Author Erica Berry, will present "Changing Earth, Changing Stories: Finding New Models Of Environmental Storytelling" in Willamette University’s Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center, Hudson Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Erica Berry is author of the book Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron Books, 2023), a kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, science, cultural criticism, journalism and folklore. Researched over the course of a decade, the book has its roots in an Environmental Studies thesis she wrote about wolf repopulation in her home state of Oregon. Her academic project became personal after a handful of alarming encounters left Berry deeply rattled—not only afraid of being a woman in the world, but wary of the narratives she had inherited about fear, threat, and who could be predator and who could be prey. In untangling the mythos of the ‘Big Bad Wolf,’ Wolfish examines cultural narratives of wilderness, gender, power, and the body, offering new expressions for bravery in a warming world. With a family that includes hunters, a sheep farmer, and a former Sierra Club president, Berry’s exploration of how humans live beside wolves becomes a call for how we can better live beside one another.

The event is sponsored by the Dempsey Foundation and Willamette University’s Environmental Science Department. For more information, contact Joe Bowersox at jbowerso@willamette.edu