I’ve been fascinated by animals all of my life … especially such large carnivores as wolves and bears and mountain lions. One of my earliest ambitions was to become a naturalist or perhaps a park ranger where I would be able to interact with such powerful creatures on a regular basis. My feeling of connection to those animals grew even deeper as I grew older and learned more about the Abenaki Indian culture that is part of my heritage. For example, as John Lawyer, an Abenaki elder once explained it to me, there’s visible evidence that we humans are close kin to the bear, the wolf, and the lion. Our eyes, like theirs, are in the front of our heads. Thus we can follow the trail of whatever we hunt. The eyes of the rabbit and the deer are on the sides of their heads to enable them to see all around them. That is because they are the ones being hunted.
When I went to Cornell University, I spent three years studying Wildlife Conservation before switching to English after taking several Creative Writing courses that led me to another trail, which convinced me writing was the path I was meant to follow.
However, as a writer, I never forgot that first connection to nature. Much of what I’ve written is about the natural world and draws on all I’ve learned, not just in the classroom, but from my American Indian elders and from the forest itself, which is a great teacher for those willing to be silent, look, and listen.
I’ve also kept reading. I am, by any definition, a voracious reader. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t hunger for books. I’m always wolfing down at least a dozen books at any given time. I finish an average of a book a day. I devour fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translations, plays, graphic novels, books from all over the world, including Africa and Asia.
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And I love genre fiction — the spy novel (some of that shows in Wolf Mark), detective stories, science fiction and fantasy. I believe I have as complete a grasp on the literature and folklore of lycanthropy as anyone in the world. (The first story I can recall reading about a human being joining with the wolves is one that I still love and admire. Rudyard Kipling’s powerful and still relevant collection of stories, The Jungle Book, published in 1894.)
All of this is the background that took me down the trail toward Wolf Mark, a shapeshifter story with a difference, for it is not shaped by the grisly and horrific European conventions of the werewolf as ravening beast, but by American Indian traditions that recognize kinship with the animals and see the wolf as brother, as teacher, as guide.
I also think that I wrote Wolf Mark because I wanted to write a YA supernatural novel that would be as interesting to young men as the currently popular romantic novels about hunky vampires are to young women.
Note my use of the word “think” in that last paragraph. I say that because writing Wolf Mark was not really a conscious decision. I heard the voice of my main character speaking to me and began to write down what I heard from him.
Of course what I heard may have just come from within my own subconscious, from things I already knew. And this leads me to the last thing I’d like to share in this brief essay — a few words about belief.
I believe that as a writer, you write best when you are writing about things you know deeply and well. Or about things that you want to know deeply and well and thus begin to embark upon the journey to learn them. That journey can take decades, as was the case for me with such books I’ve written as Sacajawea and Code Talker.
The stories that fail for me as a reader are usually those that I stop believing because they betray a lack of knowledge on the writer’s part. (That is sadly true of most — but not all — books about American Indians or with Native characters that were written by non-Indians.) A few facts scattered here and there are not enough. You have to feel that there’s a depth, real roots holding the story up. In the words of Alexander Pope, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing/Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring …”
When a story is backed by knowledge, deepened by understanding, then even if that story is fantasy, taking place in a world far removed from the one in which most people believe, then disbelief can be willingly suspected. Then we may believe in the unbelievable and trust the author as our guide as we follow his or her story’s trail.
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