CONTRIBUTORS

In This Issue

MEQO SAM CECIL

CONNOR BRODERICK

RAIMONDAS VALASCEVIČIOUS

ERICA BERRY

KATE MOSES

JENNIFER ALULA ROSE

MARY BARRINGER

SUSAN JEFTS

DUANE L. HERMANN

TYLER BARTON

ALAIN HARJAONA RASOLOMAPLANDRA

CAPERTON TISSOT

PHIL BROWN

MIA VODANOVICH

SOPHIA KAREN

ANNIE FURMAN

ALSHAAD KARA

MARILYN MCCABE

CHARLES WATTS

SERGEY DOBRY

ALYSSA CARROLL

COLTER MANCINI

SARAH TERESA COOK

JACLYN HALL

TEREZA NESNÍDALOVÁ

JAMES B. KOBAK JR

HIMANEE GUPTA

Cover

FRONT: “Untitled 1” by Meqo Sam Cecil

BACK: “City Roots” by Conor Broderick

Craigardan’s Kate Moses recently spoke with writer and 2018-19 artist-in-residence Erica Berry about her debut book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, published in February by Flatiron Books. Erica spoke with us from her home in Portland, Oregon.

One of the most highly anticipated nonfiction books of 2023, Wol fi sh is Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic, deeply researched, and personal exploration of the real wolf, canis lupus, and the sometimes revered but mostly feared wolf of our minds – lone-wolf terrorists, the wolf at the door, Little Red’s devourer, and predatory men. Wolves are “Government Sponsored Terrorists” according to bumper stickers in Montana, senselessly persecuted emblem of resilience according to environmental and animal activists; symbol of leadership and hunting skill in Navajo tradition; bloodthirsty child-snatcher borne of British Imperialism in India; the twin founders of Rome’s wet nurse, whose descendants were respectfully shooed toward safety outside the city’s gates; apex predator whose near-complete eradication in the U.S. may be a significant reason for an ecosystem out of whack and the resulting epidemic of Lyme disease carried by deer ticks.

“I am not an academic or a scientist,” Erica writes, “I am just one animal trying to see another.” Taking an associative, interdisciplinary and lyrical approach informed by a decade of scholarship and field study, she examines the many threads of our emotional and cultural constructions of the wolf through the lenses of history, fairy tale, myth, biology, conservation, and sociopolitics. Tracing the life of one particular wolf, a tagged “disperser” who left his pack and became the first known wild wolf to enter California in nearly a century, Erica examines her own history of solitude and camaraderie, fear and curiosity, exploration and home. “To understand the ‘wolf,’ I look to what it brings up beyond itself,” Erica continues. “I cannot see the animal without seeing the dynamics of gender, race, colonialism, violence, environmental degradation, and capitalism that ensnare my conceptions of it.”

--Kate Moses

Kate Moses: You’ve been working on this book, your wolf project, for a really long time – you must feel such a sense of achievement to finally see it in physical form, to know it’s being read and appreciated. When did you first think of yourself as a writer? I think women, particularly, seem to feel that they have to earn some exterior approval in order to be seen. So often we have the hardest time putting on the wardrobe of the art we're in the process of making.

Erica Berry: I had a very lucky experience. One of the reasons why I love teaching high school now is because it was so formative in my teen years, when I was so lost and insecure in my body and living, really, in a projected version of what I hoped I would become. I was finding places to hide in books and finding possibility in books. I won a poetry contest that a teacher had alerted me to, and I got to go to England to be around other teenage poets – talk about a gift. This experience gave me the sense that poetry -- that language -- that writing -- could be this sort of trap door, a way to get me out of the other teen bullshit and spring me into this world where other people wanted to talk about the things I wanted to talk about. That moment made me want to be a teacher almost as much as it made me want to be a writer. Seeing how important it is to have a hand reaching out of nothing, a voice that says, “You can do this.”

And it made me want to enter a lot of contests, which I wouldn't win, but having won the first one, I understood the lottery-ness of it. I feel like part of my drive towards wanting to get my work out there now is understanding that it is a rejection game. And the odds are so strange. In some ways my love of writing and my willingness to play the game were both seeded young in a way that I'm grateful for. Nobody's waiting for the writing. It's often not going to fit. And that's so hard. But it just takes a couple of moments where something amazing happens, you win something, or you get an opportunity to meet someone, that makes you realize, wow, I get to be seen as the person I feel I am.

The thing about being in residence with other people who are artists is that they're seeing you first as an artist. I think about all the ways we are asked to be other bodies who are doing different things. What I have with my residency friends is that the first thing you check in about is “How's the art? How's that going?” They see me first as an artist, even when I've been teaching high school up to my ears and grading assignments. Being seen in this way kindles something that’s crucial.

KM: That validation is only external for an artist. Other people have actually seen the deepest part of you.

EB: Rebecca Solnit had a quote that really resonated with me. She said when she was young books were the portal, this bridge, that took her other places. And then you realize that your writing can be the bridge that brings other people to you, or opens up opportunities. I've met friends by writing to them to say, “I loved your music,” or they write to me and say, "I read your book. It really resonated with me.” And then we start talking and suddenly the work is about that human connection.

But you also have to cultivate this deep solitude. I love being alone so much and I'm so grateful to Craigardan for the time it let me be in-residence without the static of the world. I also love people so much, and don't always know how to reconcile those two things. This is the central question of being a creator. I think it takes understanding that the work can be a way to connect with people, and the solitude is like a gateway to the community, and vice versa.

KM: This makes me think about the disperser wolves you write about in your book. For one of several well documented reasons, they're willing to leave their pack and head out. And that too is an interesting balance of leaving the community in order to become a part of -- or create -another community.

EB: And it leads us back to the misnomer of “lone wolf,” which is the cultural belief that the lone wolf has gone out alone because he wants to be alone. I’m gendering him because that's often how it is culturally as well. And yet in reality, a wolf goes out alone because it wants to meet a new pack. And that's the point. That is such a misunderstood, beautiful thing about this metaphor -- you set out alone in order to create new constellations of ideas or community. Genetically the wolves are trying to create the most diverse genetic pool. But there is something in that quest that we know intellectually. I’m drawn to people from different backgrounds, from different places, and that can involve a lot of discomfort and living with the unfamiliar. I've reckoned with this a lot since moving back home to Oregon after being gone for ten years. Oregon's a different place for me now because I also have the Adirondacks as a home and Maine as a home and Sicily as a home.

KM: There's another layer to it, too, that's really fascinating because wolves are not thinking to themselves, “Well, you know, I really do want to diversify our genetic pool here. So I'm going to head over to eastern Oregon." But instinct and intuition are somehow working. Which is, of course, where art lives as well. It's below the conscious level and there's something so incredibly poignant about thinking of these creatures who are so reviled and so endangered by human beings, and yet their instinct is still to leave the “safety” of the group. We know that's not necessarily a safe thing, but something’s driving them regardless.

EB: It reminds me of the idea that fear and curiosity or fear and inquiry are very tied. At times it felt like fear had closed all these doors for me. But I was talking to a biologist who said, “A wolf is born afraid. They hear a noise under a tree. They're going to go investigate it.” And that's inquiry. That's a beautiful thing. The fear is actually getting them out the door. And in some sense, I feel like that's true in my life. I have felt this. I wrote this book from a place where I was uncomfortable with a hypervigilance that had set over me. At the same time, I was constantly pushing myself into new adventures and new things. I think that is so tied in some way to making art. The state of complete terror you’re in about putting something out into the world is tied to a deep curiosity or generative imperative to do this thing.

It also makes me think about animal emotions. There's a famous color wheel model of emotions felt by animals, and love and fear are across from each other on this color wheel. So any time that we're afraid, it's because we're deeply in love with something. Those feelings are not opposites, actually. They're very tied.

KM: At one point in the book you wrote about the domestication that led to dogs. And it seems to be tied to gendering as well. You raise the question regarding the hysterical fear and hatred of wolves, “Is it possible that human beings are responding to feeling rejected?" As in, our hostile attitude toward wolves may be coming from a place of emotional projection -- you rejected me, so now I’m going to reject you right back. Dogs are our best friends. You're our worst enemy.

Another side of that is the possibility that the trope of the devouring wolf is actually female, not male -- the thing that should be overpowered, but cannot be overpowered.

EB: Wolves do not obey the expectations that people have for them -- that it should behave like a dog, it should be very tidy, it should come eat our food when we want it to and leave when we don't want it to. Instead, there’s a wildness there. And yes, I think we see that so much in the tropes of misogyny — the idea that a woman is not acquiescing, that she's out of her territory, or there's some roaming beyond where she should go. That sort of trespass and punishment appears all the way back to old Greek poetry. There are clear parallels between women and wolves as this problem-thing that needs to be taken care of. Wolves are essentially matriarchal in their packs. The whole idea that patriarchy is natural, well, it's just obviously not. If you look at what a mother wolf does in the pack, she’s setting the tone through empathy and, very often, is the most successful leader and hunter.

Not just in terms of wolves but studies across different species are debunking the alpha male trope, which has been used in bad CEO business stuff since the ‘80s. The alpha male idea doesn't even apply to wolves. The metaphors we have for wolves are broken, but they have huge implications in the human world. Based on the wrong idea about wolves, we pass along harmful ideas in a human context.

Looking at how these animals act gives us another roadmap for how we might be. Wolves are very territorial. They'll kill each other, it's not all peace and love. But there are different models of kinship, even the sense that you'll usually have one breeding pair in a pack, that’s only a couple of pups, and then everyone else is helping take care of the pups. The aunts and the uncles or the half-siblings. Wolf packs can have foster families. They have stepfamilies. They have immigrant wolves. It’s not just these nuclear family packs. That to me was really inspirational when I started reading about those “chosen family” wolf packs and trying to think about how we are all animals in an environment that is threatened and, you know, in a habitat where we can be both scary but also scared. We can be both fearful and feared for. And how do we stand by each other in those moments? That's true for wolves, and even thinking about their prey. It all does come back to community as sort of the antidote to fear or to threat.

KM: And yet, the prevalent attitude toward the wolf, as well you know, in general is so binary. It's either you're with us or you're against us. There's no in-between. The only good wolf is a dead wolf.

At what point do wolves get to be good? You include the creation story of the Kalapuya in Wolfish. Mother Wolf offers to watch the first woman’s two babies while she explores the world. The first woman is afraid – can she really trust this wolf? — but decides to take up Mother Wolf’s offer, strapping the babies to the wolf’s back and securing them with a band across their foreheads. When first woman came back her babies were just fine, but their foreheads had flattened from the band holding them into their basket. From then on, the Kalapuya people flattened the foreheads of their children to honor their relationship with the wolf.

EB: The Kalapuya were native to the area where I now live. It was from the same ground, the same animals on the same earth, that you have two radically different origin stories. That was the story of honoring the wolf. In contrast, Oregon's founding was rooted in the extermination of the wolf. The difference is so stark. I've been thinking about this idea of the nemesis that people are sort of addicted to. It makes them feel important if they think they’re being hunted. With human attitudes toward wolves, there’s a real unrequited hatred there. I mean, if you think that hatred can be a form of love. It can be a form of obsession. We think about the wolf so much more than the wolf thinks about us. The wolf is just doing its own thing. It's not out to hunt us. It's not out to be our friend. For us the challenge is to understand that we have to untangle our own ego from imagining that every other creature is somehow orbiting around us: they want to come be in my photo, or they’re scared of me. No -- they're just doing their thing. You are just another body that they maybe are not hungry for, or not interested in, and that's all.

KM: You did an interview with someone who worked with the Yellowstone Wolf Project. She and a colleague were coming down off a hillside and a huge herd of elk came running at them and sort of split to either side of them, fleeing a group of wolves who then showed up. I think she said something like, she was so surprised that one of the wolves got really close and started barking at them, and she’d never heard a wolf bark before. If we think of how dogs bark to communicate their feelings, then it doesn’t seem so surprising that wolves might also communicate to these creatures who were interrupting their hunt! So what if they’re wolf researchers – all the wolves know is that they got in the way of a biological imperative. I think that's the perfect illustration of your point that human beings are so confident of our centrality as creatures that we are thinking that the rest of creaturedom is orbiting around us. When in fact, we're just one more creature. In the book, you tell us that fossilized wolf remains have been found in Oregon that are more than 300,000 years old, but the oldest signs of Homo sapiens in North America are only 16,000 years old.

EB: Wolves were originally the most widely distributed land mammal. They are literally living in Mexico City, on Antarctica — every continent has had wolves. People have been encountering them for ages and they've been in our language and psyches for so long. Their resilience and that dispersing trait again means they are constantly expanding or reclaiming their territories. Even after humans have wiped them out.

Somebody recently asked me in a Q&A, "What's a mountain lion folk tale?” I don't know any off the top of my head. I've also been thinking about the wolf’s howl and the idea that a howl is a sonic breadcrumb -- we don't see them, but we're aware of them in a way that is so much louder than mountain lions. It's that howl that has become aesthetic shorthand for creepiness. If wolves didn't howl, I don't know that we'd be as scared of them.

KM: Do you think it also has something to do with the fact that humans like to pick a fight with something they think they have a fi ghting chance against?

EB: So that does go back to conceptions of the nemesis. Even in philosophy, with the concept of the perfect enemy, there is that sense of balance and some equity, right? It's not punching up, it's not punching down. There's the idea that you're well matched in some way. And I think all the mirrors between humans and wolves -- the pack behavior, they're monogamous sometimes, they like to raise young collaboratively, they mourn their dead pups and even bury them. All of that gives us the sense that we are these mirror creatures.

KM: Again this brings up the dog-wolf tension with humans, where one reaction is “you’re coming in the house” and one is “we're hiding our kids and shooting you.”

EB: In so many Indigenous stories there is much more fluidity and slippage in a creature's wildness. I think it goes back to our desires for control or imagining things as civilized or uncivilized. So much of America was built on this binary of, well, we better define what is wild, because otherwise are we civilized? Like we better stake our civilization in saying, that thing is out there and it is not us. And we know that ties to conceptions of whiteness and patriarchy and all of these ideas that are defined off of the creation of a vulnerable other that we are not.

KM: What does this book mean to you now that it's finished and it's out in the world?

EB: There's the thing you think you should do, and then there's the thing that you just keep doing. I didn't want to write the book this way for a long time. I tried to write other books or do it another way because I thought that I shouldn't write about my own experiences: They're not noteworthy enough. Or I should write a more serious wolf book, or I should do more. We have all these doubts and at a certain point, I think part of recognizing myself as an artist and this book as my art was about learning to trust my gut a little bit. Honestly, that’s what Craigardan was for me. I’d finished my MFA and I'd gotten some feedback that was, “this is two books.” It's a book about fear, it's a book about wolves. And I sat with that and I remember getting to Craigardan the first day and thinking, “Am I going to tear this book apart? Am I going to make this book two books? Am I going to abandon the book?” And I decided how to proceed with a really strong conviction, maybe the first conviction I've ever had in my life. I'm a person who lives so much in nuance and in indecision. And then I knew I was going to try to do everything to make it one book. And it was also the book I had to write. It’s very personal in that I'm trying to make sense of a discomfort I have with occupying the world in a certain way, and I need to figure out how to live better in the world. For me that means understanding these stories about fear that I've been told, and understanding what I want to carry forward and how to reclaim some of this bravery or adventurousness that feels very close to me. So the stakes felt kind of high. I think now I do feel a sense of calm and resolve, having done it. I'm a lot less hypervigilant about some things. In that way there was a curative in it.

KM: There was a Washington Post review that points out how Wolfish "reads expansively.” That applies to the way you’ve built a sort of openness into the narrative -- the intersecting pathways of lyrical associations and resonances in this work, the art that you created out of the information you give, not just what but how you put it together. Art and story are what get us emotionally, what make things matter to us, not logic. I think of your recognition in Wolfish that factual analyses of the potential threat of wolves to humans shows how statistically remote it is for us to fear these creatures. Even in terms of livestock loss, the percentage of wolf predation is overwhelmingly miniscule. And yet, the fear of wolves remains at a hysterical level. It’s associative and became practically instinctive over many human generations. It’s become our fearful story of wolves, not the fact of wolves. and only recently, maybe the last sixty, seventy years, since Farley Mowat’s book Never Cry Wolf, has that story been increasingly challenged. But I think that your decision to write Wolfish as you have increases our opportunities to break those stories open and see what other, more useful stories might be lurking inside. One of the many thinkers you quote in the book is Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote The Uses of Enchantment, on the impact of fairy tales on children. Bettelheim believed that the more fairy tales that children were told, the more possibilities they would have to create the stories needed for their own survival. In that way, asking the questions it asks us to ask ourselves, your book has an opportunity to change hearts and minds.

EB: I didn't think of it as polemical. I thought of it as showing my mind, working ideas out on the page and connecting dots. One of the reasons I include other quotes is related to how I did my math homework, which is, I'm going to show my work a little bit because you might not believe me, but you can see how all of these facts, this history, this thinker, those things, are going to create a constellation. And then you decide where to sum it up. This is not a book of answers. You’re right, it's more a book of questions. But I also think it's a book that shows a web of associations. One of my goals with this book was to show that in the same way that Little Red Riding Hood was bad for the Wolf, it was also bad for the girl.

KM: So with this expansiveness that you've created with the book, are you content with leaving it there? Where do you go next?

EB: Now I have another set of questions because I thought it was about getting rid of certain fears or making them make sense. And now I understand that we learn to live beside them. There are so many things we can't control. So, okay, we're in this world. I can't turn the volume down on the things that scare me, but I'm here. And what does it mean? How do we connect through that? So now I'm interested in writing about love and connection, and thinking about climate change again. Through time and space and history when people feel in crisis, how do we connect? And that is the question that came out of me. Living through the pandemic and understanding what changed and what didn't change socially and culturally got me interested in speculatively imagining a better world, but doing that through a lens that's also looking at history and at the animal world and inevitably my own life. So…

KM: It sounds so simple.

Swan Song

By Jennifer Alula Rose Newtown, PA

As my fears become tears To be cleansed and released

As my heart once was full, Now it sinks to my feet

Nothing’s left, nothing’s gone, Only changed and washed anew

As my soul is laid bareMore steadfast, and rare

As my peace grows in sync With the spread of my wings

When the swans start to swim I think maybe I’ll swim, too

As the wave crashes down Just as fast as it rose

All that’s sacred revealed In the highs and the lows

Watch my heart as she blooms, Through the thorns, Just as roses do