This episode is brought to you by Amazon Publishing and the new short story collection Nothing Like I Imagined by Mindy Kaling. It’s kind of the only way it could happen, because they all live with each other and they have no walls. … I got so steeped in the logic of the book that when I started getting feedback like, whoa, people fuck in front of each other? I was like, yeah. It’s an absolute show of power and authority in a group. Think of animal groups, and every high-drama nature documentary is about a male and a female and who gets who. They’re hunting and gathering and tracking and they’re also having sex in front of each other.ĭC: It was hard to figure out a way to avoid that. MK: Most notably to me, in the way these humans begin to act like animals, is in the sex scenes. The novel is another version of that thought experiment. Why do we think that this thing that happens to an animal is all that different from the thing that happens to a person? Maybe we process these things very similarly. … I come up with a lot of ideas by watching animals and their behaviors, and imagining then that humans are animals on a different spectrum. The New Wilderness Written by Diane Cook Diane Cook’s extraordinary novel is both a blazing lament for our contempt of nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood. Finally I had to open a new blank document, label it “Experiment,” and finally I found Agnes’s voice.DC: I was interested in how people devolve. Bea, the mother, was narrating, and even though I knew I wanted the daughter to narrate as well, I was having a hard time getting out of Bea’s POV. I was all over the place, just going with whatever came out. In early days I was writing in first and third, even second person. The thing I had to work hardest at was finding the point of view. I found a good middle ground with that and I was able to still surprise myself even as I was working through the beats of the story. 'Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mothers battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. The trick was to have an outline but still be able to discover new things while I was writing. This month, we will discuss the novel The New Wilderness by Diane Cook.

But a small group of people take part of an experiment to live in the last, vast wilderness, to demonstrate that people can live in nature without destroying it. I never used an outline to write my short stories, but I found that I needed one with the novel. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook takes place in a dystopian, nearly apocalyptical future where civilisation, living in a giant city crumbles under climate change and pollution. Then, I spent the early years dipping in and out, finding my way and more recent years really writing every day. I had the idea for the book in 2012 but I didn’t start writing it until around 2015.

The new wilderness by diane cook