Lauren Wolk ’81 grew up with Brown employees for parents, so when it came time to apply to colleges, she figured she would get away from College Hill. But the day before applications were due, magic arrived on Brown’s campus the way it often does: it snowed. In the middle of the night, students constructed extravagant ice sculptures all over the Main Green. “And I thought, why would I want to go anywhere else?” she said.
Wolk raced home that night and wrote a “passionate” application for Brown, in which she submitted a collection of poems rather than an essay. “And I was very happy there for four years,” she said.
Since her time at Brown, Wolk has published six novels, many poems and now a picture book. Her second novel, “Wolf Hollow,” made her a Newbery Medalist and a New York Times bestselling author. This summer, she published “The Outermost Mouse,” her first picture book, which tells the story of a mouse living in a little coastal cottage, worried about the threat of an impending storm washing their home away.
Wolk’s writing practice often begins with setting. “I’m an intuitive writer, so I start with a sense of place, and I add a character when she appears to me, and then I just follow her,” she said. “The two of us are steering the ship together.”
But for “The Outermost Mouse,” the story idea began with plot. “I’m a big fan of happy accidents,” Wolk said.
Wolk was helping to hang art in the Cultural Center of Cape Cod when she misread a caption referring to “The Outermost House,” a 1928 book by Henry Beston chronicling his time living in a tiny dune shack on Cape Cod, which was ultimately washed away.
The idea came to her then: “What if there had been a mouse living in the Outermost House when that storm came, and she tried to save the house?” she wondered. “That would make a really cool picture book.”
She didn’t revisit the idea for several years until she followed her family to the beach one day with a pad and paper. In the Cape Cod sand, she wrote “The Outermost Mouse,” and “it was so much fun,” she said. She cleaned up the draft, sent it to her agent — who received it enthusiastically — and is now in the process of writing two other picture books.
“I have come to learn that the ideas will come to me,” Wolk said. “That’s what happened here.”
This has been true of Wolk since she first met her husband, Richard Hall ’81 at a social mixer in the Emery-Woolley dorms during their first year at Brown. “Even back then, you could tell she was very, very good,” he said. “It came naturally to her.”
After Wolk left Brown, she worked as a staff writer and researcher for the St. Paul American Indian Center’s Battered Women’s Project. “It was a really tough job,” but “it was a great job,” she said. From there, she worked for a publisher in Canada before turning to freelance writing while she raised her two sons.
Wolk published her first novel, “Those Who Favor Fire,” in 1998. The book tells the love story of two residents of a town built atop an unruly mine fire. “I wish I could rewrite that,” she said. “But I learned a lot (about the publishing industry) in the process.”
Suzanne Wolk, Lauren Wolk’s older sister and often the first reader of her sister’s manuscripts, said she had a lot of edits when Lauren Wolk sent her “Those Who Favor Fire.”
“As good as the writing is in that book, and it absolutely is, that story didn’t come from inside her,” Suzanne Wolk said. “It wasn’t a story she needed to tell, or really wanted to tell.”
With “Wolf Hollow,” Suzanne Wolk said her sister “had found her voice, so it was really a pleasure for me to tell her that that’s what I thought.” When Suzanne Wolk read the draft of “The Outermost Mouse,” she had practically no suggestions to offer.
Lauren Wolk “has a real talent for writing creative, original imagery, and I’ve always been impressed by that,” Suzanne Wolk said. “I think it’s a real gift.”
“I think to myself sometimes, ‘if only I’d started sooner. If only I’d really had my breakthrough book when I was in my 30s. If only, if only, if only,’” Lauren Wolk said. “But I wasn’t ready to write ‘Wolf Hollow’ when I was in my 30s. I learned a lot by my failures, or let’s not call them failures, even if they were.”
“Make your goal to tell the truth, make your goal to tell your story,” Lauren Wolk said. “Write it the way you want to write it.”
Rebecca Goodman is a arts & culture and university news editor covering career and alumni. She is a senior from Cambridge, MA, studying English. Outside of writing, you can find her at the Avon or in the basement of the Rock.
