Scott Swanson
Shortly after his retirement from four decades of veterinary practice in Sweet Home at the end of 2016, Dr. David Larsen embarked on a second career: author.
Actually, he’d been writing for a “long time – 10 or 15 years,” but when he sold his practice on Long Street and headed home for good, he decided to get serious.
He was raised on a family farm and attended college for two years after graduating from high school.
“Those were not very good years,” he said of his initial foray in college.
He dropped out and went to work and two weeks later received a draft notice. He spent the next four years, 1965-69, in the Army, serving as an enlisted man in the Army Security Agency in South Korea and Germany.
“It was very good duty,” Larsen said.
Back in the states he finished school and moved on to veterinary college at Colorado State University, graduating in 1975. After practicing two years in Washington, he and his wife Sandy moved to Sweet Home in 1976, pulling a trailer with all their belongings behind their car with four kids, the youngest a month old.
“The town was booming in those days,” Larsen recalled. He spent 40 years as a veterinarian in the area, initially the only one in town.
And he built up a repository of stories from his days in the barns and the clinic, which he’s decided to turn first into a blog, and now a regular newspaper column, and possibly, some day, a book.
Larsen said he has plenty of source material for stories from his 42 years of practice as a veterinarian, 40 of those in Sweet Home – not just the animal stories.
“I think the profession is unique and I think we see clients in a different way than the other professions see those people,” he said. “There’s an intimacy there that develops very quickly.
“I’ve heard the statement that clients will tell their vets things that they won’t tell their psychologist.
That’s part of it. Capturing that is difficult. Some characters I can describe easier than others.”
That’s what he’s been working on for the last two years.
“Most of my early stuff is not very good,” he said. “In the last year or two I’ve been concentrating on improving my writing.”
Early on, he said, he got some help from the husband of a cousin, a former “book doctor,” who told Larsen his writing “needed a little bit of polish.”
He started taking some writing classes, particularly from Linn-Benton Community College instructor Sharon Waldman.
“My writing has improved,” he said.
His cousin’s husband suggested Larsen post stories on a blog “to see what kind of readership I could develop.”
He said it’s “doing OK,” averaging a little over 1,000 views per month at docsmemoirs.com.
He’s also been working on some children’s books based on animal characters, for later elementary-grade students.
“That’s a little more of a challenge for me,” Larsen said. “It’s a little more of a problem, generating fiction.”
His veterinary stories are based mostly on memories, he said.
“It all happened,” though he acknowledged that some details might involve “a tiny bit of ebellishment to improve the quality of the story.”
“For the most part, they happened,” he said.
Larsen said he’s familiar with the famed James Herriot, who wrote a best-selling series of stories about his experiences as a veterinarian in rural England.
“All veterinarians today think they’re going to be the next James Herriot,” he said. “I haven’t actually read very much of him. In fact, I don’t read a whole lot. I wouldn’t say I was influenced by him and I don’t anticipate that kind of success.”
Veterinary medicine has changed a lot since he began, he said.
“When I came to Sweet Home, if I could fix a dog for $100, I’d fix it. If it was $120, we were having another discussion. I don’t think that happens today.”
He said he wants his story to portray people as much as their pets.
“I want to portray their relationships, their struggles with animal care. There are some tear-jerkers, some things I have difficulty writing about.
“Emotions are pretty deep in some of the stories.”