THANK YOU Milwaukee! Three hundred of you came out to hear my first talk about The Education of Will, and I can't thank you enough. Needless to say, I was excited and terrified and thrilled and nervous and empowered and overwhelmed to be speaking in public for the first time about the journey that Willie and I took to overcome our fears. I won't pretend that it was easy. But we all know that some of the best things in life are hard won, and that certainly is true for the journey I began six years ago when I first started writing about how Willie set me back before he helped me to recover. Thank you Wisconsin Humane Society and Boswell Books for having me! Today is another big day because it's the official release date of The Read More
Archives for 2017
Collars I have Known and Loved. Or Not.
The impetus for this topic came from an article I sent out on Facebook on how to behave around a service dog. The article made many good points about respecting the space around a working service dog and his/her human, but I didn’t notice that it came with a photograph of a dog wearing a prong collar. Many people commented on the content of the article, but several also called me out for sending around a photograph of a service dog wearing a prong collar. After initially being abashed abut not noticing the dog’s collar, I realized that this created an opportunity to have a dialogue about the state of dog collars in 2017. Our family dog, Fudge, had the same collar worn by all the dogs in the neighborhood--leather, buckle fastener. I’m sure she would have pulled us around like a wagon if Read More
The Books Behind the Book
I spent three years writing The Education of Will before deciding that I would go ahead and publish it. I wrote and wrote and wrote for myself, as a well-documented way to resolve baggage from my past and move on. I had wanted to try writing fiction, but got discouraged by editors and agents who said, "Well, that's a very difficult world to enter; every week publishers are blasted with a fire hose of works from hopeful fiction writers. Why don't you write a memoir?" I had no plans or interest at that time to write a memoir (don't you have to be, ahem, older?), but I was also working with a brilliant therapist at the time who encouraged me to write about some of the things we were talking about. Not for her, not for anyone else, but just for myself. Writing is a powerful thing. I often Read More
Holy Moly, Trisha’s on Twitter
Don't take that to mean I know what I'm doing. Seriously, who knew this 140 character stuff was so complicated? Expect me to tweet like a 5 year old in kindergarten for awhile. FYI, it seems every variant of my name is taken, so I ended up taking the handle @McConnellWrites. Come say hi. Speaking of writing, that's all she wrote for today. I'm deep into creating four different talks for 12 book tour events in February and March for The Education of Will. Not to mention the logistics of traveling to Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, Columbus, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco (or close to anyway), Boston and Philadelphia in a brief period of time, and arranging for AV, hotels, etc etc. Enough already. I do hope you'll forgive me for being a bit less prolific on the blog during the Read More
Resource Guarding, Dog to Dog (Repost)
I've had a lot of questions lately about resource guarding. I'm not sure why--dogs stuck together inside because of the weather? A butterfly flapping its wings in China? Who knows. But I thought it was a good time to revisit a post I wrote in 2014 about dogs who guard resources from other dogs. Here are some thoughts and ideas: There’s no doubt that RG between dogs is a bit trickier than when it occurs toward a person, perhaps because it is simply easier to control the behavior of a member of our species than it is a dog. But there is a lot one can do to prevent or treat RG between dogs. Can it solve all problems between all dogs? Do I have a bridge to sell you? No, but here are some ideas that I’ve found helpful in the past. PREVENTION I know this isn’t helpful once the problem Read More