If you’ve ever lived in a rural part of the western United States, you’ve probably seen the bumper stickers. “Smoke a Pack a Day” is the most common one, but if you have a curious eye, you may have caught “Canadian Wolves: Government Sponsored Terrorists” or even “I wish wolves ate Californians.” The animal has long attracted much attention among settlers in the region, first as a threat to colonization, then as a mourned-over absence, and finally (now) as a contentious revenant. Countless books, written across a variety of disciplines, have documented this history. If you read them, you will find many different types of wolves: wild wolves and politicized ones, evil wolves and wolves of legendary personality, far-roaming wolves and saviors promising to restore the wildness of the “American Serengeti” (think Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, with all of its bison and grizzly bears, but all across the Mountain West).  What you couldn’t find, until recently, was a book that is conscious of all the wolves that it has constructed on the page. Enter Erica Berry’s Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories we Tell About Fear (Flatiron Books 2023), which examines the symbols we’ve made of wolves and also exorcises (or at least exercises) their scruffy bodies from the tales in which we’ve placed them. 

Based on a decade of research, Berry’s work blends history, memoir, and original reportage with literary and cultural criticism. As one might expect, it traces the story of wolves’ reintroduction into the Western United States, but it also probes the author’s own experience — and inheritance — of fear.  In this way, the book refuses to separate the world it looks out upon from the world that does the looking. Its approach is rich, layered, and nuanced. The wolves it describes are never just Bad or just Good. Insofar as they can be captured on the page, they are alive: head high and trotting, a grin and blood both on their teeth. 

I talked with Berry over Zoom on a Thursday afternoon. We were a state’s distance apart on Interstate 5—she in Portland, Oregon; I in Bellingham, Washington—and although our regional wolf packs were likely tens or hundreds of miles away from us, we found much to talk about in their considerable shadows. In the following conversation, we discuss the gaps between living bodies, the challenge of narrating others’ lives, the messiness of returning home, and how good essaying can feel like a going to a party.

North: I thought genre might be an interesting place to start, because your book employs many of the same conventions that a lot of contemporary nature and travel writing does, but it also diverges in noteworthy ways from something by, say, Robert Macfarlane, Barry Lopez, or even Rebecca Solnit. Were there elements of those writers’ work that you were trying to distance yourself from, or elements from other genres that you were trying to incorporate as you wrote this book?

Erica: I love this question. At the beginning, I just wanted to write the book I wanted to read, but I’m the sort of greedy reader who often has a few different books going at once — maybe a history book, a researched memoir, a novel — and, inevitably, they jostle and start talking. Reading means absorbing a book into your bloodstream so it can mingle with everything else you’ve read, and at some point, I had the nerve to think: could I represent that associative co-mingling on the page?! Whether thinking about symbol or real-life animal, our perception of the wolf is shaped by external forces (folklore, policy, history, science) and so the relationship between those forces (each with their own expectation of genre) felt important. The “leaps” between these genres — the moments where the reader has to get their bearings, maybe sit with the discomfort of being jostled — can be places of challenge, but also of building trust. I am drawn to books I get lost in, but also ones where I find myself, or see my life or the world in a new frame. Escapism and confrontation can feel like different impulses, but I wanted to write a book that felt both like extending my hand to the reader and also sitting them down, being like, Okay, I’m examining the scaffolding of my own experience in a way that might be vulnerable and uncomfortable, but I want it to help you do the same. 

I tried at first to do that classic New Yorker-style reportage, and I just wasn’t good at it. My life leaked in too much. I didn’t set out to reinvent genre, but it was a very conscious choice to ignore the voices of, say, publishing professionals who told me I had to focus more on the wolf or more on my life — I just wanted to do both! And at some point, I decided to lean into the benefits of what that type of gaze might offer.

North: I feel like that dynamic really shaped this project, too. If this is a book about the stories people tell about wolves, then maybe encountering an “actual” wolf is not really that crucial to the project.

Erica: I think that’s true. I was very interested in the act of, like, going into the forest, wondering what you were going to see, wondering how to interpret the shadow on the hill. All of that is a sort of padding around the wolf that’s not actually about the moment of connection. I guess it’s similar to some of my favorite stories about love, or grief, that don’t dwell on the actual moment of, say, sex or loss, but what comes before or after — I wanted to show what was “around” the wolf. 

North: Totally. In my reading, I often sensed that you used natural history less as a way to get at “actual” wolves than as one way, among many, of narrating humans’ attempts to understand wolves. This makes me think of the idea of “speaking nearby” a subject, rather than “speaking about” it, which you borrow from Cathy Park Hong’s book, Minor Feelings. It seems so appropriate, but I’d never thought of applying that idea to non-human animals, too. So I was wondering: how did that idea inform your approach to this book? What challenges did it offer you, and what affordances?

Erica: I was always intrigued by the question of How can I write a wolf? How much can I teach myself about, say, OR-7, to understand what it felt like to be OR-7? And yet in the challenge of representing a non-human animal on the page, I’m also confronted with how to put myself on the page, which extends to whoever I’m speaking to, too. Like, I’m a body interacting with other bodies, and that sounds kind of stoned to say, but it’s true: we’re all just bouncing into each other with our preconceived notions about who each other are, and we’re so often wrong. Thinking about confronting a wild wolf made that gap very obvious. But suddenly I was thinking about that in non-wolf contexts as well. It’s impossible for a reader to fully “see” the life of OR-7 in this book, which mostly comes through via collar dispatches and camera/eyewitness accounts, but I wanted to capture that impossibility. [The impossibility] feels true to the act of trying to represent a wild animal, but also maybe to the act of representing other people, or even a younger version of myself, as well. I guess I’m drawn to the effort of trying to connect across a distance.

North: I actually wrote a question asking whether or not it was frustrating as a writer to struggle for so long against this opaqueness of non-human animals, but now I realize that the same blockages exist between you and any human person that you talk to, too. And I felt that distance in your book. It seems like you dealt with that gap narratively by sending yourself and the wolves you’re interested in on parallel trajectories — such as when you pair wolf B-45’s crossing from Idaho into Oregon with your own train ride into the state — that never actually intersect. You learn more about the wolf along the way, but the narrative doesn’t bring you any closer. 

Erica: Wow, thank you for giving me language to describe that. When I was outlining the book, I drew a big chart with two lines: here is what the wolf is doing, here is where I am at that time. Later a publication casually mentioned that I used OR-7 as a metaphor, but I always felt like it was a real both/and situation. For example, when I read that he walked near a wildfire, probably to catch fleeing prey, it both made me think about that human impulse to flirt with danger when it feels necessary to survive, but also became a biological fact about another animal that taught me something about the ecosystem that was really cool. I’m wary of making the natural world a metaphor for the self — it feels too solipsistic — but I’m a big proponent of learning to look at the natural world closely, and sometimes that means I’m reading myself into it. I was uncomfortable with that impulse in the book, so I wanted to make it obvious what I was doing. To lean into self-projection in one section and dismantle it in another.  

North: Yeah, your thinking seemed like something that was always investigating itself in ways that kept it from stepping too far in any one direction. Like before a wolf becomes fully a metaphor, the writing moves in another direction, which I really appreciated. Your prose is so complex and rich in this way, but also the book, as a whole, has a pretty definite structure. And so I was wondering: if this book holds ten years of hard thinking about fear and wolves, how did you arrive at a superstructure that still permitted all of this fine-grained thinking? 

Erica: I gave each of the chapters an “X vs. Wolf” title because I wanted to acknowledge that I was interacting with the animals on a sort of hyperbolic binary of good and evil, an inheritance from that Western Biblical tradition, and I wanted to chip away at that binary throughout the text. 

I knew I’d write myself into the book after having these moments experiencing fear in my own life where I kept thinking about Little Red Riding Hood and feeling implicated in its narrative — like I couldn’t think about the construction of wolf as villain without thinking about the construction of woman as victim. Both my body and the wolf’s are, in a sense, narrative creations. I wanted to start at that intimate binary (Girl vs. Wolf) and then sort of explode outward — later chapters are about the town, the country, the self. In each chapter, I wanted people to learn about biological wolves, but also, archivally, symbolic wolves maybe across time and space. My own coming-of-age and OR-7’s life become a sort of central ladder you can return to, where you might reach way over there to learn about werewolves or anthropology or something — to go out on a limb — but the reader knows they’ll come back to familiar ground. I wanted to honor the digressive, essayistic mode of thinking while also keeping a grounded trajectory.

North: That’s so cool. Was that something that you could only assemble later in the project?

Erica: I definitely had to accumulate a huge body of research to begin to make the sort of associative leaps that determined the current of thinking and that tug the book along. I didn’t add OR-7’s trajectory until after the book had sold: talking to editors during the selling process made me think it might be helpful to have a real wolf body in the text just like I had my body in it. He was presumed dead around the time I moved home, and I suddenly realized events in his life had been these bookends for all my research. I’d been following him all along. Initially, I felt resistant to linear chronology — like I would be selling out or becoming too commercial — but that was wrong. This book is inherently so kaleidoscopic and sprawling, but the moments of focus are necessary.

North: The chronology also felt key to some of the ideas in this book. At some point, you say that this book is about learning to deal with fear and how that process first involves examining fear and unspooling it, and then either learning to live with what’s been unspooled or learning to let it go. That’s a process that builds over time, and one that you include as part of the book’s narrative. 

Erica: I’ve always been interested in journey literature: the idea that if you go on a journey, inherently you’ll be in a different place at the end, and that’s baked into narrative expectation. The first version of this book, for my undergraduate thesis, was very rooted in me being on the ground studying wolves, but, at some point, I realized the journey I wanted to track was more psychological. I was a different person at the end of the book — less scared. How had that happened? I like the essayistic mode of showing how a mind moves on the page more than how a body moves through space, and I think this book grapples with both a spatial trajectory and an emotional/internal one. 

North: I was struck by how the book ends with two returns to Oregon: both yours to Portland and OR-7’s to southern Oregon. What about the motion of return interested you as you drafted an ending to this book?

Erica: Usually I’m skeptical of boomerang narratives because they feel too tidy. An early version of this book actually ended with me settling down with my partner at the time, and even though it was true, I squirmed at the marriage-plot-ness of it: the idea that a woman’s body becomes safe, or her life becomes secure, because she settles down with a man. Well, partway through the pandemic we broke up, and — ha ha — that forced me to confront that the reason I felt way less anxious than I had felt, say, five years earlier, wasn’t at all because of an external relationship; it was more internal. Maybe there’s a parallel with OR-7: he did start a pack, which was a victory to many, but they predated on a pretty big number of livestock, which presented a big challenge for some of the same people. My own experience moving back to Oregon meant feeling both some of the itchy I-need-to-get-out skin crawl that I had felt as a teenager, but also this tremendous, fall-to-my-knees love. Sometimes returning — settling down — means the coexistence of irreconcilable things. 

North: I just moved back to my hometown, and I feel similarly. On one hand, it’s nice to return here as a version of myself who has never lived here before, but I also find myself thinking, Wow, this place is too familiar, and wanting more space to define myself. You mention in the book that you return to Oregon in part because you feel that you can exercise a certain type of responsibility there, and also because you can activate a set of connections that seem valuable after years away. 

Erica: That’s beautifully said. Solitude will always be a creative engine for me, but I also have a very strong impulse toward family and connection. In regard to the theme of fear, I wanted to challenge the idea that settling down with a nuclear family equals security — I wanted to visualize “family” more capaciously across lines of kin and species. At the same time: how to sustain that node of creative self while also giving yourself to other people? That’s the question.

North: You mention that you became a writer in community, and I think that one of your book’s notable qualities is the way that it directly quotes ideas borrowed from other essayists. There could be a version of this book where those contributions are hidden or paraphrased, but that is not the case here. What did you intend by keeping all of those ideas in their author’s voices?

Erica: Was it Sylvia Plath who had the quote about how any idea she had was just a postage stamp of everything else she’d read being pressed onto it? I wanted this book to peel back the layers of how I felt about this one thing — the wolf — and so bringing all the other voices into the room felt like showing my work in a long-division way. I like conversation on the page, the good dinner-party kind where you don’t know how talking about x leads to talking about y, but there’s a real tangible static of connection. I never wanted to quote anyone to try and sound smart, but rather to show the way I come to a certain conclusion, thereby inviting the reader to think about their own inheritance of ideas on, say, fear. 

North: I always read your references to other works as a display of excitement and not as an I read this book! type of brag. [Laughs].

Erica: Thank god! My nightmare is that a reader just sees all the quotations marks and thinks I’m just smirking, like, Look at me! I did all this research!

North: This talk of connected thinking reminds me of the idea [from Mating by Norman Rush] of a “lore package,” which you reference at the beginning of your book and which I understand to be the collection of stories each of us have made or inherited in order to make the world around us feel safer and more sensical. In some ways, I’ve come to think of your book as a sort of lore-laundering, where you clean out your lore package and dispense with the stories that misallocate fear. If this feels true to you, what’s left in your lore package at the end of this project? What stories and ideas have you been turning to lately? 

Erica: I love that you come back to that term, it’s such a good one. Jenny Odell’s way of thinking in How to Do Nothing has literally rearranged the bricks in the architecture of my brain, making me very aware that I can choose how to dose or diffuse my attention. My next project I think is about climate change and love, and part of what I am interested in is the question of how we buffer the uncertainty of life, period. I suppose I’m interested in other stories that think about connection as a form of buffering. The novel All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews did this for me, as did Sabrina Imbler’s essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches: My Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Totally different books, but they both made me think about the connectivity between beings in ways that were really exhilarating. I love books that have the same granularity of focus on internal and external worlds. I am committed to fighting the idea that one is inherently a distraction from the other.