Lauren Wolk is an award-winning poet and artist, and the author of Wolf Hollow. She was born in Baltimore and has since lived in California, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Canada, and Ohio. She now lives with her family on Cape Cod.

When I began work on Wolf Hollow, I invented a character who had never recovered from the physical and emotional wounds he suffered in World War I. Creating him made me realize anew how little I know about agony.

We all know how hard it is to forget traumatic episodes in our lives. Those memories burrow into the gut, the brain, the juicy heart. Even the small stuff, though there really isn’t anything small about fear, or anger, or pain.

So we ought to be able to imagine a soldier filled with fear and anxiety, sorrow and confusion, rage and outrage, guilt and regret. We ought to be able to understand how he struggles with their weight every moment of his life. The always-ness of them. The space they occupy inside him, squeezing out the organs he needs in order to live.

Imagine a soldier named Toby coming home from a war, back to a place where people don’t know what’s happened to him. How can we know that? If we could multiply our own bad stuff to compare with his, we might have an inkling. But why would anyone do that? We’re all trying to manage our own hurts. To forget them. To make them smaller. To dull them down. Why would we get close enough to pull the hat from his head, its shadow from his face? Why would we want to translate his silence? Share the weight of the broken guns his carries on his back? Sleep alongside him on a bed of pine boughs, in an old shack not fit for a criminal let alone a man who gave up everything dear to him?

The answer should be obvious and immediate: because he’s ours. Because we owe him the effort. We can’t possibly know what he knows, but that’s not the important part. He knows. It’s our job to pay attention. To give him anything and everything he needs to carry the weight of his experiences, to help him grow strong enough to do that, or to help him lay them down.

Any single one of us can do just that. Including a girl named Annabelle, not quite twelve, who takes the time to look beneath his second skin, to find a man in agony, to care about him. Which changes both their lives.

I was inspired to write Wolf Hollow after listening to my mother’s stories about a childhood spent on a little farm with family all around, enough to eat, a strong sense of belonging. Into that world, from time to time, came drifters, men so damaged by World War I or by the Great Depression that they wandered endlessly, perhaps to escape what had ruined them, perhaps in search of solace or beauty or some kind of understanding that would balance out the pain and ugliness and confusion of their lives. I suspect that they were bent on both escape and discovery.

My mother’s stories inspired two characters—Annabelle and Toby—who try to do the right thing but learn how easily everything can go wrong along the way.

It’s through their connection, though, that  Annabelle finds the straightforward answer to nearly every ill that plagues us: That while we are all capable of enormous good, capacity isn’t enough. Intention isn’t enough. It’s what we do that matters.

-Lauren Wolk