COVER feature
MARTHA HUNT HANDLER WINTER OF THE WOLF & THE WOLF CONSERVATION CENTER BY Michael Kaplan PHOTOGRAPHY BY: Carter Fish
Martha Hunt Handler’s recently released, 18-yearsin-the-making, first novel, Winter Of The Wolf, reveals much about Martha. NBC News anchor Stephanie Ruhle called the story ‘captivating’…and that’s a fair description of Martha as well. In the novel, a teenage Bean gives a firsthand account of her brother Sam’s death, her personal struggle with it, and the family’s evolving revelations and relationships. It’s an adventure/ mystery like Nancy Drew (who Bean mentions is a favorite), but suffice it to say that Martha wrote the book to honor the death of her best friend’s 12-year-old son, to talk about spirituality and the importance of moving from grief to gratitude, and to remind us of our connection to the natural world. And while the story is a fictionalized version of an actual event, the novel seems in many ways rather auto-biographical. Bean’s words and thoughts sound - philosophically, anthropomorphically, socially, and to-the-ear - a lot like Martha’s. Martha grew up in the once small town of Crystal Lake, in northern Illinois, near the border of Wisconsin. Winter of the Wolf takes place in a similar lake country area of northern Minnesota (where wolves are present). Bean and Martha share many other similarities; like Martha, Bean, after the loss of Sam, has two older brothers. They also share a special sense of, and oneness with, the natural world. Martha describes a childhood shaped by these deep feelings: “From a very young age I was able to hear the voices of plants and animals in the woodlands surrounding our home. When it hit me that others didn’t share this gift, I felt clear that my role in this lifetime was to be a voice for nature. The voices I heard were extremely agitated. I didn’t understand why initially, but it quickly became all too clear when bulldozers showed up and began leveling nearly every wooded area surrounding our home to make room for other houses. It was horrifying to witness such devastation and have no real voice given my age.” Bean describes her childhood similarly, explaining, “Mom and I - and Sam when he was alive - believe that the world is governed by myriad magical and mystical energies and forces, and that obstacles are presented to us in order for our souls to grow. We could see and feel that a higher power was at work around us at all times.” (p79).
78
BEDFORD & NEW CANAAN
M A R / A P R
2 0 2 1
M A R / A P R
2 0 2 1
MARTHA HUNT HANDLER
BEDFORD & NEW CANAAN
79
