Following an obsession might have been life-changing for Kentucky’s Katy Yocum, an associate director of Spalding University’s School of Creative and Professional Writing, but the novel she wrote from chasing that obsession to India changed more lives than hers. Three Ways to Disappear won the Siskiyou Prize for Environmental Literature along with publication by Ashland Creek Press back in 2019. Since then, its list of accolades has grown long enough to keep a person scrolling deep down her webpage. She continues winning readers and for many, connecting to something long-lasting. She credits Ranthambore National Park naturalist Vipul Jain with arranging the series of community experiences that allowed her to write with nuance and complexity about human-tiger relationships. And Yocum credits Ranthambore’s celebrity tiger, Machali, with creating a sense of connection that she rendered to the page.

“Writing the Other” has been a frequent topic of discussion over the past five years or more, as #OwnVoices gained traction, providing fresh spaces for marginalized writers of all kinds. Our literature is so much richer for that. And novelists are much more conscious about the effort needed to write respectfully outside personal experience. Colson Whitehead urges writers not to artificially limit their stories, but in writing cultures you don’t know, to “do it well.” The measure of Whitehead’s admonition is marked by the high praises Yocum’s book garnered in India.

Sensitivity readers can be tough to find, however, from among animals who aren’t human. Yocum proceeds cautiously as she introduces readers to park wildlife, recognizing that we translate our perceptions through our incomplete understandings. “The tigress stopped her grooming, paw halted in mid-air. She looked directly at Sarah and said, “Hello, you.” Or not that exactly. The message was languageless but definitely an acknowledgment. The tigress saw her, recognized that she existed: not prey, not competitor, just an odd creature passing through her territory—migrating perhaps.” Reading excerpts from a number of my “critter lit” favorites will start off our morning on August 4 at Jackson Hole Writers “Fiction Shift” workshop . These examples will loosen our literary ligaments so we can explore and experiment with words together, narrowing the gap between humans and the rest of the animal world.