Gary would give a presentation and we’d do a couple of writing exercises, then go for a hike.” “We’d get up in the morning and we’d have two or three hours of workshop time. “We went out onto the Zumwalt Prairie, which is where Wander first comes out of the mountains, and we camped there for a week,” Parry recalled. She interviewed a number of wolf conservationists, and in the summer of 2014, took an outpost workshop led by nature and science writer Gary Ferguson at the literary organization Fishtrap in eastern Oregon. It includes some of the terrifying moments he might have endured and his triumph in eventually finding a mate in an area where no wolf had been seen in 90 years.įor Parry, who is a former teacher and current part-time bookseller at Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland, Ore., conducting the research for the book was part of the fun. Parry’s riveting narrative, illustrated by Mónica Armiño, is a fictionalized version of OR-7’s journey, told from a wolf’s-eye view. They told the saga of OR-7, a lone wolf that traveled more than 1,000 miles through three ecosystems over the course of three years, from the Wallowa Mountains in the northeastern corner of Oregon to the Siskiyou Wilderness in northwestern California, to start a new pack. at all.Ī Wolf Called Wander is a survival tale loosely based on a series of news articles that first captivated the Pacific Northwest in 2011. In fact, Wander almost didn’t get published in the U.S. But despite having five acclaimed novels and a picture book under her belt, her journey over the past few years was anything but easy.

Thanks in part to the middle grade novel’s success, Parry has just signed a six-figure deal with Greenwillow for three more books. After her latest book, A Wolf Called Wander (Greenwillow), was published in May, it landed on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for 17 weeks.

Author Rosanne Parry has been a bit busy these last few months.

A wolf called wander by rosanne parry