My Very Good, Very Bad Dog
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Tanya Shearer lives in Alabama with her husband, Clay. Their family includes two wonderful married children, their spouses, granddaughter Zoey Clayre, and Cornbread. She loves writing short stories and walking Cornbread. This is her fourth story published in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. E-mail her at tshearer24@yahoo.com.
Jessica Snell is a writer who lives in sunny Southern California. She’s the editor of Let Us Keep the Feast: Living the Church Year at Home and Not Alone: A Literary and Spiritual Companion for Those Confronted with Infertility and Miscarriage. She blogs about faith, fiction, and family at jessicasnell.com.
Laura Snell, her husband Dave and their dog Gus Gusterson live in Wasaga Beach, Ontario where they operate their web development and online marketing firm, GBSelect.com. Her son Ryan lives in Melbourne, Australia. E-mail her at laura@gbselect.com.
Jean Haynie Stewart has shared her memories in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series eighteen times. She edits freelance books and articles from her home in Southern California where she lives with her retired husband of fifty-five years. Their grand-dog and grand-cats are nearby, along with the grandchildren, to bring much joy.
Kristin Stuckmyer is a music therapist who has used therapy animals to assist in her work with children who have special needs. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband, daughters, service dog Teddy, and her cat Crystal. For more about a day in the life of a service dog, check out Teddy’s Tales at www.allshewrote.org.
W. Bradford Swift has written several true-life stories for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. He and his wife co-founded Life On Purpose Institute in 1996 (www.lifeonpurpose.com). He also writes speculative fiction under the pen name of Orrin Jason Bradford. Learn more at wbradfordswift.com.
Lisa Timpf is a freelance writer who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Her creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of venues, including More of Our Canada, Outposts of Beyond, Good Times, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Christmas in Canada, New Myths, and Third Wednesday.
Lucy Tobias is a former award-winning New York Times Regional Group reporter and the author of Florida travel and gardening books plus a children’s book about manatees. Lucy writes a popular travel blog called Saturday Morning Magazine. Lucy lives in Sarasota, sharing space with one dog and three cats. E-mail her at greatwalks@gmail.com.
Pat Wahler is a retired grant writer and proud contributor to ten previous Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Pat resides in Missouri and draws writing inspiration from family, friends, and the critters who tirelessly supervise each moment she spends at the keyboard. Learn more at www.critteralley.blogspot.com.
Jessica A. Walsh lives in New Jersey with her husband and dog. She blogs about her inspiring journey of self-discovery at blog.crackingnut.com. She co-edited Reading Glasses: Stories Through an Unpredictable Lens, a fiction collection, including her own story, “Unquiet Mind.” She is working on her first novel.
Dallas Woodburn is a writer and teacher living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is proud to have contributed stories to more than two dozen Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Learn more about her youth literacy organization Write On! at www.writeonbooks.org and visit her blog at dallaswoodburn.blogspot.com.
Sandy Wright is a gifted-and-talented teacher who is also a mountain girl who loves to tromp and snowshoe with her dog. Her passion is writing and she is active with the North Texas Christian Writers. Painting, horseback riding, and traveling with her husband are right up there as well. E-mail her at wrightonsandy@yahoo.com.
Susan Kimmel Wright lives and writes in a creaky, old western-Pennsylvania farmhouse with her husband Dave and her animal family and fosters. Her car and clothing are permanently embedded with pet hair, and her heart with love and precious memories. E-mail her at kidsbookwrighter@gmail.com.
After receiving a Master of Education degree at UBC, Sarah Wun traveled to the Middle East to begin her career as an ESL teacher. She currently resides in Shanghai, China where she teaches sixth and seventh grade English and Sexual Health Education. She enjoys writing, often about her experiences overseas.
Megan Yeardley is a college dropout who loves spending time with her family, friends, and especially her dog and cat! She would like to give a shout-out to Silver 4 for molding her into the person she is!
Meet Amy Newmark
Amy Newmark was a writer, speaker, Wall Street analyst and business executive in the worlds of finance and telecommunications for thirty years. Today she is author, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. By curating and editing inspirational true stories from ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences, Amy has kept the twenty-three-year-old Chicken Soup for the Soul brand fresh and relevant, and still part of the social zeitgeist.
Amy graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University where she majored in Portuguese and minored in French. She wrote her thesis about popular, spoken-word poetry in Brazil, which involved traveling throughout Brazil and meeting with poets and writers to collect their stories. She is delighted to have come full circle in her writing career — from collecting poetry “from the people” in Brazil as a twenty-year-old to, decades later, collecting stories and poems “from the people” for Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Amy is a frequent radio and TV guest, passing along the real-life lessons and useful tips she has picked up from reading and editing thousands of Chicken Soup for the Soul stories.
She and her husband are the proud parents of four grown children and in her limited spare time, Amy enjoys visiting them, hiking, and reading books that she did not have to edit.
Follow her on Twitter @amynewmark and @chickensoupsoul.
About Robin Ganzert and American Humane Association
Robin Ganzert has been president and CEO of the American Humane Association since late 2010, leading the nation’s oldest organization dedicated to the protection of animals and children. Dr. Ganzert utilizes the insights she gained as deputy director of the prestigious Pew Charitable Trusts and, prior to that, as Wachovia’s national director of philanthropic strategies, to bring visionary leadership and a renewed vibrancy to the 134-year-old American Humane Association.
Since 1877 the historic American Humane Association has been at the forefront of every major advancement in protecting children, pets and farm animals from abuse and neglect. AHA also leads the way in understanding human-animal interaction and its role in society. As the nation’s voice for the protection of children and animals, American Humane Association reaches millions of people every day through groundbreaking research, education, training and services that span a wide network of organizations, agencies and businesses.
Under Dr. Ganzert’s leadership, American Humane Association has been named a “Top-Rated Charity” by CharityWatch and achieved the prestigious “Gold Level” charity designation from GuideStar.
A familiar face to millions of Americans from her frequent TV appearances and the highly-watched Hallmark Channel’s American Humane Association Hero Dog Awards, she also hosts her own radio show, Be Humane™ with Dr. Robin Ganzert, which mixes practical expert pet advice with guest appearances by some of America’s best known pet lovers from the movies, music and sports.
She is the author of Animal Stars: Behind the Scenes with Your Favorite Animal Actors. She authored the foreword of Animals and the Kids Who Love Them: Extraordinary True Stories of Hope, Healing and Compassion.
Meanwhile, the Association’s best known program, the “No Animals Were Harmed®” animals in entertainment certification, which appears during the end credits of films and TV shows, today monitors more than 1,000 productions yearly with over 3,400 production days with an outstanding safety record. American Humane Association’s farm animal welfare program ensures the humane treatment of over a billion farm animals, the largest animal welfare program of its kind.
Most recently, Dr. Ganzert spearheaded a groundbreaking clinical trial that hopes to provide scientific substantiation for animal-assisted ther
apy (AAT) in the treatment of children with cancer and their families. The trial is now underway at five pediatric cancer hospitals across the nation.
A graduate of Wake Forest University with undergraduate degrees in business and accounting and a Masters in Business Administration, she served as Assistant Dean for Finance and Administration at the university’s Babcock School of Business while pursuing her doctorate in higher education finance.
Robin has appeared on NBC’s Today, ABC World News Tonight, Fox & Friends, On The Record with Greta Van Susteren as well as other local and national television programs. She has been a guest on The Diane Rehm Show, Sean Hannity’s radio show and many other radio programs. Robin has written for or been quoted in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Foxnews.com, USA Today, Fast Company, The Boston Globe, The Tennessean and other news outlets.
Robin and her husband Bart reside in North Carolina and are the proud parents of three human children. Fur children include dogs Gatsby, Daisy and Chas, as well as feline family members Rosebud, Poochie and Cedes.
Thank You
We owe huge thanks to all of our contributors and fans, and to their fascinating, loving, intuitive dogs. We loved your stories about your dogs and how they enrich your lives. We could only publish a small percentage of the stories that were submitted, but we read every single one and even the ones that do not appear in the book had an influence on what went into the final manuscript.
We owe special thanks to Assistant Publisher D’ette Corona, who not only read most of the thousands of stories submitted for this book, but also worked with the contributors on any edits to their stories and ensured that we got a final manuscript on time. She was ably assisted by editors Barbara LoMonaco and Kristiana Pastir, who read hundreds of submissions themselves and proofread the final manuscript. Our outside editor Susan M. Heim deserves all the credit for her fabulous idea of including fun facts about dogs at the beginning of each story instead of our normal quotations. She did an amazing job finding the facts and pairing them with the stories.
The whole publishing team deserves a hand, including our Director of Production, Victor Cataldo, our graphic designer, Daniel Zaccari, who turned our manuscript into this beautiful book, and all our team members who provided photos of their family’s rescue dogs for our chapter illustrations.
Sharing Happiness, Inspiration, and Wellness
Real people sharing real stories, every day, all over the world. In 2007, USA Today named Chicken Soup for the Soul one of the five most memorable books in the last quarter-century. With over 100 million books sold to date in the U.S. and Canada alone, more than 200 titles in print, and translations into more than forty languages, “chicken soup for the soul” is one of the world’s best-known phrases.
Today, twenty-three years after we first began sharing happiness, inspiration and wellness through our books, we continue to delight our readers with new titles, but have also evolved beyond the bookstore, with super premium pet food, a line of high quality soups, and a variety of licensed products and digital offerings, all inspired by stories. Chicken Soup for the Soul has recently expanded into visual storytelling through movies and television. Chicken Soup for the Soul is “changing the world one story at a time®.” Thanks for reading!
Share with Us
We all have had Chicken Soup for the Soul moments in our lives. If you would like to share your story or poem with millions of people around the world, go to chickensoup.com and click on “Submit Your Story.” You may be able to help another reader and become a published author at the same time. Some of our past contributors have launched writing and speaking careers from the publication of their stories in our books!
We only accept story submissions via our website. They are no longer accepted via mail or fax.
To contact us regarding other matters, please send us an e-mail through webmaster@chickensoupforthesoul.com, or fax or write us at:
Chicken Soup for the Soul
P.O. Box 700
Cos Cob, CT 06807-0700
Fax: 203-861-7194
One more note from your friends at Chicken Soup for the Soul: Occasionally, we receive an unsolicited book manuscript from one of our readers, and we would like to respectfully inform you that we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts and we must discard the ones that appear.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Very Good, Very Bad Dog
101 Heartwarming Stories about Our Happy, Heroic & Hilarious Pets
Amy Newmark. Foreword by Robin Ganzert.
Published by Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC www.chickensoup.com
Copyright ©2016 by Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
CSS, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and its Logo and Marks are trademarks of Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the many publishers and individuals who granted Chicken Soup for the Soul permission to reprint the cited material.
Front cover artwork courtesy of iStockphoto.com/ Igorri1 (©Igorri1)
Back cover photo of puppy courtesy of iStockphoto.com/WebSubstance (©WebSubstance)
Back cover photo of dog with tilted head courtesy of iStockphoto.com/dhotard (©dhotard)
Interior dog illustrations courtesy of iStockphoto.com/AdrianHillman (©AdrianHillman)
Interior photos of dogs courtesy of Chicken Soup for the Soul employees
Photo of Amy Newmark courtesy of Susan Morrow at SwickPix
Photo of Robin Ganzert courtesy of Anne Grant
Cover and Interior by Daniel Zaccari
Distributed to the booktrade by Simon & Schuster. SAN: 200-2442
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Chicken soup for the soul : my very good, very bad dog : 101 heartwarming stories about our happy, heroic & hilarious pets / [compiled by] Amy Newmark ; foreword by Robin Ganzert.
pages : illustrations ; cm
ISBN: 978-1-61159-956-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-6115-9256-6 (eBook)
1. Dogs--Behavior--Literary collections. 2. Dogs--Behavior--Anecdotes. 3. Dog owners--Literary collections. 4. Dog owners--Anecdotes. 5. Human-animal relationships--Literary collections. 6. Human-animal relationships--Anecdotes. 7. Anecdotes. I. Newmark, Amy. II. Ganzert, Robin. III. Title: My very good, very bad dog : 101 heartwarming stories about our happy, heroic & hilarious pets
SF426.2 .C45 2016
636.7/02
2015956064