Once There Were Wolves
Once There Were Wolves
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Charlotte McConaghy on Once There Were Wolves
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A dying forest and a fury that couldn’t waitThe book’s premise arrived from a single article, not from years of accumulated thinking. McConaghy was reading about Pando, the Trembling Giant, a forest of quaking aspen in Utah that functions as one organism connected by a single underground root system, possibly a million years old, and dying from human impact. The final sentence, almost an aside, noted that reintroducing wolves would likely reverse that decline. Local farmers would never allow it. By the time she finished her walk, the novel existed.
I immediately was enthralled by this idea. And all of a sudden, I had the whole book in my head. I knew exactly what it was going to be. I went for a walk and by the time I got back, it was fully formed.
Where her previous novel, Migrations, had been written from grief, this one came from somewhere harder to sit with. McConaghy has described the emotional register of each of her books as distinct, arriving from a specific place in her own emotional life rather than from a neutral creative decision. For Once There Were Wolves, what preceded the writing was not sorrow but fury at a pattern she kept seeing repeated.
Each of my novels takes a look at the wildness both beyond us and within us, but they do so through a different emotional lens. Migrations came from a starting point of sadness and loss, Wolves started from a place of rage. Wild Dark Shore is about fear.
The rage had two specific targets, and finding the thread connecting them became the novel’s structural spine. McConaghy named them plainly in an early video interview, before she had worked out how they fit together. The answer she arrived at shaped everything from the plot’s murder mystery to the protagonist Inti’s neurological condition.
There are two kind of main themes, I think, in this novel: the slaughter of innocent animals and male violence against women. So I needed to sort of work out how these two things would go together into this novel, and it sort of came down to empathy for me, and the lack of empathy. [paraphrased from audio]
Creating Inti, the wolf biologist at the book’s center, was also a way of imagining a version of herself McConaghy wanted to exist in the world. She has spoken about writing fierce women not as an abstract political gesture but as something closer to personal instruction, a way of practicing on the page what she hopes to enact in life.
I think it’s wish fulfillment, really. I would love to be fiercer than I am, and I love the idea that that ferocity could be turned towards fighting for the natural world. So I write women who are undertaking incredible feats of courage and resilience in order to do what I hope to see more of in the real world. Maybe to inspire myself.
How she wrote it
Wolf personalities, a farmer father, and a title found in bedMcConaghy has no scientific training, and her research process begins before a single sentence of prose. For Once There Were Wolves, this meant reading extensively about the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction of the 1990s, a project unusually well-documented through the journals and firsthand accounts of the biologists who ran it. What she found there surprised her and changed what the novel was about.
The main thing that really blew me away was the individual personalities of the wolves...It’s impossible not to love them after you read about them...The people who were working with them loved them in that same way...I found that very moving and knew that there was a story in that.
That discovery generated one of the book’s quieter tensions: Inti insists on numbering her wolves rather than naming them, a rule designed to keep scientific distance intact, but one the story slowly dismantles.
Representing farmers who oppose reintroduction was the craft problem McConaghy had least sympathy for at the outset, and therefore the one she worked hardest to solve honestly. Her method was personal before it was literary. She asked her own father, who runs a sheep and cattle farm in Australia, to walk her through his hypothetical fears about a predator being introduced near his land.
I needed to understand the opposition to my own way of thinking.
The choice to give Inti mirror-touch synesthesia, a condition in which a person physically feels what they see others experiencing, came from an American podcast called Invisibilia that McConaghy encountered during research. Her own mild synesthesia, in which memories attach to colors and textures, made the concept feel personally legible rather than purely invented. But the decision was thematic as much as autobiographical.
I think this is really what Wolves is about — empathy and its absence — so to have Inti challenged by her own complex relationship to empathy seemed like the perfect way to explore that thematic within the book.
Inti began the novel as a character whose anger was the engine driving her forward, and McConaghy has said writing that fury was one of the book’s genuine pleasures. But a novel that stays in one emotional key is not a novel, and McConaghy knew early that the character’s arc had to move somewhere harder to write than rage.
[Inti] is a character who’s really driven by fury. And it was a joy to write that, actually, to write a woman who is furious...But a book has to be a transition, a movement. I had to take her and myself on a journey into something gentler and more tender.
The personal thread
Writing herself out of despairThe rewilding that happens in the book is ecological: wolves returned to the Scottish Highlands, a damaged landscape slowly reordering itself. But McConaghy has been explicit that she tracked her own emotional state through Inti’s arc during the writing, and that the two movements, character and author, ran parallel rather than separately.
As she rewilded the landscape, she had to be open to rewilding herself. And so this became my path, too. A way of writing out of despair, away from anger and into hope.
That movement toward hope was not incidental to the project. McConaghy treats it as a baseline requirement for her work, a condition she imposes on herself before a book is finished. She has spoken about it in terms of what she owes the reader, but the version she gave EcoLit Books frames it as something closer to a question of purpose.
I never want to leave readers feeling worse about the world than when they start a book, so I will always find my way to hope, and that’s very important to me, otherwise I don’t think there’d be much point in writing at all.
On what’s at stake
What fiction can do that argument cannotWolf reintroduction is politically contentious in ways that make straightforward advocacy writing blunt to the point of uselessness. McConaghy’s argument for fiction as a delivery mechanism is that it bypasses the defensive posture readers adopt when they recognize they are being argued at. She made this point to Electric Literature while discussing why she chose a novel rather than the kind of science writing or journalism that covers the same ground.
That’s the amazing thing about fiction. It allows us to access a deeply emotional space around an issue that I think we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to go to when we’re reading science texts or hearing these really politicized views about things.
The rewilding premise was designed to operate on two levels at once, the ecological and the personal, so that neither reading of the book cancels out the other. McConaghy described this doubling in a video interview, making clear that Inti’s internal journey was not a subplot grafted onto an environmental story but the same story told from the inside.
It’s kind of a story about not just rewilding a landscape, but rewilding yourself as well. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Hope as a practice, not a consolationThe book’s darkness, which McConaghy has never minimized, was real and came from somewhere real. But she was equally deliberate about what she wanted on the other side of it. The quote below, from Electric Literature, closes her argument for why fiction matters to the environmental conversation: the emotional access it provides is the point, not a softening of the issue.
I hope that this provides an avenue to hope and feeling energized and wanting to come out the other side of it, actively pursuing change.
There are very dark moments in this novel, and I think that’s because I wrote it from an initial place of rage. Everywhere I looked I could see humans causing harm to both the natural world and to each other, and I didn’t understand it, and I’d had enough.
There are very dark moments in this novel, and I think that’s because I wrote it from an initial place of rage. Everywhere I looked I could see humans causing harm to both the natural world and to each other, and I didn’t understand it, and I’d had enough.
The rage is the starting point, not the destination. McConaghy’s insistence on arriving at hope by the final page is not a retreat from what provoked her. It is, she has said, the only version of the argument she believes fiction is actually equipped to make.