CAMARILLO : Author Talks About a Dog and a Book

Dorothy Ann Walker explained to 55 children in a Camarillo school Thursday how a three-legged dog whose spirit she admired became the main character in her first published book.

Walker was one of 17 children’s-book authors visiting 12 schools in the Pleasant Valley Elementary School District to share their experiences with youngsters.

The 69-year-old author, who writes under the pen name Ann Doro, wanted to talk about how she wrote her book, “Charlie, the Lost Dog.”

But many of the fourth-grade students at Las Colinas School wanted to know more about the dogs in Walker’s life, including the one that inspired the story of Charlie the German shepherd.

Which leg was missing? What kind of dog was it? How many dogs has she had? Does she love dogs?

Some of the questions, of course, pertained to her writing.

Does Walker always write about dogs?

Her answer was no, but she said she does plan to write a sequel to “Charlie, the Lost Dog,” called “Goodbye to the Mountain.”

Walker talked candidly about her frustrations with book publishers, who she said seem to take forever to give writers the answers they want.

But despite the trials and tribulations, the Iowa-born woman told the class that she is happier now than she has ever been.

“I wanted all my life to write,” said the former elementary school teacher, who once taught fourth-grade students in Thousand Oaks. “My life is better every day and it’s because I’m doing what I always wanted to do.”

Walker encouraged the students to write poems and stories and send them to magazines that publish children’s work.

“No one will read it unless you send it somewhere,” she said.

The students should not be scared of rejection letters because even the popular novel “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was rejected about 100 times, she said.

“Some people call them rejections,” she said. But to her, “those are return manuscripts, and what you do is put them in the mail again.”

Even when a publisher is interested, she said, getting a book into print can take years. Walker submitted “Charlie, the Lost Dog” in 1986. It was accepted in 1988 and published in 1990.