Oblong Online: Erica Berry, WOLFISH
In conversation with Sharon Charde.
Missed the event? WATCH IT HERE
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023: Vulture, Salon, Bustle, The Rumpus, The Financial Times, Debutiful, and more! For fans of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry’s WOLFISH blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon.
Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations. Erica Berry will talk with Sharon Charde about her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily, chronicling the search for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do age-old stories about wolves tell us about our relationship with fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
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. Wolfish is her first book.
Sharon Charde has seven published poetry collections, the most recent being The Glass is Already Broken published by Blue Light Press in 2021. She has taught incarcerated girls poetry for sixteen years and wrote a memoir about that work, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, published by Mango in June 2020. She has received many awards for her poetry, including ten Pushcart nominations, and numerous fellowships, among them Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, UCross, and MacDowell. A retired psychotherapist, she lives in Northwest Connecticut with her husband of fifty-eight years.
Your purchase of a book helps support the author and our independent bookstore and is greatly appreciated. Shipping or in-store pickup is available.
