September 19, 2007 – So after some weeks of discussion, I am very happy to report that my editor and I have settled on my next book, tentatively called “Anthony, Izzy and me.” It’s about a remarkable period on the farm in which my friend Anthony Armstrong and I went on a remarkable journey of friendship together, very powerful and challenging for both of us, and ultimately, a testament to friendship, loyalty, and courage, and a statement about pain, anger and love, and the ways in which we do and don’t help one another in our culture. By the book, this friendship should never have happened. As it turned out, the friendship saved both of us in a number of ways.
  This book is also about the emergence of Izzy as a major element in the life of the farm, and in my life, focusing on the extraordinary experience he and I have had this year when we underwent hospice training together, and found ourselves entering the lives and emotional experiences of the dying. Hospice has awakened me to the mistreatment of the dying, particularly the ways in which society buries death and dying far from consciousness. Izzy is a remarkable animal, and his ability to enter the lives of the actively dying and brighten their journey to the end of the lives is something I cannot explain, only marvel at. The story of these two relationships, these two friendships is what the book is about.
  These two experiences shaped my year on the farm. I debated doing a book on Anthony and one on Izzy. My editor Bruce Tracy and my friend and Random House publicity exec Brian McLendon helped me to see that I should do both. The book will also include some of the pictures I’ve been taking and posting all year of Anthony’s journey and a few of Izzy’s hospice work. Anthony is now an artist and a concrete designer (countertops, tables, benches, surfaces), and when I met him he was a handyman working on my  barn and looking for a dog. Izzy was left to run a farm in New York State on his own for five years, cared for by a loving caretaker. Both changed my life. I could not begin to list the many things the farm has brought me, especially the people. Can’t wait to get going.