That dog in me

This essay uses sketchbooks, songwriting, and cartooning as a way of drawing lines and breath into our relationships with animals (dogs in particular), each other, and grief. Using the author’s own sketchbook of repeated drawings of her dog, the sketchbook of her late best friend, and Bento’s Sketchbook, where John Berger fills an empty sketchbook as a way of imagining the missing sketchbook of Baruch or Benedict (Bento) Spinoza, often discussing the process of drawing and grief simultaneously, this work looks at repetition in sketchbooks, cartooning, and songwriting as a way of “holding on” to what is fleeting – in a way our own lives, the lives of our friends, and especially the lives of our animal companions.