ABOUT WANDERWILD PRESS
The world gets more interesting when you pay attention.
WanderWild Press is a storytelling and discovery company that helps people notice more, understand more, and carry the wonder with them.
WHY WANDERWILD EXISTS
Recognition is not the same as understanding.
WanderWild began with a simple realization: it is possible to walk through a place you know well and still understand very little about what surrounds you.
A pine cone is more than a pine cone. A lake is more than water. A campground is more than a place to sleep. Each connects to stories, science, history, people, work, systems, choices, and questions that are easy to miss when no one helps us look more closely.
WanderWild Press creates books, learning resources, and experiences designed to help people notice more, understand more, and connect what they learn to the world they actually live in.
The goal is not simply to give people more information. It is to teach them what to look for so that when they return to the real world, more of it becomes visible.
FOUNDED BY AN EDUCATOR
Why I started
WanderWild Press.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years working across education and technology, but the thread running through that work has always been curiosity—how people learn, what captures attention, what makes something meaningful, and what causes an idea to stay with us.
WanderWild grew out of those questions, but also out of my own growing awareness of how differently we experience the world when we slow down enough to really notice it.
During a difficult period in my life, I spent more and more time outdoors. Familiar places gave me permission to stop rushing and simply pay attention. I began noticing things I had walked past countless times before: the way trees grew in one part of a landscape but not another, the sediment along a shoreline, an old homesite in the woods, the relationship between water, land, wildlife, and human history.
And the more I noticed, the more questions I had.
What surprised me was how often the knowledge I wanted was something I had technically encountered before—in science class, history, geography, reading, or somewhere else in school. But now the learning had a reason to exist. I had a real question, attached to a real place, and I genuinely wanted the answer.
That realization became one of the foundations of WanderWild Press.
I believe people understand and care about the world differently when learning is connected to something real. Information can be forgotten quickly. But attach it to a place, a story, a character, an experience, or something someone has noticed for themselves, and it begins to mean something.
WanderWild is my attempt to create more of those moments: to help people look closer, ask another question, understand what they are seeing, and then carry that deeper way of noticing with them.
What It Means to WanderWild
WanderWild began with a simple idea:
The world becomes more interesting when we learn to pay attention.
Wander is the method.
Look closely. Ask questions. Follow what catches your attention—even when you do not yet know where it will lead.
Wild is what we are learning to encounter.
Sometimes that means woods, water, wildlife, and real places. Sometimes it means a story, a community, a system, a question, or something familiar that turns out to hold much more than we realized.
WanderWild creates stories and learning experiences that move through a fuller arc: Wander → Wonder → Discover → Connect → Protect.
The experience changes as we grow. A child may begin by spotting something they once walked past. Later, curiosity becomes knowledge, exploration, reflection, and a deeper understanding of how the world fits together.
The invitation stays the same: look closer, ask another question, and discover something you did not know before.
WHY STORY MATTERS
Story gives information somewhere to live.
WanderWild does not use story simply to make learning more entertaining.
A character can give a reader a familiar point of entry into an unfamiliar world. A child may not begin by caring about coastal ecology, watershed systems, or local history—but they may care what Jackson and Tucker discover, what Ellie notices, or what happens next.
Story creates an emotional and imaginative bridge. Curiosity can then carry the reader into the science, history, geography, observation, and exploration that surrounds it.
WHAT WE’RE EXPLORING
We build learning experiences—and study how they work.
WanderWild Press is exploring whether learning becomes more meaningful when it connects directly to the places, systems, products, communities, and experiences people already encounter.
We are also asking whether generative AI can make more specific, customized learning possible—without handing educational judgment over to the technology.
Current questions
- Does connecting learning to familiar places and real-world systems change understanding, engagement, or connection?
- What do educators and organizations need to customize because existing materials do not quite fit?
- Can AI make high-quality, specific learning more feasible—and where does it create new work for humans?
- Can the same learning-design methods help schools, parks, museums, outdoor companies, and other organizations help people understand more?
We’re learning while we build.
We are still learning. That is intentional. WanderWild is being built through research, real-world use, and conversations with educators, learners, readers, organizations, families, and partners.
We test what we believe against what people actually need and do. When the evidence challenges an assumption, we change the work.
Our current interviews and experiments are exploratory business and practitioner research, not formal academic research. When a project becomes formal research, we will follow the appropriate research and ethical requirements.
HUMAN + AI
AI may assist our work. It does not authorize our work.
WanderWild is built with substantial support from generative AI and other digital tools. Those tools can contribute research support, synthesis, prototyping, drafting, illustration, differentiation, editing, and production.
But capability is not the same as judgment.
Human decisions determine the purpose of the work, what questions are worth pursuing, what learners need, what belongs, what is accurate, what should be rejected or revised, and whether the final product is good enough to publish.
I think of the process much like directing a multidisciplinary creative team: different capabilities may contribute to the outcome, while authorship lives in the vision, direction, selection, integration, judgment, and accountability for the finished work.
AI can assist execution. It cannot take responsibility for a WanderWild product. That responsibility remains human.
WANDER • WONDER • DISCOVER • CONNECT • PROTECT
We care for what we learn to notice.
WanderWild Press creates opportunities to notice, understand, remember, and return with greater care.