Bears have been lumbering into my fiction almost as long as I’ve been writing it, and my forthcoming novel Scratch is probably their ursine apotheosis — the first title, in fact, for the version I wrote as my MFA thesis, was Ursus americanus. I don’t know why I write (and read) about bears as much as I do, but I’ve decided to embrace it in the spirit of — and with apologies to — Raymond Queneau’s wonderful book Exercises in Style (and Matt Madden’s riff on it, too) by writing 99 variations of “Exursuses in wild.” And I won’t be prewriting them, either, in hopes some wild things will happen on the spur of the moment. Unless the bears turn on me before I’m through and things get all Grizzly Man.

(photo via)