How many pet owners have looked at the animal sprawled beside them and dreamed of building a business around that face?
Jacqueline Alexander did more than dream. After years in management consulting, most recently helping restaurants improve their operations, she began searching for work that engaged her emotionally as well as intellectually. The answer was sitting nearby.
“I was looking at my dog one day and thinking, man, this little guy is my entire life,” Alexander says. “If I could dedicate my life’s work to doing something that I’m passionate about, like him, while also impacting other people’s lives positively, that’s where I want to be spending my waking hours.”
The result is Rowen Hollow, a Coxsackie-based company that creates bespoke coffee-table books narrated by pets. Customers answer an online questionnaire about their animal’s habits, history, relationships, and personality, upload photographs, and select a visual style. Several weeks later, the family pet emerges as a published author.
The premise rests on a familiar act of interspecies ventriloquism. Pet owners already narrate their animals. We know precisely what the dog thinks about the rain, the mail carrier, the new couch, and the outrageous delay in serving dinner. We assign them political opinions, elaborate grievances, regional accents, and private names for our friends. Rowen Hollow takes that running domestic monologue and turns it into an object designed for the coffee table.
To see how the process worked, I commissioned a book by Clancy, my 15-year-old dog and longtime subject. I have written about him extensively over the years, so I approached Rowen Hollow’s questionnaire with a storehouse of established material: the day I adopted him, the morning pack at the park, the friends whose pockets he routinely searches for treats. Instead of summoning memories on command, I sometimes pasted in stories that had already been told.
Most customers arrive with something closer to a collection of impressions. Rowen Hollow’s prompts are designed to draw those details out: What does the pet love? What do they fear? Who belongs to their inner circle? What have they endured? What private rituals structure their day?
One especially productive question asks about a difficult period in the animal’s life. “We don’t really think about our pet experiencing hard times,” Alexander says. “Owners really pause at this question to think about that and imagine it.” Another asks customers to identify the figures who populate the pet’s world—not simply who they are, but who they are to the animal.
“You’re learning about the animal with their people and how that relationship has changed over the years,” Alexander says. “Seeing that from the pet side has been really illuminating to me.”
The questionnaire feeds what Alexander describes as a proprietary system that builds a character profile, or “DNA,” for each animal. That process includes assigning an archetype: The pet might be moody, silly, deadpan, imperious, anxious, or adventurous. From there, the narrative can follow a day in the animal’s life, proceed chronologically, or organize itself around recurring rituals and obsessions.
Alexander says the company uses AI on the back end, with a small team developing the narrative, illustrations, and book design. The exact boundary between the software and the human contributors remains difficult to locate; when asked where one stops and the other begins, Alexander generally answers with “we.” For the customer, the more immediate test is whether the finished animal sounds like the one occupying the couch.
Capturing that voice requires avoiding the standard repertoire of jokes about squirrels, vacuum cleaners, and humans failing to understand the urgency of dinnertime. Alexander says the humor grows from the owner’s description of the pet and the character profile created from it.
“We have some pets that are moody and dark,” she says. “We have others that are silly. We have others that are deadpan.” A joke might emerge from the animal’s personality or from translating a familiar household event into the pet’s presumed understanding of what occurred.
Customers also choose a visual “vibe” and color palette. A New York-based digital team uses those selections and the uploaded photographs to create an overall visual treatment. Some images closely reproduce the supplied pictures, while others depict scenes described in the questionnaire. Available styles include watercolor, continuous-line drawing, and a more editorial approach.
The finished product in my case is Clancy: A Life in Full, a Legacy in Fur, a 58-page memoir credited simply to Clancy. His photographs have been rendered in stark black and white, somewhere between charcoal drawing, ink wash, and an image pulled from a half-remembered dream. The design alternates between full-page illustrations, extended passages of prose, and spare declarations set against expanses of white. “CLANCY, LET’S GO,” reads one spread, reproducing the phrase that still reliably brings him to his feet.
The voice is observant, literal, and faintly aggrieved. In one chapter, Clancy describes working the morning crowd at the dog park, moving from person to person in search of treats. He rejects the suggestion that this performance is funny. He is conducting business. Elsewhere, he remembers the person who rescued him from a crate and drove him to open country, where there were unfamiliar smells, other dogs, and room to run.
The dedication reads: “For the one with his arm under me. And for everyone with a pocket.” Here, certainly, is the Clancy we know.
The book also reflects the particular moment in which I completed the questionnaire. Clancy is very old. He has a degenerative nerve condition in his back legs, his walks have shortened, and I am increasingly conscious that our time together is finite. I kept returning to that knowledge while writing my responses. The prompts kept directing me toward other subjects: his routines, his favorite people, his peculiarities, his pleasures.
Alexander understood what was happening. “Sometimes owners just want stream of consciousness—to tell us everything that’s on their mind—and sometimes the prompts don’t quite bring them there,” she says.
In retrospect, the redirection helped produce a fuller portrait. Age is present in the book, but it does not overwhelm the life being described. Clancy remains busy monitoring the household, inspecting pockets, working the park, and accepting the assistance that gets him up the stairs. The book records a dog who is still here and still very much himself.
About 70 percent of Rowen Hollow’s books concern living animals; the remaining 30 percent are memorial books. Alexander made the creative decision to write those in what she calls the “eternal present,” allowing the animal to remain alive within the book’s world.
She encourages people with aging pets to begin while the small details remain fresh: the precise route through the house, the ceremonial arrangement of the blankets, the neighbor regarded as a mortal enemy for reasons long forgotten. The company can also work with photographs and memories after an animal has died.
Dogs and cats account for most of its subjects so far, although horses and a rabbit have also joined the list. Alexander says any animal is eligible. Multi-pet books are in development, along with Rowen Hollow Kids, a children’s line planned for 2027 in which the family pet might become the hero of a story dreamed up by a child.
Alexander moved to Coxsackie after meeting her wife, who was developing Cavalli Hudson Valley, an event space in a former dairy barn along Route 385. They married there six months later and now spend most of their time in the Hudson Valley. Rowen Hollow’s printing partner operates facilities around the world and produces each book near its destination. The company currently offers hardcover editions for $69 and paperbacks for $40, with plans to expand internationally in 2027.
Exactly how much of Clancy comes from Alexander, her team, the company’s software, or my previously written stories may matter to some readers. The clearest measure I have is recognition. I showed the book to half a dozen people who know Clancy, and each recognized the dog on the page. They were tickled by it. Whatever combination of questionnaire, technology, editing, and imaginative projection produced the voice, it sounded to them like him.
Near the end appears an author biography. It notes that Clancy is 15, has never been trained, possesses mostly useless back legs, works the morning crowd for treats, and would prefer to lie on your feet. Above the text is the only unaltered photograph in the book, a portrait by Val Shaff.
When Shaff took it, I joked that it looked like an author photo. Clancy gazes directly into the camera, gray around the muzzle, his expression grave enough for the back flap of a memoir. Lo and behold, he has written one.
