Proust supposedly said something like “never meet your heroes”. What does a long-dead French philosopher know anyway? I recently had the chance to sit down and talk with one of my heroes, Patricia McConnell, and she is every bit as amazing as I understood her to be. McConnell, a professor emeritus of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is known worldwide as an expert on canine and feline training and behavior, and for her acclaimed books on living with and learning from dogs, The Other End of the Leash, For the Love of a Dog, and The Education of Will. She is also known to me as one of the kindest, most genuine people in the “dog world”.

I was in the midst of an identity crisis and considering embarking on a career in canine science research the first time I contacted “Trisha”. I had read her books and got up the gumption to reach out to ask if she might have any advice for someone trying to figure out how to make a living out of thinking about how dogs think. She very generously picked up the phone and spent nearly an hour talking to me, a stranger, about dogs, life, and the dog life. A decade later, this past fall, I found myself emailing her again, this time to tell her I was doing it! I followed the path I’d nervously asked her about those many years ago and became a canine scientist. But more urgently, I wanted to hear about what she was doing -- and her new adventure as a fiction writer.

At the risk of quoting another old white guy, Mark Twain famously said “write what you know”. While McConnell has been doing that for years in the non-fiction space, she has now turned to the world of herding dogs as inspiration for her first novel, Away to Me, a mystery. Like McConnell, her protagonist Maddie McGowan is an animal behaviorist who lives on a small farm in Wisconsin with her sheep dog. But, says McConnell, “she’s far braver than me.” (I’m not so sure that’s true…)

When I asked her what prompted the shift to novel writing, McConnell talked about her life-long love of fiction. As a young girl, she spent much of her time engrossed in the make-believe worlds of books. She recalls her father handing her a copy of Black Beauty and telling her, “Books are like a treasure chest. When you open up the chest, everything is in there for you. You can go anywhere in time or in space and it’s all like a bunch of jewels.”

And while books about animals of course topped her list, McConnell’s true favorites were who-dunits. So when noted naturalist and award-winning author Sy Montgomery described Away to Me -- wherein the main character risks her life trying to find her dog that has suddenly gone missing -- as ‘Agatha Christie meets All Creatures Great and Small’, McConnell couldn’t have been more thrilled.

As the story unfolded itself to her, McConnell found herself sometimes surprised by what her own imagination ran with. There’s a romantic tryst (“I wrote a sex scene!”), quirky clients, and dubious characters, but, she confirms, “No dog dies in the making of this novel! I would never do that!” McConnell also shared her plans for Away to Me to be the first in a trilogy of mysteries about Maddie and her sheep dogs. She has already begun drafting book number two, Come By (the title another double entendre on a herding cue), with the finale slated to be, That’ll Do.

As someone who is also both a creative writer and animal behaviorist, it was a delight to get to dig deep with McConnell about her writing process, new discoveries of her own abilities, the things she had to learn about scent and detection dogs to write the book, and the similarities between science research and book research. Over the course of our conversation, McConnell and I also had the chance to talk about the emerging field of button learning and the many ways we communicate with our dogs.

“A lot of us know a lot of what they’re telling us,” she said. “But I don’t think we can ever get good enough at reading a dog’s visual signals.” We both agreed that as guardians, we all have a responsibility to continue to hone our practice of noticing, and to pay attention to our dogs’ subtle cues and signals (which I’ve written about before).

“But here’s what I think is invaluable and I would love to hear more about this [from the community]... I would love to teach my dog [words for] different body parts… and then ‘hurt’. Which is a concept, a really hard thing to teach…. that would be a magical world to me where we could ask them, ‘what hurts’.”

Discover the best way to connect with your individual learner.

Take our quick quiz to discover your dog’s unique learner type and get a personalized FluentPet Kit recommendation.

Plus, get 10% off your first order when you complete it!

Take the Quiz

 

Moral of the story? At the end of the day, the more we look at things from different perspectives, the better off we are. Patricia McConnell has spent a lifetime learning, thinking, teaching, and writing about people and dogs and how they’re the same and how they’re different. Now, in writing Away to Me, she leans on her belief that what makes us human is our love for a good story to offer people yet another perspective on life and the human-dog relationship.

 

Away to Me is out February 24 from Kensington books, and available to pre-order now.

Listen to my full conversation with Trisha here.

 

Bibliography:

Courtney Sexton is a Postdoctoral research scientist at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine and has a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology and Comparative Animal Behavior from The George Washington University.