to try some more. Gathering these stories together was fun, but I realized when I read them that I have certain mental preoccupations and they keep recurring in my stories.

I'd just like to point out that almost all of these stories in this collection were rejected by some publication at one time or another, some of them have been rejected a lot, in fact. Find people you trust and listen to them.

I have two dogs myself and they are always around when I write, so they tend to creep in there.

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.