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Robert Rodi, author of Dogged Pursuit, our guest blogger for the week of 6/15

Mon, 06/15/2009

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Robert Rodi is our guest blogger during the week of June 15th. If you have any questions for Robert Rodi, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on Dogged Pursuit: My Year of Competing Dusty, the World's Least Likely Agility Dog

Read an excerpt.

Best in Show meets Marley and Me in the hilarious (mis)adventures of an unlikely duo competing for glory on the pro dog circuit

An urban intellectual and a scruffy, disobedient Sheltie team up to conquer the Canine Agility pro-circuit in this hysterical account of the quest for glory in the competitive dog world. A cousin to the popular best-in-breed show, agility competitions resemble doggie boot camp: dogs scamper across teeter-totters, jump tires, and scoot down tunnels-without leashed guidance from a human. Taking home ribbons requires a focused handler and a cooperative dog.

Robert Rodi is a self-proclaimed Blue-stater who prefers fine wine and Italian literature (in Italian) to SUVs and suburban sprawl. His dog Dusty's scrawny build and skittish personality make him an unnatural competitor. Nevertheless, Rodi recounts a year filled with victories, failures, and hysterical personalities, and the loving bond between one man and his bug-eyed dog.

About Robert Rodi:

Robert Rodi was born in 1956 in a tidy, middle-class suburb of Chicago, right around the time tidy, middle-class suburbs were beginning to face the scorn of a burgeoning counterculture. Twenty-two years later, he earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy as the mega-materialist Reagan era loomed on the horizon. Not long afterwards, he came out of the closet just as gay men were dealt the first crushing blow of the AIDS crisis.

It was perhaps inevitable that he turned to writing comedy.

Robert's first novel, Fag Hag, was published in 1991. It has been translated into Italian, French, German and Japanese. Fag Hag was followed in quick succession by Closet Case (1992), What They Did to Princess Paragon (1994), Drag Queen (1995), and Kept Boy (1996). All are available from Plume Books. Kept Boy is currently under option at Warner Brothers; Robert is working on the screenplay. Robert's shorter fiction can be found in a number of anthologies, including Men On Men 5 (available from Plume), His, and Sandman: Book of Dreams. His novelization of the film The Birdcage is also available in a Plume edition.

Robert is also the creator and writer of Codename: Knockout, a monthly comic book published by DC/Vertigo that chronicles the adventures of secret agent Angela Devlin and her irrepressible gay sidekick, Go-Go-Fiasco. Robert's other comics work can be found in 4 Horsemen, Strange Adventures, Heart Throbs, Weird War Stories and Flinch.

Robert's success has prompted the Chicago-based newspaper New City to include him for two consecutive years in its annual list of "The Lit 50: Who Really Counts In Chicago's Book World."

In addition to his career in fiction, Robert was a founding member of the Chicago-based gay performance art troupe, The Pansy Kings, and during the 1990s also performed his own monologues in the Live Bait Theatre's annual holiday show "Feliz Navidada." As a playwright, he contributed segments to the Live Bait's omnibus shows "Junk Food" and "Dear Jackie: The Queen of Camelot Remembered."

Dogged Pursuit: My Year of Competing Dusty, the World's Least Likely Agility Dog
Robert Rodi - Author