Патриция Макконнелл рассказывает о переходе от поведенческой науки к литературе в новой книге «Away To Me»

Chapter A Day’s Executive Producer, Michele Good, sat down with author, Animal Behaviorist and former “Calling All Pets” host Patricia McConnell to discuss her switch from non-fiction to fiction, her writing style and her new book “Away To Me.” Episode Credits - Michele Good Host Transcript Collapse Transcript Terms of Use Transcripts are provided for accessibility and convenience and may be created using a mix of automated tools and human review. While we strive for accuracy, transcripts may contain errors or omissions and are provided "as is" without warranties of any kind. The audio version is the official record of WPR programming. All transcripts are owned by WPR and protected by U.S. and international copyright law. They are provided for personal, non-commercial use only. You may not reproduce, modify, distribute, or use transcripts for public or commercial purposes without prior written permission from WPR. For permissions, contact [email protected]. This is a Chapter Day Bonus Interview. I’m Michele Good. Patricia McConnell is well known to longtime listeners of Wisconsin Public Radio from our former nationally syndicated radio program, Calling All Pets, which she co-hosted with Larry Miller for over a decade. She’s also author of numerous books on animal behavior and training, including The Other End of the Leash, which was published in 14 languages and is considered a classic in the field. Now she’s written a murder mystery set in southeastern Wisconsin called A Way to Me. And she’s here with me in the studio. Michele: Patricia, thanks for joining us. Patricia: Thank you for having me. What a treat. Michele: This is your first book of fiction, correct? Patricia: Absolutely. Had no idea how to write fiction when I started. Michele: What prompted you to make the switch? Patricia: You know, I’m old and I sort of want to retire, but I sort of really don’t. And I love to read. I love fiction. And I thought, well, what if I just played at writing a story? You know, what if I just played at writing fiction and just sort of see how it went? I had an image in my head of what would happen in the first chapter. And I just started literally just like, I’m just going to do this for fun for an hour or so a day. And then I just got sucked into the tunnel of the fascination of the craft of writing stories. And I love stories. And we are, you know, we are a species of stories. And I just I just became fascinated at how do people do this? How do they write, make up stories that that seem realistic, but also fascinating and keep you turning the page. Michele: Your story starts at a sheepdog trial where a murder occurs. How did you decide to set the story there? It’s not often a place you encounter murder. Patricia: I’m happy to say it’s not because I’ve been to a lot of it’s a lot of it is because I was so new at writing fiction, much less a murder mystery, which is in a way more complicated because you have to know where you’re going. You can’t just sort of I’m just going to write and sort of see what happens. Right. You have to know what’s going to happen. You have to lay breadcrumbs throughout. Right. And so I thought, I don’t know how to do this. So, you know, that old saying, write what you know. So I thought, well, you know, what I know is how to be an animal behaviorist. What I know is what it’s like to live on a farm with sheep and border collies and compete in sheepdog trials. And I also thought that’s a pretty cool setting. You know, that’s a pretty interesting setting. And there’s believe it or not, there’s a lot of drama at sheepdog trials. There’s you, it’s three species, two of you trying to work as a team together to influence the behavior of a third species who doesn’t really want to play. And sheep are not, as you know by now, when you’ve read the book, sheep are not always the docile and they’re certainly not stupid creatures that people tend to think that they are. They have heads like anvils and they will turn and threaten dogs. I’ve seen them try to smash dogs into the ground. I had one sheep who did not live on the farm for too much longer who literally lined a dog up, moved her body such that the dog was between her and the cement wall so she could smash the dog against the wall. They’re not stupid and they’re not helpless. So there’s a lot of drama with sheepdog trials. But again, it was write what you know. And so that was a lot of why I made those choices. And I realized after the fact, Michele, that in a way it is also a kind of autofiction, which is a word I didn’t even know until I started learning about writing fiction, which is where you sort of take parts of your life and then you just fictionalize it, which what a lot of fiction actually is really anyway. So that was what I realized after I was done, that’s sort of partly what I’m doing, too. Michele: Your book is almost as much of a book about animal behavior as it is about murder. Maddie, our protagonist, is dealing with all these different animal cases. And I found it a very clever way to approach a mystery because Maddie isn’t a private investigator. She’s an animal behaviorist who stumbles into becoming one. Patricia: Yeah. And I love that you pick up on that because, you know, there’s mysteries, especially crime or murder mysteries where whoever is the protagonist is a detective. But then there are also ones who are like, you know, Sara Paretsky’s books, where the protagonist is a bail bondsman. Right? And she’s not supposed to solve murders. You know, there’s all kinds of stories and like so many stories, it’s a hero’s journey. You know, even the books with detectives as protagonists, they’re still on a hero’s journey. They always have something. They are alcoholics. They’ve lost the love of their lives, their wife and children were killed in a car accident. I mean, everybody, every protagonist in a mystery has to have a kind of a hero’s journey there. And that’s sort of how all of that evolved. Michele: I definitely also found myself wondering how much of this was your life, particularly in the animal behavior cases, but also with Jack, Maddy’s dog. Tell us about that. Patricia: Yeah. So Jack isn’t one dog. He’s an amalgam of Border Collies I’ve known. You know, he’s a combination of dogs I’ve known. He adores Maddy and she adores him. But he’s also could be like, I’m going to go hunt the sheep by myself, and I’ve had some dogs like that and some who weren’t. I’ve had dogs who had great big, huge open out runs. I made him have the opposite problem to sort of distinguish things a little bit. But the other thing is circling back to that point about Maddy seeing clients as sort of part of the thread is one of the things I learned, again, after the fact about fiction is that part of what so many people like about them is that you learn about something else. You learn about another world. You know, so many books out there. We’re reading about some aspect of the world, whether it’s, you name it, like being a detective or being a bail bondsman or being an animal behaviorist that people are interested in. And I actually I was surprised, I did tons of podcasts, right? And most of them were in the animal world. And almost every host asked me, did you write this book in part to educate people about canine behavior and to educate them about what it’s like to be an animal behaviorist? And they’re all like, thank you, because people have no idea what we do. And my answer was like, no, no. I’m so glad that happened. And I’m so glad that I get so many comments from people saying “like, I had no idea. That’s fascinating.” It’s just, you know, you can’t have a murder about to happen every second, right? You can’t have great drama at every moment. Right? And so Maddy had a life, and you need to know so much. To me a good book is about character. Who is Maddy and what is her life like and what does she do? The client cases were the easiest ones to write. And some of those clients are very close to clients that I saw. Very, very close to them. And they may seem like exaggerations, but like, nope, nope. One of the best things just personally is being an animal behaviorist is working with my two favorite species and dogs are one of them. Horses are close. I love horses, but people are my second. And we can just be so frankly horrific, but we’re also just fascinating. It’s just as somebody who’s interested in animal behavior, we are animals and our behavior is just ridiculously interesting. Michele: I learned so much about dogs and animal behavior while reading the book. And one of the things I found fascinating was how much of an animal’s behavior is really about the owner’s behavior. Not that the dog needs to be fixed, but that the people need to be fixed. Patricia: Yeah. And, you know, again, that’s not, there was no intent there. It’s just, that’s, that’s our life. That’s the life of professional dog trainers and animal behaviorists. That’s 90% of what we do is work with the humans, right? And it’s hard, no matter how much you love dogs, for example, so many of us do, it doesn’t mean that we’re inherently good at communicating with them. Because as I talk about in “The Other End Of The Leash”, we’re primates, they’re, they’re dogs, right? And dogs don’t hug each other as a way to express affection. That’s a way to be rude and dominating and possibly aggressive. When one dog slaps a leg over the shoulders of another dog, that’s not a gesture of affection. So we do it to dogs and dogs usually, unless, you know, unless you happen to be lucky enough to own a golden retriever and they’re like “whatever, I don’t care, I love you.” But with most dogs, if you don’t know them, you put your arm around their shoulders and they’re like, “What, what? You might want to take your hand away now, or else I get tongue flicky and nervous and I go, what did I do? I’m so sorry.” So we love them, but it doesn’t mean we understand how to communicate. So that’s just part of your job as an animal behaviorist. And if it comes out in the book, that makes me happy. Michele: There are some animals that are hurt in this book, spoiler alert. But I appreciated the fact, as someone who is very triggered by animals being hurt, animals being abused, “Call of the Wild” comes to mind. But in your book, I wasn’t triggered, even though these animals are going through some life-threatening situations, I never felt the need to plug my ears or walk away. I feel like you handled that in a much different way than other authors. How did you come about that? Patricia: Yeah, thank you for that. Because I was very conscious of that because I don’t want to read that book. I just, I just don’t. And I actually had a heated discussion with my wonderful editor from Kensington Publishing when I told her, I have to tell people up front, when I’m promoting this book, that no dog dies in this book. And she said, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. That’s a spoiler. You can’t. And I was like, oh, I have to. Because so many people that I know would never read the book if, you know, if they got to the end. I mean, honestly, could you publish “Old Yeller” now? I actually reread that a while ago, and I was gutted for two days. So I was very conscious of that. And so thank you for your for making that point, because I do want people to know, yes, there are dogs at risk. Yes, there are people at risk. But no dog dies in the making of this novel. Michele: As longtime listeners to the show probably know, we abridge 95% of the books that we air on Chapter A Day, mostly for time. And there was a lot of detail that Susan ended up leaving out. For example, there’s a couple of animal case studies that were omitted, some of the details about Manny’s abuse by her ex-spouse. She has nightmares. We cut a couple of those. Is there anything you’d like to share here that our listeners should know? Patricia: Well, you know, I so appreciate that in order to fit into a time schedule, right? I totally get it. I completely appreciate that. I don’t know exactly what’s been cut out. And by the way, I know when you said 95% of the books, you meant of the books you do, almost all of them are abridged. But you don’t take 95% of the book out. Michele: No. Patricia: Absolutely not. They would never do that. You can trust them, you guys. They would never, ever do that. And so the one thing I will say is, again, not knowing exactly what’s out, but I will say there are a few romantic encounters in the book that may or may not be there. And I guess this is a great opportunity for me to say, one, more reason to go buy the book. Thank you all very much. And for the opening, thank you, Michele. But also, I’m starting on the second book in the series. There’s going to be a trilogy with Maddie McGowan as the protagonist. And I love writing the romantic parts, that thread of “Away To Me,” so that will continue and maybe even play a slightly bigger role because I don’t know, I’m becoming a cougar at 77. It was like really fun. I was like, this is sort of fun to write about. So yeah. Michele: So it’s funny that you say that because that was my last question for you. I feel like you kind of gave us a little hint that there may be more to come. Maybe because I wanted there to be more to come, I wanted to know what was happening with the people that were coming into our life near the end. Also, there was something in the tone that said, stay tuned. Patricia: There is. Thank you for picking up on that. That was very intentional. So the intention is to write a trilogy. The first is “Away To Me”, which as some people know, is a cue for a dog to go around counterclockwise from the handler to the sheep. The second one that I’ve already started is “Come By,” which is also a cue to a herding dog, which means go clockwise. But they’re also metaphors, Michele, because away to me and come by are both metaphors for Maddie. Maddie is like staying in her own lane, stay away from me, I’m fine by myself, just stay away, away to me. But then come to me because really deep inside, I really do need you. And come by is the same way. Come, no bye. Come, no bye. And the third one, if you know anything about sheepdogs, and you might if you saw the movie “Babe”, is “That’ll Do.” Yes. And I don’t need to say any more. That will be the end of Maddie’s Hero’s Journey. Michele: I love that. Well, Patricia, thank you so much for joining me today. Patricia: Oh, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for having “Away To Me” on Chapter A Day. I listen to it all the time, and I’m just thrilled to be a part of it. Michele: Patricia McConnell’s new book is “Away To Me”. It’s airing on Chapter A Day now through September 22, and you can hear it at 7 p.m. on WPR Music and at 9.30 p.m. on WPR News. It’ll also be available online at WPR.org slash chapter through September 28. I’m Michele Good. Wisconsin Public Radio, © Copyright 2026, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin Educational Communications Board.