Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Her essays and journalism appear in Outside, Catapult, Wired, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Gulf Coast, The New York Times Magazine, Colorado Review, The Atlantic, and Guernica, among others. Berry was the 2019-2020 National Writers’ Series Writer-in-Residence and Teaching Fellow at Front Street Writers in Traverse City, Michigan. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 2014, and received her MFA from the University of Minnesota as a College of Liberal Arts Fellow in 2018. Berry now lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, where she works as a Writer-in-the-Schools.
BARTELS: How did you start writing nonfiction in general, and what specifically made you want to write about animals?
BERRY: My gateway into writing was through poetry and short stories, where I was interested in those sprawling themes of love and death, though (let’s be honest) as a teen I mostly wrote about crushes. The idea of how we entangle with one another has always been very compelling to me.
Only later did I understand I could explore the same themes in nonfiction. I think I thought one had to choose between reading about interior or exterior worlds, and that’s so wrong, there’s always an oscillation. I tried on the journalist hat, trying to erase myself and look at my subject super objectively, but that didn’t feel comfortable. I was too porous on the page; my own life was always leaking in. I became more interested in the stickiness of that perception.
BARTELS: Totally. I feel like it’s impossible for a person to look at anything truly objectively.
BERRY: Right? And then writing about animals happened somewhat organically, in that, in encountering them, I had to acknowledge them as part of my exterior and interior worlds. As a child I felt extremely at home in the natural world. Though I grew up in a city, both of my grandparents live on farms, so I spent large swathes of the year in the country. Both writing and the natural world are places I go to feel at home, to quiet the din of stimuli and anxiety, to figure out what I’m thinking. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I tried to tether these two things I loved—the haven of the page and of the forest—and to write about animals and the outdoors.
BARTELS: I love that.
BERRY: The environmental writing I grew up loving tended to follow a somewhat predictable trajectory of experience: a man on a quest of self-discovery in the trees. My own experience felt much more flailing. I wanted to write about the messy way that I, an animal (!), moved through my natural and built environments: sometimes bumbling, sometimes afraid, sometimes completely awestruck, sometimes unsure if I was reacting the “right” way. Was I allowed to write about birds if I couldn’t identify them by name or birdsong? I had an almost prudish fear of anthropomorphizing, which prevented me from writing about animals at all. At some point I just gave myself permission lean into the [environmental writing] space in a way that felt authentic to me.
BARTELS: Your book Wolfish is about literal wolves but also the metaphor of the wolf and the ways we perceive wolves (“wolves”) in society and culture. Like, I love Rick McIntyre’s alpha wolves of Yellowstone series, but I feel like your book really did something new by blending the real wolves with the literary/metaphorical wolves. How did you balance this writing about actual animals and symbolic animals?
BERRY: I went into the project a decade ago thinking it was going to be only about real wolves. But once I started interviewing people and taking notes on how they were talking about them, the construction of what I think of as the “cultural taxidermy” of the wolf became very clear. One of my sources, who worked for an environmental nonprofit, urged me to ignore the human projection. I got his point—I did want to separate the truth from the story—and yet I didn’t feel I could pretend the “shadow wolf” wasn’t there, because it was influencing policy and science.
I’m interested in how science is communicated, and how that communication becomes its own cultural narrative. I realized I couldn’t just say, “Here’s the truth about the wolf,” because not even all biologists agree on how repopulating wolves should be managed. We’re all shaped so much by our relationship with the natural world: Did you grow up thinking of wilderness as a place for work or recreation? Do you feel comfortable or scared when you are outside? Do you feel like your body belongs there? What other bodies?
Ultimately, there so many amazing books about wolves, and I spent the first three years of this project thinking, I can’t write another wolf book, there are so many good ones out there. American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee, for example, just blew me away. I was never going to have the same expertise as writers like Rick, say, who have spent hours witnessing wolves, but I could go down the rabbit holes in our cultural subconscious to consider quite intimately how we metabolize the thing we call the “wolf.” My reckoning of this symbolic animal would be quite different from how a male biologist would tell it, and though that had at first scared me off, it soon began to feel like a reason to do it.
BARTELS: So much of the book is about fear, especially the fear that women feel in the world. I mean, fear is right there in the subtitle (“Stories We Tell About Fear”) and it’s woven throughout the whole thing. How did you tackle writing about such a large, nebulous concept?
BERRY: I read Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams right after I finished my undergraduate thesis, when I was learning what creative nonfiction could do, and that book gave me a lot of permission to think that maybe I could also circle an emotion kaleidoscopically. I was asking myself the same questions both on and off the page: Why am I trying to be brave? Who for? Or: why am I indulging fear in this moment? Why does it feel kind of good to say I’m scared? Why does it feel bad to say that x or y scares me? I think fear is so often talked about as this black and white thing, like you’re afraid or you’re not. But, actually, that’s so not true.
I had to admit that my own life had been overwhelmed by speculative fear. At first, I thought that was totally separate from wolves—like, here’s my wolf project that I’m working on as I’m doing these interviews, and here’s the part of me that is just really anxious. Then, in early graduate school, I had a couple interactions with strange men that forced me to confront how uncomfortable I felt dragging my body through the world. Suddenly I was thinking about Little Red Riding Hood, even though I didn’t want to.
I had a professor tell me it was two books—one about fear, and one about wolves—and I had to spend a couple years trying to figure out why it really did feel like one book to me. Because wolves had been conflated with fear/danger for so long in a certain Western American imagination, I felt I couldn’t just ignore that feeling.
BARTELS: I feel like so much of Wolfish is about misconceptions about wolves and fear, but were there any particular misconceptions you had when you went into working on the project? Or did writing and researching about these topics change your relationship to people or animals in any way?
BERRY: I love that question. I do think a part of me thought I’d waltz into this project and figure out how to evaluate rational/irrational fear, when in reality it’s much more about reconciling ourselves to the uncertainty of being mortal. There’s so much we cannot predict.
Have you read In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin? I think you’d be really into it. She is a French anthropologist who studies animism, who wrote a memoir about the before/aftermath of a bear attack while in eastern Siberia.
BARTELS: How have I not read that? Adding it to my list now.
BERRY: She refers to their encounter as a “kiss”—there is this eroticism in the pain, in how their two bodies collapse into one when the bear puts its head around hers. She writes beautifully about how the Indigenous peoples in that part of Kamchatka conceptualize living beside precarity, and about her own respect for the bear that attacks her. I became quite interested in those gray-area moments of encounter. I thought, a book cannot eliminate the patriarchy that makes me afraid to walk down the street, but maybe I can change the narrative I have imbibed which tells me I will be attacked walking down the street. Was that story keeping me safe, or just keeping me off the street? What different stories could I tell—more rationally grounded statistical ones?
Similarly, people are afraid while hiking because, for example, we hear that story about the mountain lion that jumped on the runner, but so many people happily run every morning in shared habitat and don’t get attacked.
BARTELS: Right. It’s like how my midwife friend only tells me about the horrific scary birth situations she witnesses, but actually many more babies are born every day without any issue.
BERRY: Absolutely, we owe it to ourselves—and the world—to really question the dosage of stories we imbibe. We have to ask ourselves why certain stories becomes popular. Like the story of the teacher who was attacked by wolves was an anomaly from absolutely every angle. So, why did it get so much coverage? In part because it felt familiar—it had a Little Red Riding Hood-esque quality. I think acknowledging that subconscious conflation ultimately makes it easier to separate them.
BARTELS: Do you now think about wolves differently? Or interact with them in a new way?
BERRY: Part of what I was doing with this book was trying to figure out how I should interact with an apex predator as someone who has grown up with them existing mostly as stuffed animals, or folkloric or Disney representations. Like that anxiety I used to have about anthropomorphizing—in fact the opposite can be so harmful: to presume that we don’t share emotions with animals risks making us exceptional, and making them into automatons. I was so moved by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s short story collection What We Fed to the Manticore, which made me think deeply about what it means to imagine animal feelings, or to try and see the world as a non-human animal might.
There’s this impassable gulf between us, and yet I now fall on the side of thinking it’s maybe better to anthropomorphize than to have that smug observer stance of we can never know what that animal feels so I’m not even going to try. This stance has allowed me to indulge more curiosity into how animals relate to each other. For example, if I see a coyote walking through a city neighborhood, I wonder: are you going to get food for your pups? What are you eating these days? Are you looking for a mate? Allowing myself to wonder about behind-the-scenes animal life has become this totally delightful way of interacting with the world.
BARTELS: I love that you brought up coyotes. They’re all over my neighborhood, and there is a town Facebook group dedicated to them—and, speaking of fear, so many of the posts are about people wanting to shoot them or have someone go “mess up their nests” so they don’t come back. I mean, first of all, coyotes don’t have nests. But people can be really scared of animals they don’t understand.
I also really loved how you wrote about how, sure, we project human behavior onto animals all the time, but when animals look at us—maybe they are doing their own projecting?
BERRY: I love how you put that. I forget who said it, but I remember reading that when we see an animal and it sees us, we’re really seeing the animal’s fear reflected back at us. We think that baseline is “animal” but it’s really “animal-seeing-human.” Your question also makes me think again about anthropomorphizing, and how in dominant Western culture it is seen as making animals into cartoonish allegories, whereas in, say, Indigenous cultures where that binary between “man” and “animal” does not exist, a story about talking animals means something totally different. Is it an animal with human qualities, or does the human have animal qualities? I’m so intrigued by that sliding scale.
BARTELS: Right. I feel like a lot of conservationists use storytelling and anthropomorphizing to try to get people to care about saving a species.
BERRY: I’m very aware that wolves are charismatic—you can assign them personalities in a way you can’t as easily with a jellyfish or a toad. That’s why I think Sabrina Imbler’s book is really brilliant at showing how we can learn about an animal, and learn about ourselves through an animal, even when that animal is less immediately “relatable.”
I do think a writer is always having to earn their space on the page, earn their time with the reader. I’m not actively thinking I have to make this relevant to the reader, but sometimes I do want the reader to feel like I’ve grabbed them through the page and said, “You!” Humans need to feel we are a part of nature, because we too are animals in an ecosystem. What will make a reader care for a wolf, and just because it’s cute or reminds them of themselves? What are the other doors for “making someone to care”?
BARTELS: I loved how you blended together your personal stories with your research. In particular, I can’t believe just how many quotes about wolves you had in this book! How did you approach your research? How did you stay organized?
BERRY: Eula Biss writes that in her brilliant essay “Time and Distance Overcome” she went through and searched for the word “telephone pole” in the New York Times archives, which I then did that with the word “wolf.” I used Scrivener to pretty obsessively keep track of notes, screenshots, links, photos, etc., and essentially created my own archive of intriguing material that I later played connect-the-dots with when I was grouping by theme. There are so many articles and stories about wolves! I had to leave so much out. But while researching, I gave myself permission to be omnivorous. To just peek down rabbit holes into different disciplines. That was part of the privilege of working on it for so long, but also what made it insane at times.
BARTELS: I love, love, loved the structure of Wolfish, how each chapter is a different element versus wolf (Adventure v. Wolf, Girl v. Wolf, Town v. Wolf). How did you land on that structure?
BERRY: My agent Marya Spence actually helped with the framing. (Shout out: she is brilliant!) She knew I was interested in dismantling the binaries that too often frame the wolf within in a Biblical Western context, so had the idea of caricaturing that perceived battle by using the “versus” approach, and then continually excavating and undermining it.
Planning out the different threads, I had a crazy outline chart with various columns in each chapter. Each one a topic: one column for the whereabouts of OR-7, the specific Oregon wolf I was tracking; one for wolf policy/biology; one for symbolic wolves through time and space; one for what was going on in my own life; one for my meta-research process. Looking at all the columns I was able to see connections between the ideas, like how wolves run towards wildfires to catch prey that is escaping from the fire, and how that, say, maybe related to me moving back to Oregon despite the threat of “the really big one.” I wanted to honor facts as facts while letting them perhaps become metaphor, because I wanted to reveal the interconnectivity and associations our minds make, like that idea of going towards something dangerous to survive.
BARTELS: What do you think are some of the challenges of writing about subjects you can’t interview directly? What are some of the rewards?
BERRY: The process made obvious the lack of information we always have about other bodies. How do we confront another being? How do we put language to that encounter? It made me think about the commonalities between us, the connections, versus the innate aloneness of being stuck inside one human consciousness.
I think sometimes people probably feel closer to animals they live near because they’re able to fanfiction that relationship, right? Like you see a dog looking at you and you give it this speech bubble of adoration that it’s feeling, and that in a way might feel better than the partner you live with who might not be giving you the words of affirmation you want. There’s something liberatory about a lack of language: we can fill that space with fantasy.
I wanted to make visible the divide between bodies, and also my desire to reach across it. I follow the wolf OR-7 throughout the book, but there are often just pages and pages where we don’t know where he is. I felt like that could be frustrating for a reader who wants to be with him, but that’s sort of the point. Like, in Nate Blakeslee’s book, the way he writes the wolves as characters is absolutely stunning, and I thought—I can’t do that, but I can dig more into the separation between us and wolves. The distance becomes its own engine of curiosity.
BARTELS: Who are some other animal writers you admire, besides Blakeslee?
BERRY: I already mentioned What We Fed to the Manticore, In the Eye of the Wild, andHow Far the Light Reaches. I love Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs, and Wild Souls by Emma Marris. Oh also The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich, and of course Annie Dillard. Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. And Robin Wall Kimmerer, though I’m sure everyone talks about her. I love her one specific essay about trying to get frogs off the road when cars are coming and how it’s futile but also there is beauty in the trying. It’s so much about our relationship with nature and what we owe the natural world.
BARTELS: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?
BERRY: I am so absorbed with wanting a dog, that I feel like I have this shadow dog. But my schedule doesn’t allow it right now, so I dog-sit whenever I can. I am a dog auntie.
My house is also next to an empty lot that is full of squirrels and rabbits, so I have become the person who stares out the kitchen window while eating food and looking for the rabbit and that feels very exciting.
I also am a fledgling birdwatcher—I’m trying to get better with it. Same with plants. I have my Merlin Bird ID app, and it’s forced me to just pause more, to become more “granular in my perception,” as I think the brilliant Jenny Odell said. I love what she says about knowing birds—it makes you feel like you’re in good company all the time.