I was both comforted and excited by these words,. I had grown up assuming that vacation meant a camping trip, that the natural world was both bountiful and eternal. But I was coming to realize with increasing certainty and despair that human need and greed might well ruin that endless bounty forever, and I welcome a wisdom that offered even a hint of hope for us and for the land.

Not long after that, the story that became Into the Forest suggested itself to me during a rare night of insomnia. Included among its many strands were my fascination with sisterhood, my concerns about the future, any interest in the past, and my musings about humans' relationship with the natural world. Perhaps one of the reasons I wrote Into the Forest was to attempt to understand was what might it be like for the spirits to start speaking again, what it would mean—in a metaphorical sense, at least—if we were to once more hear the voices of the old powers coming up from the land.

Because Into the Forest is set in a forest very similar to the one in which I live (though the fictionalized forest is much more remote from a much more rural town than my own), I set out to learn as much about that place as possible. Of course the real experts—both indigenous and Europeans, were long gone—the first banished by force from their native home, the second moved elsewhere when the land was no longer profitable or no longer suited their needs. Lacking them, and lacking the leisure to learn about my new home as I had once learned about my birthplace, by the long and rambling research of my own busy senses, I turned to books.

My first forays into the forest were burdened by field guides and histories, and through books I learned the names of dozens of plants, learned how the people who inhabited the woods before me found food, shelter, and medicine there. Books taught me about the history of the wild boars, and the ironic ways in which that history parallels that of the Europeans in California. I learned the story of the grizzly whose image endures on the state flag, although it has long since been exterminated from its vast California range.

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