Eastern Michigan University alumnus Tom Barthel sometimes gets to take his dog Dakota to work.
“Dakota gets motion sickness after more than about twenty minutes, he starts throwing up all over the place,” Barthel said. It’s a good thing he often gets to work with Dakota at his side, in his own backyard garden.
“It’s important to find that one thing that you love. In my case it was writing. And the other things I love are gardening, farming and animals, and I found a way to combine all of those,” he said. And Dakota gets to stay home.
Barthel is a freelance writer who writes about pets and gardening from his own backyard. He has ghostwritten a book “Garden Ponds Made Easy,” and in February of this year he published his first book “Dogscaping: Creating the Perfect Backyard and Garden for You and Your Dog” published by BowTie Press.
“It was a 10-year journey for me,” he said. He graduated from EMU in 2001 with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism. The summer before his senior year, he did an internship with BowTie Press in Irvine, California then began to work for them upon graduation.
He worked for BowTie Press for two years and then he went freelance, moving 10 times in the next eight years.
“I had a lot of ups and downs and disappointments and hard lessons,” Barthel said. “I worked graveyard shifts at newspapers, took jobs for less money than I knew would comfortably support me, just so I could one day get to where I wanted to be.
“It’s hard and a lot of struggle when you have to pack up and leave your family and friends behind every eight months to a year and a half and start over in a new place, again and again and again. It’s not easy to pursue your passion.”
He was building his personal brand, his niche in the writing market, he explained to an EMU journalism class recently.
“I eventually became the go-to guy when anyone wanted someone to write on the subject of pets and home gardening.”
He’s written and published more than a hundred articles in magazines about backyard gardening and pets on the way to publishing his own book.
“It feels really good to get my book out. It feels even better to hear people tell me they’ve been looking for a book like this for years and that I’m doing very important work. To hear people actually say things like that is the payoff for the struggling for all that time, for something that I really believed in.”
To get to this point in his life “it’s a question of going and evolving and finding a way to survive and make it that is satisfying and beneficial to you.
“Often it is self-limiting to come from college with these really restrictive ideas of what we want to do and what we want to be and what we want to achieve.
“More often, we have to work harder to find the right equation for success. That’s how it is now. It’s a fact of being a professional in America. I think it can be really good and challenge us and stretch our minds when we walk outside our comfort zones,” said the thirty-one year-old self-employed writer.
Barthel lives in Lansing with his wife and Dakota, their four-year-old Labradoodle, a rescued dog.
“We adopted him two years ago from a Toledo animal shelter.”
On Barthel’s business card is his personal recipe for organic lawn fertilizer that is pet friendly.
“I researched every ingredient. Some came from other recipes I’ve seen over the years,” he said. There’s not a one in the recipe that will make Dakota sick if he eats the grass.
In fact “a lot of the stuff in the book and my writing, I tested out right on him. He’s a really energetic, rambunctious kind of dog. He helped me with a lot of that, which is great.”
Just don’t take the dog driving; he doesn’t like that too much.
Find more information about Tom Barthel’s book, “Dogscaping: Creating the Perfect Backyard and Garden for You and Your Dog” on his Web site, www.tombarthel.com.
