Thursday, March 30, 2023

Top 10 stories about wolves

Erica Berry is a writer based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Atlantic, Guernica, and elsewhere. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received fellowships and funding from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, the Ucross Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. A former Writer-in-Residence with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, she is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland.

[The Page 99 Test: Wolfish]

Berry's new book is Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.

At the Guardian she tagged ten stories that "made me consider the wolf and our vision of it in an important new light," including:
The Wolf [US title: American Wolf] by Nate Blakeslee

In tracing the reign of O-Six, a wolf mother renowned for her empathy and leadership in Yellowstone Park, Blakeslee pulls off a high-wire journalistic feat, unspooling moments of the wolf’s life as if from some hidden Go-Pro camera. He patched together these novelistic scenes after receiving more than 2,500 pages of notes from dedicated wolf-watchers and the result, rendered in high-definition prose, at times makes you feel you are inside a wolf’s skin. He describes O-Six seeing a car as “like anything else on the landscape that was neither predator nor prey – like a rock or a tree or even a bison. It wouldn’t harm her, and she couldn’t eat it; it was a nonentity.” Even now, years after first encountering this book, I sometimes see a car and think of this sentence – of how the car would appear if I were a wolf.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue