Melissa Croghan BEHIND THE STORY I wrote this novel when I was supposed to be doing something else. The Tracking Heart took over my life when I was a scholarship student at The University of Pennsylvania. I was supposed to be writing my thesis but instead I found myself secretly writing about Callie and Newton -- not to mention the bear -- who entered my dreams the night I looked out my window and saw a glossy, recently killed black bear in my neighbor’s pickup truck. I was living next door to a family of hunters, the youngest of whom befriended my son. This youngest boy (‘Nature Boy’ he was called) had duties of skinning animals, and setting and checking traplines. He was not eager to start hunting, as was expected of him. About this time, I was struck by a newspaper article in the ‘Philadelphia Enquirer’ about a man so obsessed with hunting a huge black bear that he crossed the West Virginia state line into the Pennsylvania Allegheny Mountains where he pursued this animal, illegally. The bear, finally shot, had the second largest black bear skull recorded in North America. The bear continued to prowl my dreams and I decided I wanted to write a story about a woman with close ties to nature and a man who is a hunter. These two, at odds with one another, fall in love, only to be tested by their obsession with a supernatural black bear. I wrote a first draft of The Tracking Heart, but had to put it aside in order to finish my thesis and earn a living to support my children. Along the way I got my masters in creative writing at The University of Pennsylvania, taught writing workshops and American literature there for seven years, and began to publish in nationally distributed literary magazines such as “The Massachusetts Review”. While at Penn, my research into the archetypal American landscape and myths about bears, from tall tales to hunting stories by Faulkner also planted a seed for my novel to come. A little over a year ago I was finally able to revisit Callie and Newton, and to give myself to the story fully.
|
