The Writer in the Doghouse

Loretta Sinclair has been writing stories since she was old enough to hold a pencil and young enough to believe that animals were secretly running things. She still believes that. It has only gotten more convincing.

She grew up in a house with a dog, hamster, several cats, and the occasional bird. My sister even kept a spider as a pet. And so many books there was nowhere to put them — on shelves, under beds, stacked beside the bathtub, balanced on the kitchen counter. She studied art history at a college in Sacramento, where she also acquired a lifelong appreciation for the way a single image can hold an entire world.

Her fiction tends toward the warm and the slightly absurd. She writes about children who discover things adults have forgotten, animals who understand more than they let on, and the strange magic that lives in ordinary places — the back of a closet, the bottom of a garden, the space under a grandmother's kitchen table.

She lives in Northern California with an unreasonable number of houseplants and rotating custody of her granddogs Chuckie and Douggie, who have eaten one manuscript between them and show no remorse.