The speaker's journey from being a poet to venturing into nonfiction writing was influenced by a deep interest in language and specificity, sparked by reading renowned poets such as Sylvia Plath. This interest in understanding and voicing women's experiences led to a fascination with the porousness between self-reflection and observing the world. Initially immersed in fiction and poetry writing, the speaker's project of writing a nonfiction book evolved over 10 years as a means to address personal and family tensions, initially intended to solve problems of the American West and eventually intertwining with events in the speaker's personal life.
The wolf carries an almost unbearable amount of symbolism in western culture, encapsulating the predatory, the carnal, the supernatural and the ravenous. But in her book Wolfish, Erica Berry suggests that it’s time to understand wolves differently: as tender, as hunted, as guardians of the landscape.
What’s more, those evil qualities may be better attributed to ourselves than to wolves. Berry weaves memoir with natural history, cultural critique, folklore and conservation to show that wolves have too often been a cypher for all our fears, and that this has left them under threat of extinction.
In this fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, recorded as part of Katherine’s True Stories Book Club, Erica discusses her experiences with wolves real and imagined.
Katherine's new book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
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