So I begin...

By trade I am a filmmaker. My greatest “hit” was The Heart of the Game, distributed by Miramax to a bunch of applause. I love film, as it is the hotel that all the other art forms come to stay awhile. It involves photography, design, composition, acting, writing, lighting, sound, music, animation and at its essence, storytelling. I’ve made about 90 short films for good causes, and am currently working on four long form films: Touch, a narrative about tango, A series with mythologist Michael Meade, a piece on sound healer and scientist Tom Kenyon and TreeStory a feature telling the story of the relationship between people and trees.

But underlying all of this has been my fledgling career as a writer. I have notebooks and drafts of stories that could fill an attic. It is time to pull the cobwebs back and unpack some of these things.

The first place I will start is here, writing about the greatest teacher I ever had: a dog, a dog named Woody. He was the most famous dog in Ketchikan Alaska, had his own radio show, called Chew the Bone with Dr. Woody (where he answered the problems of pets or people who lived with them) and won and eventually broke every heart in town.

So I write now, encouraged and threatened lovingly by my muse and mate Sophie Mortimer. I write about Woody as practice and because of a vow. A week ago, Sophie and I made each other a vow beneath a 400 year old Douglas Fir that on November 1, 2012 we would be holding a book we had written. She came up with the idea to start a blog so I can write about Woody as it comes and as I go, organize it into a book. The book is called, Woody the Dog, Life with a Canine Avatar. And so it begins…

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Woody the Dog

Life with a canine Avatar 

By Ward A. Serrill

"What would you say if someone was asked the question, 'Does a dog have the Buddha nature?' and answered, "Woof!'"

                                    --Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums

This is a book about a dog who looked back at me and showed me who I was.  In his eyes lived the essence of free flowing streams, mountain trails, the joyous copulation of life…the stillness of a leaf on a pond, the brilliance of a great joker. 

We are lucky to look into such eyes even once. 

By breed he was a natural born waterdog, a yellow Labrador Retriever. Instead of birds, what he retrieved was my watery heart. For I met a clown angel once, and he stayed with me for awhile.