Leave the Dogs at Home, published summer 2015 by Indiana University Press, is a vibrant, witty, and unflinchingly confessional book challenging the norms about love and grief. It’s the kind of real truth you only hear at the kitchen table with a glass of wine.

“Claire Arbogast rewrites the stages of grief in this raw, sometimes unsettling, always compelling memoir that takes us backward and forward in time from the moment her intense, complicated husband is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Leave the Dogs at Home challenges the conventional wisdom about love, marriage, loss, survival, and grace in ways that are bound to make you think about your own life.” –Barbara Shoup, author of Looking for Jack Kerouac

Claire Arbogast grew up among the winding streets and deep front porches of historic Irvington on the eastside of Indianapolis. She started out as a kid that loved to curl up in hidden places with books and pick gooseberries with her grandmother for tart, bubbling pies. Her family owned flower shops and had a fondness for picnics in state parks. She has planted scores of gardens, some fruitful and stunning, others bratty failures, and has left behind a long line of peony bushes surely still blooming every spring.

She’s been forever experimenting with life and it with her. Trying on identities. Getting ripped from pathways unexpectedly. Celebrating and curious.

Claire now gardens, walks with dogs, and writes in Bloomington, Indiana. 

She is the recipient of a 2009-10 Greer Artist Fellowship grant and a 2008 Ropewalk Writers Retreat Masters Creative Non-fiction Workshop Scholarship.

Learn more on the author’s website: www.clairearbogast.com