J. D. Porter

I was deputy director of the Toledo Zoo when it celebrated its centennial anniversary in the year 2000. As my team and I planned events, exhibits, and the book that explored the rich history of the zoo, I began to recognize that there was another side to that story—the history we either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell. That is what inspired me to write the history of a fictional zoo. I wanted to tell the whole story.

My first novel, The Menagerie, A Zoo Story (2012), explores the history of the Dotson Park Zoo as it celebrates its centennial anniversary. It is told from the perspective of the present day, but it reaches back in time through two flashback scenes.

The first flashback, over the months prior to the opening of the Dotson Park Zoo in June 1912, introduces the zoo’s first director, Calvin Griffith. Calvin is a widower who is doing his best to raise two children, 16-year-old Raven and 17-year-old Buddy. Raven is a shy, quiet girl who loves animals and is delighted that her father has been asked to run the new zoo. Buddy, on the other hand, is not an animal person. He is confident, cocky, and obcessed with playing baseball. He tells his father he does not want to be a zookeeper. At the conclusion of this section, on the day of the zoo’s grand opening, Raven and her friends are rounding up some foxes that had escaped from their pen while Buddy is running away from home to answer the call of a professional baseball scout.

Twenty-five years later, on Easter weekend in 1937, we meet Calvin and his family again. He is still director of the zoo and his daughter, Raven, is grown with two children. As the family sits down for lunch, Buddy turns up unannounced. It is the first time they have seen him since he ran away. He is disheveled, bearded, and has a sad story to tell of professional baseball, war, and a life with the circus.

After I finished the Menagerie, I wondered what had happened to Raven and Buddy in the intervening years of their lives. I also felt called to expand on my exploration of the human-animal bond with zoo animals by considering two more groups of animals—the animals that share our homes as pets and working animals like horses, mules, and elephants.

In my second novel, The Dogcatcher and The Fox (2020), Raven Griffith is working for the Animal Welfare Association in 1920 Chicago, where dogs are disappearing from the streets. Now, in the third book of my animal trilogy, The Muleskinner and The King, horse wrangler and elephant man Buddy Griffith is in Atlanta, Georgia in 1936 where series of murders threaten to shut down the circus. Buddy is drawn into the investigation and must set aside his focus on the animals he has come to love and help solve the mystery before an innocent man is lynched. Muleskinner is looking for a publisher and will come out in 2025.