Pretzel, Houdini & Olive: Essays On the Dogs of My Life

Deborah Thompson is a professor of English at Colorado State University, where she teaches literary criticism and creative nonfiction. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has published personal essays in journals including the Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Passages North, Briar Cliff, Upstreet, the Kenyon Review (online), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. Contest wins include the Missouri Review’s 2008 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in creative nonfiction and the 2010 Iowa Review contest in the nonfiction category. She lives with her dogs in Fort Collins, Colorado.

"In an intoxicating mix of myth and story, natural history, science, and memoir, Thompson cooks up a masterful exploration of the human bond with dogs. Rolling in the wake of unspeakable grief after the loss of her partner to cancer, she turns to one of the other constants in her life—the love of a good dog or a dumb dog or, really, almost any dog because the operative word there is 'love,' that unconditional wet-nosed bodily kind of love that sustains us and gets Thompson out of bed every morning, the love that keeps her mind moving and keeps her alive as she writes her way out of the deep holes left by loss. Required reading for anyone who has lost someone and loved a dog—which is nearly everyone." —Steven Church, author of I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood"Woven through these evocative memoir essays are the dogs of grief and joy—and of Kolkata. Street dogs and spirit dogs. Rescue dogs that we hope might rescue us. Dogs of myth and history. Daily dogs whose fur we can touch. After the loss of her partner, Rajiv, Debby Thompson found herself unprepared for what she calls 'the animal part of loss,' the way 'skin cries' for contact. In these stories—gritty, visionary, and heartbreaking—are the dogs of this world, the dogs of life, the dogs of now and of now-let’s-go!" —Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan"Deborah Thompson’s collection of dog stories leaps past the honed edge of the twenty-first-century self-absorbency to bring home the experience of simply existing in a warm, earthbound, sense-luscious, skin-wrapped body. Thompson appeases the grief of losing a husband to cancer with tending to the simple physical needs of her dogs. Walking, peeing, shitting, sniffing, humping, licking . . . her experiences with her dogs filter out the lumpy complications and sharpen the 'now' of existing with loss. Yet this collection of stories doesn’t trivialize existence with a pat on the furry head of canine cuteness. The author doesn’t explain how humans and dogs do what they do or why they do so. Instead, she winds us through the dark alleys of her life with those warm, unquestioning companions at her side. These stories do not glide along the surface of complications that grease the surface of our lives. They do not complain and they do not explain. Rather, they show how the hard edges of life can be softened by warmth, loyalty, and a good dog." —Florencia Ramirez, author of Eat Less Water