- Sharma Shields in nature (not pictured: bigfoot).
In literature, Sasquatch has always represented the unattainable wild, the animal experience of humanity that we bargained away in exchange for wi-fi and pants. And literary fiction has always handled bigfoot gingerly, as though the writers are embarrassed to be writing about such a far-out concept. Portland author Molly Gloss’s Wild Life is maybe the most prominent example of Northwest bigfoot fiction, and it’s a half-successful novel. Gloss cloaks her Sasquatch in florid descriptions of nature, never fully reveling in the tabloid allure of the subject matter. Bigfoot’s literary life seemed destined to echo his life as a tall tale: He was doomed to a brief sighting in a Pynchon novel, a moment of glory as a metaphor in a skeptical Sherman Alexie poem (the first stanza of his “The Sasquatch Poems” reads “I believe in Sasquatch/just as much as I believe in God/which is not logical/since more people have seen Sasquatch/than have seen God”), and the embrace of dozens of nerds in fringy science-fiction novels…