The Kitten and the Book

Cat and Book FAQs, with litterbox and font details included.

The Cast of Characters:
Kitty Echo
We were going to get our six year old daughter a white kitten named Snowflake? Well, it morphed, like a character in an anime movie: from white girl cat (Snowflake Mimi) to white boy cat (Snowflake Bosco) to a gray tabby with a pink nose who is upstairs napping, and is named Echo. We adopted him Saturday.

The Poetry Book (see below)
My book about adopting from China (The Long Birth) just arrived, and is now listed on Amazon.com. Most folks are ordering direct through me so they can have a discount and get Zoe's signature on the book. She works for candy, literally (don't tell her dentist).

So, with this week's new kitten and my new book, I thought I'd answer a few questions folks have asked me.

Re: The Font
I went with Garamond, or, since I work with a committee of opinionated writers, one might say "we." It is pretty and old fashioned, and like ordering bread at a bakery, you don't know how interesting the options are until you've had, say, a really good olive loaf.

Re: The Litterbox
Snowflake Mimi Bosco Echo does use it, and we clapped for him when he first did this.

Re: The Artist
Cover artist Nikki McClure is a Pacific Northwest artist whose prints I love; they have these rich deep colors and are not drawn in ink, as it appears, but from cut paper. I asked to use her work, and my publisher's designer, Tania Baban, helped me pick the nest image on the cover. It was all handled through the publisher, Jim Natal.

Re: Claws
Kitten have claws. As poet Marianne Moore might have written, "Kittens have claws and one is made to know it." The story of the little kittens with mittens sounds very attractive now (but dudes, don't lose them!). Echo likes to massage us at night with his tiny sharp claws sort of involved. Think Edward Scissorhands as a masseuse. I trimmed his claws with nail clippers, and he let me. Good kitty.

Re: Nocturnal?
The book is active any time you read it; the kitten is active all night long. Remember: when you see a sweet relaxing kitty in the afternoon sun, he is napping to be lively all night, when you sleep.

Re: Marketing
Some students in Chemeketa's excellent Visual Communications (Graphic Arts) program are designing postcards to advertise my January Readings with Musician Lorin Wilkerson, and the kitten, being adorably perfect, needs no advertisement whatsoever.

Re: The Dog
It is possible our dog adapts more easily to books, though, than to kittens. . . (we have him downstairs hanging out with books now, and will get him to meet the kitty next weekend). We want them to get so used to smelling each other on our clothes and in the house that, when they finally meet, it will be more like a reunion than a meeting. Every day, my dog Grendel looks at me boredly, as if to say, "Well, where is it?"