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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Ely, wolves: What’s the connection?

Writer describes research experience for story collection

Keith Vandervort
Posted 11/21/14

ELY - How do wolves affect the residents of Greenstone, Minn., a fictitious small town near the Canadian border where people have lived in wolf territory for generations?

In introducing and …

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Ely, wolves: What’s the connection?

Writer describes research experience for story collection

Posted

ELY - How do wolves affect the residents of Greenstone, Minn., a fictitious small town near the Canadian border where people have lived in wolf territory for generations?

In introducing and describing her writing project to the Tuesday Group this week, Min-neapolis author Wen- dy Skinner talked about what connects the longtime relationship of Ely “or a town eerily similar to Ely,” and the oft-misunderstood wolf.

Inspired by dozens of interviews in Northeast Minnesota, Skinner’s stories run the gamut of intriguing characters. The characters in the collection of short stories are based on her interpretations of many of those interviewed around the area. Readers will encounter gun-toting women and love-struck men in a never-ending clash between locals, pack sackers and living with wolves.

She emphasized that her work is fictitious. “The best fiction should feel like its true,” she said to a packed audience.

She is a 2014 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

The funding includes her involvement in community engagement about her topic. She admitted that it has been more difficult than she imagined. “There is cultural, political and personal turmoil that surrounds wolves and wolf hunting,” she said.

Skinner said she was told by a local nature center that her topic was too much of a “hot potato” to talk about at their venue. Other local organizations gave her the same cold shoulder.

“Fiction can make people uncomfortable,” Skinner said. “If someone read my stories and didn’t find something disturbing or uncomfortable, then I would have failed as a writer of fiction. I want my characters to bother you. I want you to like them, but I also want them to make you think. The point for me in being a fiction writer is it creates empathy. You don’t have to agree with people to understand them.”

Skinner arrived in Ely last January to begin her research. “This means wandering around the area, interviewing people in Orr, Cook, Ely and the surrounding area to get a feeling for the landscape and learn how wolves and the legislation of wolf hunting affects the residents in Northern Minnesota.”

She began with the idea of writing stories about wolves and how their hunting affects people here, “I also wanted to dispel stereotypes and go beyond what I’ve seen in the popular media, so I chose the personal interview, the most intimate, primary source available,” she said.

She chose to write a collection of short stories, “because a single story creates stereotypes,” she said. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story,” she said.

“I discovered that people don’t only hunt wolves or avoid hunting wolves. They also look to wolves as a key to their cultural identity, they study them for the important role they play in our ecosystem, they project their greatest fears or hopes unto wolves, and depending on their unique personal experiences with wolves, people develop a visceral hatred of them or a deep affinity with them, or someplace in between,” she said.

Her characters live in a fictitious town situated on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in the heart of wolf territory. “They are like your friend living on Fernberg, your neighbor working in town, your cousin fishing on Fall Lake, or maybe they are just like you,” she said.

As part of her presentation, she showed photographs of many people around the area, most of whom were identifiable to the group, including an Irish woman, a lake resort owner, a young trapper, an old trapper and his wife, an intern, a VCC student, a bait shop owner, a wolf-deer biologist, a goat breeder, a sled dog guide, a naturalist, aveterinarian, mining advocates, an artist, an outfitter, a conservation officer, even a roller derby girl or two.

She has completed five stories to date and read aloud the one she hopes will be the final story in the collection, called, “A Million Stars.”

Skinner hopes to complete her stories in the next year and secure a publisher after that. “Knowing what I do about the publishing world, it could be three years before it is all done.”