Wolf in the Snow began with a picture that I drew. And sometimes I just like to draw pictures that aren’t for assignment or not for deadlines, I just like to draw things and for some reason I had this idea to draw a girl in a red coat and she’s in a completely snow covered field with basically just a white, complete white space background and just a few away from her is standing an adult wolf, staring, the two are staring at each other.
And I didn’t have a story, and I’ve tried to write stories about drawings before and it just ends horribly, like I just spend so much time trying to make a story out of nothing and it just, so I’ve tried that before and it didn’t really work so, but I loved the drawing so much and I wondered if there was a story that could be pulled out of that.
So I felt like a better way to approach it would be not so much to just try to write a story about these two characters but to try to learn a bit more about a wolf because at that point I didn’t know much about wolves and what I thought I knew about wolves was that they were you know bloodthirsty and frightening and wanted to eat people and you know a lot of that comes from old fairytales like Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs where wolves are demonized and made into villains.
And you know are very frightening to people. And so when I actually took the time to research wolves and read about wolves and watched documentaries about wolves, I learned that wolves are, that’s not what wolves are, that they, they have been thought to be that by people and people have killed wolves and hunted them down and wiped out populations of wolves.
So wolves have really become very timid around people, very distrustful of people. So, I started to see some parallels in that story about you know people that distrust wolves and wolves that distrust people. I started to see parallels between that story about, and people that distrust people because of their differences and because of things they don’t know about each other that are happening all the time in our you know, and have always happened throughout history but it seems really, really amplified in our current sort of sociopolitical climate.
And so I felt like it was a good story to tell about how these two animals you know, or two beings, a person and a wolf that typically don’t trust each other, don’t know each other, they are put into a situation where they are forced to help each other. And by helping each other they become better, better people or better animals or better people because of that experience where they had to learn about each other and put their trust in each other.