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With A Wolf Called Fire, Rosanne Parry revisits her 2019 novel A Wolf Called Wander. It’s not a sequel nor a prequel; in fact, the two novels, about the same pack of wolves, take place at the same time. Neat trick!

Roger Sutton: So, Rosanne, this book isn’t exactly a sequel to A Wolf Called Wander, but what would you call it?

Rosanne Parry: I believe it's being called a companion book. The thing about A Wolf Called Fire is that it’s the same story, in some ways, but from a different wolf’s point of view — Warm, the omega wolf in my original group of pups. It doesn't matter which novel you read first. But I had to go through and resurrect my timeline from the first book — it's been a minute since I wrote that one. And so to resurrect that timeline and then make sure that the wolf meetups landed correctly — that I had the right number of days between when they were parted by this big fight and then when they reunite again after the fight and so making sure that all those days lined up — was a bit of a puzzle, but fun.

RS: Why did you decide to do it? Instead of telling the story of a new animal, why did you go back to this wolf pack?

RP: Well, we've learned a lot more about wolves in the decade since I was researching and writing A Wolf Called Wander. For example, initially the men who research wolves — wolf biologists — assumed that the largest and strongest wolf would be the alpha, and so in their research they only watched the big charismatic wolves and didn't look at the other ones. And then eventually some women wolf biologists came along. They took the exact same rubric that had always been used to watch these assumed alphas, but they watched omega wolves, they watched female wolves, and they learned a lot about how dynamic pack leadership is and how vital a role the female wolves play. They decide where the pack goes. They decide where the den is. Wolf biologists hadn't figured that out before because they hadn't bothered to look at the female wolves.

RS: Quelle surprise.

RP: I know! To their credit, now that they've made that connection, male wolf biologists are happy to acknowledge that we now understand wolves in a different way. And then I ran across the writing of Rick McIntyre, who wrote very compellingly about Wolf 8, from Yellowstone National Park, who was the omega of his pack. Nobody thought he would survive. I mean, they really thought his brothers would kill him because they were bigger and had all the obvious leadership qualities. But Wolf 8 survived and went on to be a different kind of alpha wolf, a great mentor of pups. He loved teaching pups new things, and he got taken on as the alpha wolf by an extremely powerful female who already had eight pups by another large charismatic wolf who was killed by a poacher. So Wolf 8 went on to lead this pack of pups who grew up to tower over him, but because he was such a good mentor to them, they were fanatically loyal. His son went on to lead the Druid Peak wolf pack, which dominated Yellowstone Park history for a decade or more. And you can still see some of those leadership traits that Wolf 8 had of more compassion, more insight. Interestingly, he chose not to kill other alphas that his pack defeated, and the result was that the defeated alpha never crossed into his territory again and taught all of his offspring never to cross into that territory again. Which is what made the pack so powerful in the end. The thing that looks like compassion, and maybe weakness, is the thing that consolidated the strength of that pack. So that's cool.

RS: Let's talk about when you say in the book, “He chose.” Do you find that anthropomorphic? Anthropomorphizing?

RP: I've had plenty of conversations with wildlife biologists about this very thing — that we shouldn't anthropomorphize animals — and there are good reasons not to. We can be led into error when we assume human motivation, for example. On the other hand, many, many biologists have said that the other side of the coin is we should not deny animals emotions and motivations that we would prefer to reserve for humans. For myself, in my writing, I want every behavior the wolf does in the book to be true to actual animal behavior in the wild. I want to know them well enough to say, “This is actually a thing an animal would do.” But I'm comfortable with inventing their emotional and social life.

RS: And their reasoning.

RP: Yeah, because wolves are highly intelligent. And now that we have been watching wolves for so long, we know that they do things that are like grieving, they do things that are like playing pranks. Truly, you could write an opera about the wolves in Yellowstone, because they have relatively short lives. So the leadership turns over a lot, with lots of jostling and churn in that leadership and more than one way to seize control of a pack. I had a chance to meet Rick McIntyre in Yellowstone last May, and he showed me the oldest wolf mother that Yellowstone has ever had. She was eleven years old and had a litter of pups, and I was there to watch the day she brought them out of the den. It was pretty amazing.

RS: She had the pups when she was ten years old?

RP: Yes.

RS: Wow! That’s old for a wolf, right?

RP: The average life expectancy is three years, but wolves that make it through their first year on average live five or six years, so it's not unheard of. OR-7 (the wolf that A Wolf Called Wander is based on) lived to be eleven years old as well. But anyway, this wolf’s big strategy was that she chose a much younger mate who was extremely loyal to her. She had taken the leadership of the pack four times and lost it three times, but she was on her fourth go-round as the alpha female of that pack. I was really attracted to the notion that there's more than one kind of leadership. There isn't only one way to lead, and there isn't only one kind of strength. I hope that will resonate with young readers.

RS: What made you decide to go full-blown animal story?

RP: All animals, all the time?

RS: Was your previous wolf book the first one?

RP: Yeah, it was the first. I had done four books with Random House, and they were doing fine critically, but the sales were flat. I had a period where I couldn't sell a book at all, which has happened to honestly every author that I know at some point in their life.

RS: We ought to boldface that.

RP: Everyone I know who's been in the game for a long time has a period like that. I thought, I have to do something different, and I was really taken by this OR-7 story and everything that we were learning — because collaring wolves and following them was relatively new then. And I loved wolf stories when I was a kid. But almost all the ones I could find were where a wolf has a magical relationship with a child, which is super appealing. I totally want a wolf friend! And yet, as I dug into the research — wolves do not like us at all. They just don't. People have been poaching wolves for centuries, and they remember that about us. Now that so many of them are collared, we can see that. During hunting season here in Oregon, as soon as the hunters head out there into the hills, the wolves are gone. They're a hundred miles away. They want no part of it. But the day hunting season ends, they're right back. So I knew that if I’m going to do this realistically, I can’t have a child character in the book. As much as I might wish to, if I'm going to be realistic about this animal, they don't want to have a relationship with people. So my dare to myself was, “Can I write a book from the point of view of an animal and not have any humans in it and still have it be interesting to humans to read?” That was the puzzle. It was a fun challenge, but I didn't know if I could sell it when it was done. And when it was finished, every single American publisher turned it down.

RS: But wait, what changed? Because clearly the book was published.

RP: I have a very tenacious agent, Fiona Kenshole. She loves animal stories and knows all the editors who love them. She was shocked that the book didn't sell in America and not very impressed with their reasons for not buying it. She was like, “We could shelve this and move on to the next book, but how would you feel about sending it to English-speaking publishers outside the U.S.?” So that's what we did. The first edition of A Wolf Called Wander was published by Andersen Press in the UK. It's been around for a long time, it’s venerable, and it's small — you only have to convince like three people. My editor there, Chloe Sackur, was fabulous. She said, “I love this book — this is the book I've been waiting years and years to publish because I want children in my country to feel an emotional connection to the wilderness.” She felt that we're not going to do the work that's before us in caring for the environment unless people feel connected, deeply, emotionally, to the wilderness. But in the UK, 90% of children now live in a city. It's a very urban place, and childhood is a very urban thing now.

RS: And there are no wolves.

RP: There haven't been wolves in England for 500 years. Chloe said, “This is what I want for my countrymen, but Oregon is so exotic to them. They won't get it unless it is illustrated.” She said, “I would like it to be illustrated with pictures of such number and quality that it will be in print with the same illustrations fifty years from now.” Which is not the tune you hear everywhere. They were willing to take a huge chance on the book, and they hired a fantastic illustrator, Mónica Armiño, who also illustrated A Wolf Called Fire.

RS: There aren't many pictures in the galley they sent me, but I can see it’s going to be just as heavily illustrated as the first one.

RP: It’s around 130 pictures. That's a big investment for the publisher to make, so I was completely gobsmacked that they would invest that much on an unproven thing. Which is why you need small presses, not just the big ones, because they're the ones who are willing to take those risks. But they were very savvy about it. Instead of sending an ARC like the one you got with just a few of the illustrations, they sent the first two chapters, fully illustrated, to the Bologna Book Fair. I think they sold five translations in a day, and then they took it back to America and said, “Do you want it now that it has shiny pictures?” And several publishers said, "Yes, we do!"

RS: That must have been so satisfying.

RP: It was pretty cool. I found a good home with Virginia Duncan at Greenwillow — they didn't receive it on submission the first time — and they have been fabulous to work with. They're really interested in digging into this sort of concept with the Voice of the Wilderness books, so that's exciting. But it was by no means a sure thing. I had no idea if I could sell the book when I wrote it, and even after I finally found a publisher, I had no idea it would become what it has become.

RS: What got you into wolves in the first place?

RP: I've lived in Oregon since I was a child, and I've always loved to hike and camp, so I've always known that all these animals are here. But it was really OR-7, who was collared and made this amazing journey. It was 2011 when he left his pack, and everybody assumed he'd go east to Idaho — there are hundreds of wolves in Idaho — and join a pack there. But he went west toward California, and people were like, “What? There are no wolves there! Where is he going to go? How far is he going to go?” People didn't really know how much ground a wolf can cover in a day, and he ran a thousand miles in a month.

RS: Wow.

RP: Yeah, that was pretty surprising to people. Wolves can cover fifty to a hundred miles in a day. I mean, there are a few humans who can run fifty miles a day, but they for sure can't run fifty miles the next day. But wolves can hit a pace and cover ground like almost no other animal, and that ability is one of the secrets to their survival. I was totally fascinated by this wolf, OR-7. He had his own Twitter account, so I followed his progress. He found a wolf where there had not been wolves for ninety years, and people were astonished. The two wolves formed a pack. They had pups every year for five years. Those pups of OR-7 went on to found the first pack in California in a hundred years, so it's this huge environmental resilience story that I find very appealing. And that resilience story is vital for young readers.

RS: At one point in A Wolf Called Fire they meet Snow, a wolf from the enemy ice wolves who comes to them and offers to help. How do you as a writer construct such a relationship without going too far into anthropomorphizing? You said you have a line and there are lines you don’t cross, so how do you find that line?

RP: I think it’s learning what I can about wolves and how they form connections. I remember being so struck by the story of a long-term alpha pair in Yellowstone. They had been, for three consecutive years, the alpha pair of this pack, which is a very long time for wolves. Then the male died. And the female left her pack and climbed a mountain and stayed there for five days and did nothing at all. She didn't hunt. She just spent time alone on the mountain. And then that time passed, and she went back. She went back to her pack, she chose a new alpha male, and she went on to lead that pack for another year or two. But how can that not be interpreted as grieving? It’s clear that they are capable of forming deep bonds and they're capable of learning too. It's the benefit of their intelligence. So, that Snow and Warm would form a bond and that she would be attracted to a less oppressive style of leadership seems plausible to me.

RS: Do you have a sense of how child readers connect what's going on among your wolves with their own understanding of dealing with other people, or their own families?

RP: I get a lot of letters from kids, and many of them are just like, “Hooray, animal adventure!” They love going on the journey. But recently teachers have told me that A Wolf Called Wander is the best book they’ve come across for that initial grief conversation. I did a school visit in 2022; a teacher had asked me to come because her students are mostly Russian immigrants. They're not very trustful of the government, so it's not a very vaccinated community. She told me that every single child in her class lost a grandparent in the pandemic. And a couple of them lost every grandparent, and about a quarter of them also lost a parent. That's huge.

RS: Aside from the people, you’re losing a whole layer of connection, right?

RP: Right. I mean, we lost a million grandparents, and I don't think we have come to terms with what that means, because grandparents are such force multipliers in a child's life. If I spend more than a week with students, I can almost always guess who has grandparents actively involved in their life. Because it gives a lot to their lives in terms of strength and resiliency and resources. And because Wander loses his whole family and goes on this journey to find a family of his own, a place of his own, this teacher found that the book was a good entry point to talk about grief. Because it's not about a human child who's grieving, it’s enough removed that it's a good starting point for that conversation. I have always thought that the conversation that happens because of the book is more important than anything that’s actually in the book.

RS: The problem I always had with death books, as we called them in grad school, was that there's really nothing else going on. But the fact is that when somebody dies there's a lot going on — because of that death, despite that death. And in your wolf books, wolves are dying all the time but they're also exploring, they're also finding food, they're also having battles, they're also playing. To me that is more true to a kid's life than a book that is simply a sit-down discussion of “your mom died, let's talk about it.”

RP: Yeah, and kids have to go about the business of being a child, even in grief. One of my favorite memories of my mother's funeral is all of the cousins out on the patio at the reception teaching each other dance moves, because they were all teenagers at the time. I love that so much because it's very true to how young people are. They're like, “This is sad, but also we should probably dance, and are there more cookies?” So I think animals do grieve their bonded partners, but they also have to get on with the business of living.

RS: How close have you gotten to a wolf?

RP: Because wolves are so shy of humans, not very. I have seen their tracks and scat in the wild — which I have to say is alarming! Chunks of bone, strips of skin with hair still on. I have a new insight into what my mother meant when she said, “Stop wolfing down your food!” So I've seen tracks and scat, and I've heard wolves howling. But I don't think I have actually seen them in the wild until this spring when I went wolf-watching in Yellowstone with Rick McIntyre. We used a spotting scope to watch from more than a mile away. I'm reasonably certain they've seen me, because I have been where they are. But to be honest, because I know how much wolves dread people, I'm not especially keen to see them in the wild. Because if that happened, that would be a wolf's worst day. If I want to see a wolf, there's a wolf refuge in Tenino, Washington. There are places I can go and see wolves in semi-natural behavior. But my research in a lot of ways is as much about trying to think about the environment as a wolf sees it with the wolf’s own reference point. What does this ground feel like under my feet? What can I see? What can I hear? What can I smell here? I mean, if you get down closer to the ground, it's so much easier to find water. If your head is even a foot closer to the ground, you can hear it better, you can smell it better. So I do a fair amount of kneeling and lying down in the woods going, “I wonder what things look like from here. What am I noticing that I'm not seeing from my adult height?”

RS: I was taught in library school that if you're going to be a children's librarian, what you should do anytime you go into a new job is get down on your knees to see what the room looks like from that perspective.

RP: Exactly, yeah. Often when I'm writing a picture book I'll sit on the floor while I'm writing just to be like, “I am this size, this is how the world looks to me.” I think whatever you can do to change your perspective is huge.

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