Kansas City native Bruce Cameron is a #1 New York Times best-selling author, but you wouldn’t know it from his demeanor. Like the dogs he chronicles in his novels, his gaze is steady and inquisitive, seeking connection with a stranger. His warm brown eyes pull you in, never glancing down at a phone or around the room. He speaks softly in long sentences that roll like small waves spilling onto the sand, connected by an endless stream of “ands.”
Cameron, who was born in Michigan, grew up in Prairie Village. He graduated from Shawnee Mission East and attended Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Cameron moved to Los Angeles in 2002 when his book, Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter was turned into an ABC TV series. He shares his California home with wife and writing partner, Cathryn Michon, and their dog, Tucker.
Three of Cameron’s books—A Dog’s Purpose, A Dog’s Way Home, and A Dog’s Journey—have been made into major motion pictures. Cameron recently returned home to speak at a sold-out launch event for his new novel, A Dog’s Promise.
During a leisurely conversation in the lobby of a hotel on the Country Club Plaza, Cameron shared how he accidentally became “the dog-book guy,” what he’s learned from closely observing dogs in groups, and a recent unexpected shift in what he views as his life’s work.
How do you like living in Los Angeles?
I’d move back to Kansas City in a second if my wife would come with me.
A problematic detail.
Yes, that gums things up.
Do you have a checklist of things to do when you come back?
I don’t have a list, but I’m disappointed that on this trip I didn’t eat any barbecue at all, because that would be way up high on the list. I love walking around the Plaza. That gives me such joy because it has changed a lot and yet it is very much the same as it was when I lived here.
In your dog novels, you are able to slip into the mind of a dog and narrate from a dog’s perspective. When did you come up with that format idea and how did you convince a publisher and an editor that it could work?
That is almost 100 percent not how it happened [laughs].
Please set me straight.
I came up with the idea of a reincarnated dog who returns to his boy at the end of his life because I wanted to convince a friend that she should get another dog, and as I was driving with her up the coast of California, I concocted a story about this dog, Bailey, who does just that, and I wanted her to believe that her real friend was out there somewhere looking for her, if she was just receptive to the idea.
And as I told her the story, all these details were unfolding in my mind, as if I was reading them from a script. That has never happened to me before or since.
She liked the story so much she married me [laughs].
Is the idea that a dog could be reincarnated something you had always believed, or were you just making it up in the moment?
I had an encounter once, riding my mountain bike in Colorado, with a dog that was behind a fence who reminded me so much of my very first dog, Cammie, and I think it stuck with me when I rode off on my bicycle that I may have indeed just interacted with my best friend.
I did have a fleeting thought about: What if what we think of as instinct in dogs is actually some sort of memory, and what if dogs do come back? And what would that look like from the dog’s perspective?
That was probably in the ’90s. It was a long time ago, and the thought went away, and it never resurfaced until that car ride, which was probably around 2010.
A short time later, I sat down and wrote the whole book and sent it to my agent. He said, “I can sell this in a heartbeat.”
But several heartbeats went by, two years’ worth. So Cathryn [Michon, his wife and writing partner] and I decided to self-publish it. It was just too good.
We were in the process of assembling a plan—the self-publishing part is not expensive, it’s the marketing and so on—when my agent called out of the blue and started asking really weird questions.
Like what?
“Were you really on Oprah?” Well, yeah. “Were you really on Good Morning America?” Yeah, I can send you tape. Who would make that up?
Then he called back and said, “We’ve got money for this. It’s not as much money as you’re accustomed to but it’s money.” And that was like rain after a long drought.
You did a lot of research into dog behavior. How much of your “dog voice” in your novels came from research, and how much came from your emotional understanding or intuition?
I would say that my research was not particularly helpful. A lot of what we know about dogs comes from observing wolves, and a lot of what we know about observing wolves comes from observing wolves in captivity, and it just isn’t applicable to dogs. In my opinion, you can get more information going to the dog park.
Why?
You watch dogs interact in the dog park, and you realize our whole concept of the alpha male and the alpha female is based on how we humans do things. We humans say, “OK, that person’s the boss and they are always the boss.” Well, I’ve watched dog societies form and break apart and re-form for no apparent reason. One dog will be the alpha for a while and then suddenly it seems very apparent that a different dog who had been there the whole time has now become the alpha.
What other key observations did you make from watching dogs in groups?
These creatures are optimistic, joyful. They are absolutely the most kind, wonderful creatures. I needed to put myself in that mindset to write: What is it like to be that happy? In A Dog’s Purpose, a dog starts out belonging to a hoarder. But Toby—the dog’s name—doesn’t know he’s living in miserable conditions.
“I was about eight years old when this Labrador puppy came into the backyard and just jumped into my life and my heart, and I was—from that moment on—a dog lover.”
When did you get your first dog, Cammie?
I was about 8 years old when this Labrador puppy came into the backyard and just jumped into my life and my heart, and I was—from that moment on—a dog lover.
What was special about Cammie?
The weird thing was, in the neighborhood as I remember it, nobody had dogs. Everybody had little kids, and when you have kids, a dog is like one burden too much. But it seemed like as soon as I had Cammie, other dogs started popping up. So one special thing about Cammie was, she reminded everybody in the neighborhood that you’re supposed to have a dog. Like, “We’re an American family, where’s our dog?” Cammie led me to a series of Labradors. And then I adopted a malamute.
What was the malamute’s name?
Chinook. She was very strong-willed and very disinterested in being trained to do anything, especially come when called. Chinook would just take off running and I wound up having to chase this dog all over the place.
What lesson did you learn from Chinook that was different than what Cammie taught you?
That not all dogs are like Labradors. They don’t all want to jump in the water and fetch a stick. They are not all swimmers.
How did you get your current dog, Tucker?
Tucker came to us because someone left a box full of newborn puppies outside a city shelter in Denver. They called my daughter, Georgia Lee Cameron, because she was running a rescue in Denver that specializes in saving death-row animals.
She said, “I don’t have time to bottle feed a box full of puppies all day long, but I do have a German shepherd who just weaned her puppies.” So they brought the box of puppies in to the German shepherd. Even though they weren’t her puppies, her instincts kicked in, and she nursed the whole litter, and that’s how Tucker survived.
Then my daughter called us and said, “I’ve got the perfect dog for you.”
What are Tucker’s special gifts?
He only weighs 24 pounds, and he considers himself to be a fierce watchdog. But he’s afraid of what might happen if people actually knew there was a dog in the apartment, so he’ll make this tiny little barking sound. It’s inaudible unless you are sitting right next to him. That’s his way of saying, “Stay out. I’m a fierce dog and you don’t want to come in here and deal with me. But I don’t want you to know I’m in here in case you are a bad person.”
You’ve got a gift for writing and a passion for dogs, particularly rescue dogs. Do you view your dog novels as your life’s work because they support your passion?
I feel that my life’s work is evolving in ways I cannot anticipate. I did not know that I was going to become “the dog-book guy.” I wrote one dog book, and my second novel, Emory’s Gift, [about a boy who is saved from a mountain lion by a grizzly bear] didn’t have a dog on the cover, it had a grizzly bear on the cover. It didn’t sell as well because no one told me that in America more people own dogs than own grizzly bears [laughs].
Then I wrote another dog book, and now I think if I wrote a motorcycle manual, they’d put a dog on the cover. They want to make sure everybody knows, “This is the guy that writes the dog books.”
So I thought: my mission in life is to try to get people to understand that these creatures are dependent upon us, that we seized control of their destinies in the Paleolithic [era] when we started teaming with them to go hunt. And we immediately started breeding them in the direction we wanted to take them.
That’s why we have Labradors and dachshunds and sheepdogs; we wanted dogs to do specific tasks for us. We have bred out of them the ability to fend for themselves. So we owe it to them as a species—because they have done so much for us—to take care of them.
They are complex emotional creatures and we need to be cognizant of that. To be cruel to a dog is to be cruel to a child. Anyone who has that in their soul probably needs a dog more than anybody but shouldn’t have one because there is something broken in them as a human being. I looked at [spreading that message] as my life’s work.
And then I started writing these children’s books based on A Dog’s Purpose and A Dog’s Journey: Ellie’s Story and Bailey’s Story and Molly’s Story. They’ve become a huge part of what I do as an author. I have been approached by teachers and parents that say, “I have a kid that’s a reluctant reader, but they’ll read your books” because there’s something about the way in through the dog’s point of view that really helps the child fall in love with reading.
So that might be the whole purpose of all of this, is to get me to a point where I am writing books for kids that even reluctant readers are willing to open up and read. I can’t imagine a more important job than that.
Interview condensed and minimally edited for clarity.