Interview

Andrew Krivak discusses the genesis of The Bear, and how he approached writing the book.

Andrew Krivak on The Bear The Bear began as a story I used to tell my young sons about a bear who helped my father and me find our dog when I was a boy and he (the dog) was lost in the woods. As my sons got older, the story evolved from a quick bedtime vignette to a tale in which the boy of the story became much more attached to The Bear. Then my daughter was born, and the boy became the girl.

At around that time, on the heels of the publication of my first novel, The Sojourn, Bellevue Literary Press Publisher and Editorial Director Erika Goldman sent me a copy of Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family as a gift for my three children, and after reading that book to each of them, I wondered whether my story of a bear might be something to write down.

We have a house on a pond in New Hampshire, and anyone familiar with the area will recognize the landscape in The Bear. Mount Monadnock, the name of the mountain that I can see from our front porch, was a favorite of Emerson and Thoreau's. In a loose translation, the name means "the mountain that stands alone." A great deal of the inspiration for the environment in The Bear, and the struggle within nature that it describes, came to me as a result of watching nature in those New...