Writer and dog lover finds home in Queens

Pamela Ditchoff said she and her husband Paul bought their Western Head home in 2001.

They officially moved here in October of this year.

Ditchoff has since enrolled her dog Phoebe in the St. John’s Ambulance Pet Therapy program.

Phoebe is a seven-year-old Greyhound mix.

She has one blue and one brown eye, plus black and white toenails, said Ditchoff.

“I’m close to the hospital,” she said, “so it will be nice to have two dogs available for the hospital.”

Phoebe has passed all the tests to get into the program.

She is now waiting for her first supervised visit at Queens General Hospital.

Dogs are “amazing and petting them has been medically proven to lower blood pressure,” said Ditchoff.

She is looking forward to taking Phoebe to the hospital because of the joy the dog has to offer patients and staff.

Ditchoff described neighbours and her community as kind and generous.

“People of Liverpool are so accepting and open,” she explained. “I feel like I want to give something back to the community.”

Volunteering with Phoebe in the hospital is one way of doing that.

She also opened a pet sitting business, called P & P Pet Sitting.

Since she works from home as a copywriter, she is able to do this as well.

“I love dogs,” she commented.

Her parents raised Brittney Spaniels, so she has always been around dogs.

Today Ditchoff works from home, has a pet sitting business and volunteers with her dog, but before coming to Queens County she wrote two novels.

Both “Mirror of Monsters and Prodigy’s” and “Seven Days and Seven Sins” were reviewed by the New York Times.

“I write literary fiction,” she stated.

Starting out as a reporter she then used her Bachelors degree in communications to get a job writing for a television station.

Soon after she began her own copywriting agency, she said.

Ditchoff also wrote for a lot of websites.

In Michigan she took part in the “Creative Writers in Schools Program” through the Council for the Arts.

She said schools would apply for a grant to have an artist come to the school for a week.

“I did that as a poet,” she said.

In 1986 she wrote “Poetry 1,2,3” which is a teaching text for teachers to use in the classroom.

On Dec. 11 Ditchoff volunteered to attend Angela Burke’s class at the Dr. John C. Wickwire to discuss poetry.

“The class so was great,” she commented.

She did three exercises with them.

Besides copyrighting, Ditchoff is currently working on a new novel based on the history of the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, she said.