The case of the mysterious veterinarian

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This article was published 30/05/2023 (331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg veterinarian Philipp Schott has let the cat out of the bag — he has plenty of stories to share.

Since 2019, the German-born Schott, who heads up the team at the Birchwood Animal Hospital in St. James, has published three novels and three books of non-fiction.

His latest book, Six Ostriches, was published May 23, and is the second in his Dr. Bannerman series of veterinary mysteries set in the fictional Manitoba town of New Selfoss. Schott launches Six Ostriches tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where he’ll be joined in conversation by former Free Press columnist Doug Speirs.

While he has dabbled in writing since his youth, the 57-year-old Schott opted to follow his parents’ advice and focus on finding a profession.

“I did well academically, and I was science-oriented. I kind of stumbled down the path that ended up in veterinary medicine — it was really more or less accidental that I ended up there,” he says, over the sound of a dog barking from the examination room of his clinic. “Before you know it I’m working here full time, and the writing faded more and more into the background… and then you start a family and all those things. But it was always a passion.”

Fast-forward some years, to when Schott decided to have a go at writing more regularly.

“I’m a fairly directed kind of person. So it was like, OK, I’m turning 50 in 2015 — I’m going to start to write seriously. I’m going to figure out how you do this: how you approach a publisher, etc. To do this, I’m going to take a day off a week, and that’s going to be the writing day,” he explains.

Once the words started coming, Schott had to figure out how to navigate the publishing world, without any formal knowledge of how it worked or even an agent.

“I came into this without really knowing anybody in the industry,” he says. “I just went about looking at Canadian publishers and what they published, and read up on how you approach them with a query letter.”

Schott’s published debut came in 2019 with The Accidental Veterinarian: Tales From a Pet Practice, a collection of real-life stories from his veterinary career published by ECW Press, which earned him a nomination for best first book at the Manitoba Book Awards.

Schott has since published two more books in the Accidental Veterinarian series — 2021’s How to Examine a Wolverine and last year’s The Battle Cry of the Siamese Kitten, which is a finalist for the best non-fiction book at this year’s Manitoba Book Awards.

While Schott feels luck played a part in his landing a deal with ECW Press, who has published all his books, he also figures the subject matter didn’t hurt either.

“Pets are having their cultural moment, at last — I think it represents something profound shifting in society,” he says.

But Schott’s interest in writing stretched beyond non-fiction anecdotes about his day job, and in March 2021 he published his first novel, The Willow Wren, based on his father’s plight as a young German boy in the Second World War. Schott’s second novel, Fifty-Four Pigs, was the first to feature Dr. Peter Bannerman and his work as an overly curious rural vet whose analytical way of thinking helps him unravel mysteries.

Schott was keen on exploring a character over multiple books, and figured the mystery genre was the best way to do that.

“It seemed the most apt — I didn’t really want to write sci-fi or fantasy or horror, or any of the other genres,” he says. “Mystery provides me a kind of a sandbox to play in with respect to characters and location.” And while he initially had considered setting his Dr. Bannerman books in Gimli, he instead opted to create the town of New Selfoss.

The events of Six Ostriches kick off when one of the titular birds swallows what appears to be a Norse artifact. This sets off a chain of events that includes, but is not limited to, surgery on the big bird, an increasing number of strange and ominous animal ailments, and gruesome (but not graphic) ends to characters both human and animal.

Much of the mystery of Six Ostriches revolves around pagan rituals, hate-filled message boards on the dark-web, and claims of Icelandic settlers in Manitoba dating back centuries further than originally thought.

“I stumbled on a piece of information about the resurgence of Norse paganism in Iceland… a few thousand adherents, reviving the old Norse pagan religion,” Schott explains. “But that community is split, and that there’s also a right-wing, white nationalist element to it.”

One aspect of Dr. Bannerman that Schott was keen on clarifying in Six Ostriches is his neurodivergent characteristics.

“He’s on the autism spectrum, what we used to call Asperger’s… I didn’t make that explicit in Fifty-Four Pigs,” he says.

Schott’s own family experience helped inform his writing about the issue. “My father was autistic — people weren’t diagnosed in the ’40s, but he was, and my children are, and my brother is. So it’s something I’m very familiar with.”

Looking ahead, Schott is aiming to scale back his medical practice, which will allow even more time to bang out books. “I’m headed to semi-retirement next year… I’m going to move away from frontline practice to just ultrasound, reduce my hours and focus more on the writing.”

He’s already hard at work on a book of non-fiction about the history of veterinary medicine meant for a general readership, and is busy finishing up the third Bannerman book, Eleven Huskies, which will be set in remote northern Manitoba.

“If you write small-town mysteries, after a while you start to think, ‘All right, half the town must be dead by now,’” he says, laughing.

ben.sigurdson@winnipegfreepress.com