Zele Community Table
January 8, 2008

Annie Mack
Author
“The Shoretown Dogs Go Loco”

Michael Conniff: When did you come to the valley?

Ann McLeod: We came in 2000. Me and my partner. We happened to visit my sister in Missouri Heights on October 1, 1997, and that did it. We came here when we retired.

MC: What did you retire from?

AM: I was a computer programmer was at Cal Berkley. My partner, Karen Signell, was a Jungian analyst. She’s a great person to live with. We’re a couple of novelists. I’ve been writing since I was about 40. She was writing professionally. I wrote a book when I was about 16—it was six pages but eventually I expanded it to 450.

MC: What were you writing when you started?

AM: In my twenties I wrote science fiction but I only had one book published. It was about a wife who drove her husband to be reduced to a set of teeth mowing a lawn. I became a feminist and said no to an offer to put it in an anthology.

MC: Why did you say no?

AM: I was stereotyping a hen-pecked wife. Like a lot of women in the early 1970s I got caught up in the women’s movement. It took me a while but one time I saw a guy snickering about a woman’s liberation march. I was so pissed—I had false eyelashes then, I wore tiny dresses, I was into being pretty. I started marching and got more and more involved. When I was in college I was standing around at college fraternity parties and nodding. Feminism made a lot of sense to me. I’m a great backer of Hillary Clinton.

MC: Did you keep writing?

AM: I was writing novels but they weren’t getting published until I finally got “Being Someone” published in 1991 by a feminist press, Spinsters Ink. It’s about a computer programmer having to decide whether she wanted to work on defense weapons. I was 51, already considered an old person.

MC: How old are you now?

AM: Now I’m 67. I notice in writing my hand doesn’t work. My aunt lived to 101.

MC: What was the book about?

AM: It’s about a woman making a decision. It was about the different kind of alternative families. It sold about 5,000 copies. A good read for feminists and other thinking people. I thought I’m on my way when it was published. But the press was sold to someone who didn’t like my male character because he was too likeable. You’re writing for drama and you’re writing a complicated story. That was about the right to die—a woman helping a man to die. I read a lot of books. I read a lot about nurses—they’re women interested in women’s lives—they helped patients. The publisher said they liked the book but didn’t want to publish the next one. No dice. So I self-published. I sold 68 copies of “At That Moment.”

MC: When did you start to write fiction about dogs?

AM: I was about 55 and it was just much easier to write about dogs than people. They’re simpler. They’re straightforward. It made me happier to write about dogs. I like dogs more than people. I have one, an Australian shepherd, Koko: She’s very responsible, a herding dog, she’s smarter in the book than in life and speaks English. She’s competing in the book with a terrier named Bowser for top dog when the current top dog steps down. Bowser is a charismatic trickster. He always knows how to get attention. Koko is dutiful, a good dog.

MC: What’s the plot?

AM: Koko thinks she knows what’s best—to stay off the leash. In “The Lost Dogs of Shoretown,” the Shoretown dogs go loco. The third one is “The Shoretown Dogs Hit Colorado.” Shoretown is on the coast of California, which is temporarily flooded. Koko’s owner is Michelle and their partner is Ranger Bill. The books don’t have any children, just as I don’t. It doesn’t fit as a young adult book. I’m just not that interested in children.

MC: What is it about dogs that you like?

AM: It’s the difference between dogs and adults. Dogs are grateful humans have taken them in. They are more or less loyal to their humans. They’re scared the humans are going to fence them, to leash them. They think humans are busy with lots of stuff that isn’t important, like computers. Humans love the dogs. They love them. The first book is conventional, about dogs who are kidnapped by a rabid bird-lover who frames the dogs. Koko’s job is to uncover this plot and convey it to the humans. There’s a lot of human-dog misunderstanding.

MC: What does Koko do?

AM: She brings objects, she chases things, doggies. She doesn’t talk on the phone like Rita Mae Brown’s dog. It’s a happy ending. No dog dies. There’s the danger the leash law will be passed, so that’s the issue. Koko has problems communicating with humans, finding where the dogs are kept by the bad guys. Being able to run away.

MC: Is Koko anything like Lassie?

AM: I didn’t see that. There’s a wonderful book about Jack Russell, a book for adults. In it the Jack Russell is killed by a coyote and his master is remembering his young short life. But it’s too sad. I loved “Watership Down.” And the Benjy movies. I’ve seen some of those. I didn’t care for dogs until I was in my 50s. I had cats. There’s a cat in “Loco.” Tiputini, but he’s very minor.

MC: When did you first get dogs?

AM: A dog came to live with us named Lisa, an Australian shepherd.

MC: Like Koko.

AM: Like Koko. I guess what I liked is they’re so related. They act like they care about me. I never felt like that before. Apparently I had a dog when I was a little girl and I didn’t like it. I can imagine their innocent and pure—they’re natural. We’re more like monkeys: we’re devious and smart and tricky. We’re not as loveable.

MC: Thank you.

AM: I was taught to tell the truth.

MC: Where did you grow up?

AM: Storrs, Connecticut. I went to school at Cornell,

MC: You must have been a pioneer as a woman computer programmer.

AM: Women got into it very early on, then men got into it. It was open to women. One of the few things women could do besides nurse, teacher, it was open to females. My mother was left a widow when I was 7 and my sister was 3. She wanted to make sure we could get married. She thought in case we lost our husband we should have a way of making a living. She had a PHd in bacteriology.

MC: What about your sister?

AM: My sister married a millionaire. She was a computer person. I was jealous of her because she was the popular one. But I never envied her life.

MC: What’s next for you in terms of writing?

AM: I’d love to write the story of my mother after the dog books. She found out later in life that her father had embezzled funds from a church school and had to change his name. When she found out she was fifty and she said let’s pay the money back.

MC: Did you?

AM: No. She was widowed, a young mother who went back to school, and brought us up. It will be fiction because all I have is some old letters. She was an honest woman—she wouldn’t even take a pen from a hotel.

MC: Where can people get the dog books?

AM: They can go to Kokothedetective.com or Explore in Aspen, Carl’s Pharmacy, Town Center Books, the Willits General Store, Through the Looking Glass in Glenwood Springs, Red Mountain Books in the West Glenwood Mall, High Tails in West Glenwood, and Paddywacks.

MC: How does the real Koko feel about all this?

AM: She’s resigned to it. Well, when I take her into readings, she’ll slump on the floor and get up slowly and accept a lot of commotion or a lot of noise without protest. But she’d rather be going for a walk.