The Pet Thief

In gratitude

To author Monica Drake, for letting me—some unemployed yahoo she’d never met before—think I wooed her with my account of this new novel I was working on about “cat people.” It was cocktail chatter, trying to impress a beautiful woman, slouching against the counter in future Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen’s Sellwood kitchen. To Paulann, who provided the milieu for me to woo my future wife. And to Mavis, Funny One, Mousie, Imp, for being born and adding depth and breadth to my life, and consequently, to this novel. She makes me laugh. And to the workshop writers who caught a glimpse of my first attempt at this story: Monica, Stevan Allred, Joanna Rose, Suzy Vitello, Walter Keutel, Chuck Palahniuk, Cori-Ann Woodard, Kevin Burke, and the late Candy Mulligan. To Rhonda Hughes of Hawthorne Books, for publishing my first novel, which gave me the desire to resume work on this book six years after I gave up. To Jeff Baker, book editor for The Oregonian newspaper, who gives me work and keeps my name out there. I want to thank Kristin Thiel, erstwhile fiction editor for the Writers’ Dojo, who solicited material from me—she had to ask more than once, bless her!—and published an excerpt from this novel on the Dojo’s online magazine. in gratitude And to Jeffrey and Rachel Selin, founders of the Writers’ Dojo and publishers of the Dojo’s online magazine, for providing such valuable resources in service to the writers’ community. To the annual Wordstock Festival and its former executive director Greg Netzer, for supplying the venue for me to read from this novel. To Moira McAuliffe and RV Branham, founders, editors and publishers of Gobshite Quarterly, for inviting me to read with them from this novel for Oregon Literary Review’s reading series. To David Elsey, who invited me to read from this novel and other work for his own reading series. And my gratitude to the one and only Tom Spanbauer, for trying to hook me up. To Matt Love, Oregonian extraordinaire, for his boundless enthusiasm, and for including my essay in his anthology, Citadel of the Spirit. To my friend and brother Daren Dougan, who was there when I began writing this novel, who was there for me on countless other occasions, but sadly, is no longer. I miss him. And to my friend and brother Shawn Rodgers, for his invaluable feedback on this novel, and many other topics as well. I want to thank Multnomah County Library, for making available its abundance of research tools—including good oldfashioned books. Thanks to Vanesa Kelmendi, for her Bosnian; to Markrid Izquierdo, for her Spanish; and Jan Chciuk-Celt for his German and Polish. To Shantina of the Children’s Community Clinic on NE Killingsworth in Portland, who was thoroughly professional in regard to my unexpected appearance, and patient and helpful with my odd questions when she had more important work to do. To Temple Grandin and Johnny Gruelle, for using animals and dolls to teach me about humanity. And finally, I want to thank Lidia Yuknavitch, writer, publisher, rock star, a knight in shining armor, my savior, my champion and sponsor with Fiction Collective 2. Lidia’s efforts substantiated my vision. She redeemed me from a canyon of self-doubt; a mountain of hope she gave me. ...