Jean Craighead George wrote a book that was a staple of my childhood: Julie Of The Wolves.

It’s a book about a very young (like thirteen years old) native Alaskan girl who was an orphan and made to marry an abusive guy that doesn’t even want to be her husband. And that’s just the beginning of the book.

She decides to run away from that crappy situation (an attempted rape that was the last straw for her) to try to reach a friend who lives far away, but gets hopelessly lost on the Alaskan tundra.

Her only hope for survival is to draw on the traditional ways of her people and possibly befriend a wolf pack she comes across.

Apparently Jean Craighead George came up with the idea to write Julie Of The Wolves while on a trip to Barrow, Alaska to do research for an magazine article on wolves.

She had brought her son along for the trip and while in a plane he spotted an Eskimo girl by herself on the tundra. Her son commented that the girl “looked awfully little to be out there by herself.”

While in Barrow she saw many people communicating with wolves and met a woman called Julia Sebevan who taught her about “the old ways of the Eskimos.”

After having so much inspiration in Alaska Jean Craighead George went back home and decided to write a story about an Eskimo girl trying to survive alone on the tundra, basing the main character on Julia Sebevan.

Julie Of The Wolves went on to win many awards, including the Newbery Medal. And despite being a book that was one of the most frequently challenged by parents during that decade (due to the rape scene) it actually made it on to the shelves of my school library.

I drank up all stories about Alaska when I was a kid so when I saw the cool looking cover of Julie Of The Wolves and that the book was about Alaska it was a sure thing that I was going to take it off the shelf and finish it by the next day. I ended up liking the book so much that I bought my own copy and ended up reading it many times over.

So yeah what a loss to have Jean Craighead George pass away, she was such an amazing storyteller. I’m glad she had ninety-three years of life and that she decided to write Julie Of The Wolves, RIP.

This is one of those weird but hilarious juxtapositions that I suspect only happened because of the internet. So here’s to you, internet, *raises cup of coffee* for giving me an endless supply of weird story-related things to laugh at.

Oh and extra points if you saw the title for this blog post and immediately thought ‘Harry Potter’.

I gotta admit I’ve cried over the death of fictional characters quite a few times :P. My earliest memory of doing this was when I was a kid and I got to the end of Charlotte’s Web… I cried so hard and was wrecked for weeks!

I don’t know how it is now but they seemed to be everywhere when I was a kid, a ubiquitous part of any setting where children would be sitting for more than ten minutes.

And apparently they were cheap too because even the poorest of kids had quite a few of them laying around or mixed in with random toys.

I had some at home but my main memories of Little Golden Books are of reading them at dreary places from a kid’s POV like laundromats and miscellaneous waiting rooms for appointments.

Those places were dull, dull, dull. That is until I’d found a stash of these books, then I could escape into a few stories to pass the time. Thank goodness for Little Golden Books or else I would have died of boredom at a young age LOL.

Now they have Kindle editions of them so I guess there’s no more hunting around for books to read if you’re a kid stuck at the laundromat. Well, if your parents let you use the Kindle that is, and you’re not already playing a video game or something :P.

The guy who runs the account basically takes word suggestions from people and builds crazy stories around them. The stories are no longer than the Twitter 140 character limit making them all very hint fiction-ish, which is right up my alley (and probably yours too if you’re into the hint memoirs posted here).

A lot of people are doing little Twitter stories along these same lines but I gotta say that the ones on @veryshortstory are some of the best I’ve seen on Twitter, usually pretty interesting with an off the wall twist.

Apparently some of the stories have been rolled over into a book which is (no surprise) called Very Short Stories. Not sure if I’d want to sit down and read 300 of these in book form 0_o but hey it’s a good way to show some love to the author of the tweets.

Anyway, here’s a few of my favorites from @veryshortstory:

The doorknob rattled. I hid under the covers knowing you were keeping your promise of always being together, after being buried yesterday.

I plugged my thought machine into your mind. I extracted your ideas that would become my best sellers then filled you full of Teletubbies.

My parents found me working the keyboard with my nose. Mom cried. Dad unchained my hands, realizing there was no cure for being a writer.

Lovemaking with the mime was awkward. From what I could tell, she wanted me to pleasure her by riding a bicycle or hiding behind a wall.

What do you think, do you like these kinds of stories Y/N? I really like seeing these little stories pop up in my Twitter feed so let me know if you’ve seen others like it out there :).

They thought they had lost their loved ones forever.

But she created new worlds where they could be found, sometimes for the very first time.

—

And so concludes another successful Jennifer Hint Memoir Month :).

This last one is about something that Jennifer does in her spare time that makes a powerful impact on a lot of people’s lives, helping them through times of grief and often shining new light on their own histories.

Even though it’s something of a hobby for her it’s such a selfless one and comes from such a deep sense of caring for others that ‘hobby’ seems an inadequate word to describe it.

That just goes to show what an awesome and beautiful person she is though, even in her spare time she’s working to help people and make their lives better. I love you Honey, happy birthday!

Even though the living room was hardly and apt dojo, the drunk ninja left no blurry, swirling fruit unchallenged.

 

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

She realized the tea party (not the Sarah Palin kind) must go on.

After a city-wide search she found two oddballs, miraculously saving the day.

 

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

I’m obsessed with inventing stories for people I come across.

An overwhelming curiosity makes me ask myself what their lives might be like.

I want to know what they do, where they’re from, their names, what they’re thinking about at that moment, what they regret, what they hope for, whom they’ve loved, what they dream of…

-Gustave Flaubert, as quoted in The Art Of Travel

Ha I’m so like this, although I’d substitute ‘figuring out’ for ‘inventing’.

It’s amazing what you can figure out about a person’s story simply by being around them for a few minutes with an open mind.

Travel presents a great opportunity to do a lot of this since you meet a lot of new people along the way. My pocket Moleskine notebook is peppered with scribbled notes about interesting people that I see while traveling, like this:

“Woman running through graveyard paths with son like it is a park. They live in the neighborhood next to here. He is recently adopted.”

The downside about doing this while traveling is that you usually don’t get to be around the people long enough to decide if your theories about their story are right or not.

I never did get to talk to the woman and the boy, but if I lived in the area I’m sure I would have run into them enough times to make a bit of conversation and get a general idea if I was right about their story.

In a way though I guess that has it’s own particular charm to it. It’s kind of nice to imagine that yes the boy was indeed adopted by such a giving and caring woman. He might have had things tough leading up to the adoption but from what I could see the rest of his life was likely to be a happy one, and I’m totally ok with happy endings even if they’re only theories :P.