I was feeling I needed a change, so I left the radio show and went to graduate school for writing. After a few years there, I realized I was working with people who had made writing their career. So that lead me to teaching at places like the New England Literature Program (NELP), and to making radio and to This American Life where I was an editor and producer. Tell us how you came to be a writer.Ī: I’ve always loved writing, but I never thought it was something you could do as a job or make a career from. Q: You have been a radio producer for This American Life and taught in a literature program the University of Michigan. I interviewed Cook about this book and her writing. The New Wilderness calls into question what the natural world is and should be, while also showing how vast the wilderness within and between people can be. Not knowing how was only one of the things that scared her. They would be changed on the other side of it, that much she knew. She pictured the map in her head again and saw all that unknown land, that beige parchment, all that nothing.

She knew that a big part of Glen believed this. Glen hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her close. Despite learning how to stay alive in the wild and improving Agnes’ health, the characters’ memories of their former life, their love for one another in all its forms, and the burden of subsisting clash and inform their individual choices.Įarly on, Bea’s concerns emerge when considering their next journey to a ranger post farther than they’ve had to go before: Agnes was five years old when they arrived and gravely ill from the effects of pollution. The characters of The New Wilderness, including Agnes, her mother Bea, and her mother’s husband Glen, go to the wilderness as part of a research experiment to determine whether this lifestyle is sustainable. In a joint virtual event, both Cook and Karolina Waclawiak, whose new novel Life Events was just published, will read and discuss their new books through the At Home with Literati series Monday, August 31, at 7 pm. Cook has taught for the University of Michigan, is a U-M alum, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. The novel has landed on the long list for the Booker Prize.

This intense scenario forms the premise of Diane Cook’s new book, The New Wilderness, a speculative novel involving relationships and the environment-and how the latter influences the former. You live nomadically and hunt, fish, and gather to survive.

Modern amenities are nonexistent, but the upside is that the air quality is much better than the polluted city. Imagine being dropped off in the wilderness, uninhabited except for 19 people with you and rangers who patrol the land.

The new wilderness by diane cook