Renée Askins
Interviewed by Gavin J. Grant

Doubleday

Renée Askins' first book, Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, A Woman, and the Wild has just been published. Askins founded the Wolf Fund in 1986 for the sole purpose of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park. Her writing has been featured in Harper's Magazine and in the anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. She has traveled and lectured extensively on the topic of wildness in our culture. She lives in Wilson, Wyoming, with her husband, her daughter, four dogs, and three parakeets.

BookSense.com: Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, A Woman, and the Wild is your first book. It must have taken a long time to write, and I imagine it was hard to stay on target all that time.

Renée Askins: Yes. It was a journey of its own. When I started I signed the contract shortly before I closed the Wolf Fund. On the day I closed the Wolf Fund, I learned that my sister, 21 months older than I, had been diagnosed with cancer. That really changed the whole landscape of my life and I became pretty much her main support person. I told my editor that all bets were off, and I needed to be there for her. I dropped everything, put all four dogs on the plane and flew down to Atlanta. She had two surgeries back-to-back right then.

A few months later, I went over to Chattanooga to do a lecture for the Outdoors Writers Association with Molly Beattie, one of my closest friends. That was in late June -- in early July, Mollie had her first seizure, and a few days after that she was diagnosed with brain cancer.

So, that first year my sister and my closest friend were diagnosed with breast and brain cancer. I believe that it's really important to be there [for people], so the book took a back seat for a couple of years.

I think in the long run, it was a good thing. It gave me some distance that made the book a very different kind of book. I had been asked throughout the process of writing of the book, "What's your book about?" Every time -- depending on what chapter I was on, or what mood I was in -- I would answer differently. I began to think I was either terribly schizophrenic, or that this book was going to have a really disconnected feel.

What was really true was that I was weaving together a really disparate group [of ideas]. But then I sat down one morning and started scribbling some notes, and I derived the preface from the notes.

Here is an edited version of the prologue from Shadow Mountain:

"This book is about: keeping a promise, living a passion, loving an animal, never turning back, not giving up, hope, living from hope to hope, living in the hell between the hopes, the fact whatever you do counts, (and whatever you don't do counts), real work, heartbreak, incandescent joy, wildness, wildness lost, wildness found, wildness within, wildness out of reach, reaching, being accompanied, common experience, uncommon experience. A place called Shadow Mountain, a wolf named Natasha, and starting a long conversation with some people I know, and hopefully many I will come to know."

In a talk I gave in Boulder, I was recounting the line from Shadowlands, where C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, "We read to know that we are not alone." I think we write to know we are not alone. My theory is that the writing and reading process is one of great intimacy. It's one of intimate exchange and offering. As you put the words on the page they mean nothing -- they're like a painting that is painted but never seen. They exist in some ways without value as words that are never offered to be read (unless they're written for therapeutic reasons). I really see it as an intimate interactive process and a process that is -- in a culture that we are increasingly so isolated from one another -- a way to bind us together in a unity.

When I read a great book, I will invariably buy 10 or 15 copies and send them to friends. I can't help but tell people about them or write down parts and send them to friends or integrate parts into letters. It's such a community of ideas. I see Shadow Mountain as a confluence of ideas even though it's a memoir -- I don't think I'd have had the guts to even consider doing a memoir at the ripe age of 40 if I hadn't felt I was offering what I felt was an assimilation or collection of ideas and shared experience.

Were there other women working with the wolves or in your field?

There was a woman who had done her Ph.D. work with Dave Mech whom I liked a lot. She probably has little consciousness of how much it meant to know another woman in the field.

Pat Tucker started an organization, The Wild Century, quite a bit after The Wolf Fund. She had acquired a wolf that they used as an "ambassador wolf." There are a number of those kinds of organizations around the country, but Pat and her husband, Bruce White, were some of the few who did it with a lot of grace and in a manner that didn't compromise the animal.

It's very hard to go around and talk about wolves in the wild, and the importance of wolves in the wild, and the fact that wolves don't make good pets -- and parade a wolf around on a chain. Actions speak so much louder than words! When people or kids see a wolf on a leash they think, "I want one." You have to go to pretty great ends to get beyond that physical picture. Yet, the intimacy of having the contact with a real animal is a very powerful thing, and I think that Pat and Bruce continue to do a terrific job.

Are you involved with any other wolf reintroduction programs?

Only very quietly behind the scenes. I've intentionally declined being on any boards. I talk to a lot of people and discuss strategies. During the process of writing the book, I knew that to really try to get some perspective on what this experience had been I had to shift away from what I had been.

To give yourself to the sorcery of literature, I think you have to go from one of those lives where you're just doing 24/7 nonprofit work...it will eat you alive. It was my life, and I gave willingly and joyfully most of the time -- there were hard times certainly -- but I really was ready to cross that finish line.

I was well suited for the job. A lot of people never believed The Wolf Fund would really shut down, especially when we still had money in the bank, and a lot of foundations behind us. But that was what we were. That was a big part of the whole reason for creating the organization. It's what I think created our efficacy: We didn't have this motivation to survive as an organization, to keep growing and maintain. Someone compared us to a herding dog or a SWAT team. We really did well staying small and focused. We made this promise that when the first gates opened to release the wolves, we would slam our doors, and that's exactly what we did.

I still watch the programs with great interest in terms of the different recovery efforts around the country, but I'm not involved in the same way.

Are the wolves in Yellowstone are now safe from legal challenge?

I'm not a lawyer, so that would be a very hard question to answer. I was involved in a number of the lawsuits throughout the process, and I think there are still so many legal means of manipulating the situation, and the politics are very powerful....

I do think that the American public is extremely invested in those wolves. We came a little close with the last lawsuit [in 1998] that went down and then was overturned in the Appellate Court.

I felt deep in my heart that the public investment in the presence of wolves was so great that no matter what the courts did, that the public would be so adamant that there would be an Act of Congress that would overrule the courts. The only way that the other side could have won was on this very small regulation, and ultimately they didn't, because that regulaton was not in the spirit of the act itself.

If you watched the Yellowstone fires in 1988, you could see the level of investment -- and fury -- the public had in Yellowstone. I don't think anyone expected the kind of public reaction there was. Even the nightly news -- night after night after night after night it was the lead story. I think it was because the public reaction was so strong: It was their national park.

It was unfortunate that the press put a spin on it at the beginning, "These fools are letting our park burn," and that it was painful for the people that were there.... The truth was that they had no control.

I went up to the park afterward and worked with Peter Matthiesson on a piece on the fires and I remember interviewing Bob Barbee who was superintendent at the time. Peter asked him something like "How did the fires make you feel?" and Bob's response was, "You know, those fires kicked our ass from one end to the other." I'll never forget that!

When you see wildfires like you're seeing now -- with the level of suppressed burning they'd had for so long -- once the burn started, the conditions were so great, they just had no control. It was no one's fault, the conditions were such that they just had absolutely no ability to suppress the fires.

When you see that kind of public reaction and the sense of protectiveness that people feel toward Yellowstone, I think that if there were any move now to go in there and try to remove the wolves.... It has been a tremendous success -- greater than our wildest dreams. We never thought we'd see reproduction on the level that we've seen it.

Do you have any idea of the number of wolves there are now?

They don't have completely accurate counts because the pups are just emerging and becoming visible, and you have a lot of pup mortality into the fall. We won't have a secure population number until around December.

The most accurate numbers were from the end of 2001: 218 wolves in 25 packs, which is really great. That doesn't count the pups, so now it's far higher.

The most recent count I read was a total in the three-state area (Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming): 560 wolves and 150 pups.

And the wolves will keep spreading for the foreseeable future?

They're dispersing, and will until they reach the carrying capacity of the ecosystem -- again, this is a very fluid relationship. When you're talking about the ecosystem, Yellowstone National Park is surrounded by a national forest. The whole area is called the Greater Yellowstone Area, and you're talking about a much larger area than just the National Park. There are certainly wild areas outside the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, but they are "islands," so wolves have dispersed across agricultural lands; that's where some of the controversy will arise and some of the discussion: "Okay, we have wolves in Yellowstone, to what degree do we want them elsewhere in the state?"

Each state will undergo that discussion. In some cases, we may not have much conflict at all; in other cases, we may have considerable conflict. So far, given the number of wolves and the actual exposure to the number of livestock, we have had proportionately very, very few livestock kills. Which doesn't mean if you're the guy that lost the sheep or calves that that doesn't hurt. One of my friends has been one of the hardest hit people here in the Tetons. He's lost, I think, five dogs to wolves, and I don't know what the count on livestock is. That's pretty hard. I never try to play down the costs.

One of the themes of your book is control -- how much we have, and how much we're willing to let go.

When I set out to write the book I never thought of it as a wolf book, and I still don't. I felt that the story of my work with wolves was a thematic backbone that allowed me to explore some philosophical arenas that are of great interest to me using that same idea of Einstein's, "Through the specific, lies the universal."

This issue about control is one of the examples. I used the discussion around the collars and the continued use of telemetry collars on the wolves to talk about our addiction to controlling our environment. Once you start controlling something, you lose the gift of reciprocity.

When I talk about the relationship to wildness and our need to have this otherness and this wildness out there, I talk about our need to have it as a need that clears our psyche: it puts us in touch with a way of living in which we utilize our senses, a way in which we might might have lived 10,000 years ago, when we weren't insulated and cooled and fed by artificial means. We no longer have that contact with that visceral otherness.

The exchange is lost. In imposing control on these others -- whether its the way in which we start managing bears or wolves, or trees -- the more we impose our uniformity, the less we learn, the less we are open.

We have an opportunity to set them free. We will have to kill wolves. I'd far rather see a rancher who has to protect his cattle kill wolves than to have all the wolves run around with collars on being monitored.

One of the ethical questions is that, if we put the collars on for "control reasons," when they "become a nuisance" do we shoot them? I find a very scary and insidious shadow in that. I don't know if that is very far ahead of where we were 100 years ago.

We're diminishing the overall relationship to facilitate the convenience of protecting or watching the animals -- it's a very slippery slope. One of the finest wildlife writers writing now, Ted Williams, had an article in Orion Magazine called "Who's Managing the Wildlife Managers." He wrote it a long time ago, but it's held up.

What's really important to me is that this is not a wildlife book -- it's about getting involved, living, loving, and losing. I wrote it to learn what I think in hopes of provoking other ideas and hearing what other people think. I think it is one element in a long conversation.

What other books are part of this conversation?

I was very into The Abstract Wild. That was a really critical book for me. One reviewer compared it to Terry Tempest Williams; I think there's a whole new genre of women who are writing on the edge.

I often start out in the morning by reading poetry. I read a lot of Merwin, and there's a book I like, We Animals.

One book that was very important to me was a collection of essays on shadow, Meeting the Shadow -- there was more wisdom packed into that book....

Only when I was at the very end of writing the book did I find the thematic elements that brought the book full circle. I was so excited about it -- I found myself poring over all the shadow material and I found why I felt so strongly about titling it Shadow Mountain.

What have you been reading recently?

I think Terry Tempest Williams' Leap is a very daring book -- it's tough and daring. I read a lot of Paul Shepard's work, which is very dense and very tough to read, but intellectually, I think the substance of it was very important to the material in my book.

I'm such a believer in poetry because I think it's the height of literature. I love essays. I tend to return over and over again, like the series, The Writer on her Work: New Essays and New Territory, edited by Janet Sternberg. I found some of those essays really fun. There are interviews with Joy Williams, Margaret Atwood, Gretel Ehrlich, Diane Ackerman, Linda Hogan, Maxine Kumin, and Ursula K. Le Guin. They're personal, funny, kind of quirky pieces.

Of course, I've done a lot of reading in the realm of mothers -- mothers struggling to be artists, and so on. I'm a big fan of the Wild Duck Review. She's scrambling for money all the time, but she's amazing. The ideas are always original and, scanning through the back issues, I find exciting and provocative stuff.