Chosen Families: A Guest Post by Tammy Armstrong
Our latest Discover pick is a charming tale of a girl and her brother — who just so happens to be a bear. Read on for author Tammy Armstrong’s exclusive guest post on the unlikely inspiration for Pearly Everlasting and what animal stories mean to her.
Hardcover $28.99
Pearly Everlasting: A Novel
Pearly Everlasting: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.99
A remarkable story about a girl and her unlikely companion. Journey through the forest in this tale of friendship, family and hope.
A remarkable story about a girl and her unlikely companion. Journey through the forest in this tale of friendship, family and hope.
I’ve always loved animal stories, maybe it’s because I love an underdog, an unexpected friendship, a new way of seeing something. In rural New Brunswick, where I grew up, there were a lot of animal people around. My grandfather rehabilitated horses forgotten in fields, neglected in paddocks after kids outgrew them and moved to cities out west. My uncle was a horse trainer and a competitive barrel racer. During the Depression up into the 50s, my family worked as teamsters and blacksmiths. I’ve spent a lot of time in kitchens listening to horse stories and dog stories and tall tales. So, writing Pearly Everlasting—a story about a girl raised with an orphan black bear cub—was in some ways, not such a strange concept.
The inspiration took some time, though. In the mid-2000s I finished a Ph.D. in literature and animal studies at the University of New Brunswick, exploring how animals trouble fiction and poetry. Afterwards, burnt out from academic writing, I still felt animals weren’t finished with me. I wanted to write a story that would take place in the woods: just like the ones I knew in New Brunswick and Maine. An underdog. An unexpected friendship. A new way of seeing something.
After some false starts, I went down to Maine to visit my mother. One rainy afternoon, she handed me an article she’d saved from a local paper. It was an excerpt from William Underwood’s memoir, Wild Brother, recalling how he tracked down a rumour: a woman nursing an orphan bear cub alongside her newborn daughter in a lumber camp deep in the Maine woods. That image was the first spark for Pearly Everlasting. The second was the very real bears that often used my mother’s porch and clothesline and fir trees as their personal playground.
Though the cub in Underwood’s telling went on to live at an animal sanctuary in New England, the excerpt left me wondering, what if— What if a girl and a bear were raised together in this beautiful, dangerous, set-away world in a Depression-era New Brunswick? What would that look like? What would it mean—with the world so connected these days—to inhabit woods deep enough for prowling spirits to haunt, to understand that sort of world through superstition, folklore, and very real danger?
I also wanted to create a family from a seemingly scrappy crew of characters: lumberjacks, blacksmiths, teamsters—all with tenuous connections to the outside world—alongside a camp cook, his wife, their daughters, and Bruno, a runty black bear. A makeshift family. A different way of understanding what family might mean. As with lots of families, there’s laughter, music, and stories. And there are trials and tragedies. When Bruno is stolen by the camp boss and sold to an animal trader, Pearly Everlasting doesn’t hesitate tramping some fifty miles away from camp, in the dead of a mean winter, intent on bringing him home, despite the risks. Because Bruno isn’t a pet; he’s his own bear and he’s her brother. Chosen families are real families and sometimes that sort of love fights the hardest.
