When I met Petronella van der Moer in 2013 and learned of her legendary 1949 adventure across Finland’s Arctic Circle, somewhere deep down I recognized I’d just touched something I badly needed. Petronella was bold and free in ways that I could only dream of. A wild part of myself had gone missing a long time ago. I set out on that journey to get her back.

My 800-mile trek into the Lappish wilderness in Petronella’s footsteps filled me with a wildness that has followed me into the rest of my life. The act of trying to put it into words has grown me into the writer and the human equal to the story, and landed me in a beloved career as an adventure writer and environmental storyteller.

I am thrilled to tell you that Wildheart (previously Finding Petronella) has a birthday! It will be edited by Alexander Rigby and published by DK Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on June 1st, 2027.

On one level, Wildheart tells the true story of my adventure. If you’ve been on this ride with me, you know there were challenges, dangers, and plot twists: Lyme disease, freak thunderstorms, moose in the underbrush, Finns who rallied to help me when I lost my way (which was often). I competed in the Finnish National Goldpanning Championships, ate reindeer, sweated in more saunas than I could count, slept in a tiny wooden cabin by the river. I shoveled with the Lemmenjoki gold prospectors in their claims and listened to their stories. We scattered Petronella’s ashes across the rolling fjelds that she loved. I backpacked 116 kilometers into the wilderness on Petronella’s trail with a stranger I met on a riverbank. Called Petronella’s name into the wind. Followed her ghost across a country.

None of this is what took ten years to write. It’s one thing to tell a good story. It’s another to understand its heart.

What does it mean to stay wild in a culture that would have us forget that’s what we are? That’s the question I was chasing across Finland, and the question I’m chasing still. From the long, flat southern highway to the rock-studded fjelds of Lemmenjoki National Park, Wildheart explores the connection between wild places and the human spirit, reimagines our relationship to risk and intuition, provides sharp inquiry into what it is to be a woman making her way in the world of outdoor adventure, and interrogates the inherited fears that keep us playing small. The book is an experience of deep joy and humanity; an immersive journey through nature; and a call toward a deeper and wilder life.

When I am finished, if I have done my job well it will sing through you. You will not only remember your own wildness but feel it, pulsing inside of you, that happy expansion. You will look up at the stars and remember what you are made of. That you belong to the earth, and to each other. That you’ve always been wild. And nobody can take that away from you.  

Thank you so much for being on this ride with me. I can’t wait until this book is in your hands.