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Happy October! đź‘‹ It's the first of the month, and you know what that means: Time to start reading The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha. In case you missed it, Beha's novel was just long-listed for the National Book Award, meaning I'm extra excited to dive in with you all.
Be sure to join the group to share your thoughts, too!
Happy reading, Arianna
đź“š Behind the Book đź“š
We asked Christopher Beha to tell us a bit about how The Index of Self-Destructive Acts came to be. Here's what he had to say. The novel takes place over the course of a few months in 2009, shortly after Obama’s election and the economic crash, and it was actually not long after that time — certainly during Obama’s first term — that I started thinking about writing it. What people have already forgotten about those few months, I think, is the pervasive sense of hopefulness. First of all everyone — really, everyone — was grateful that the Bush years were over. Obama came in to office with an approval rating of almost 70 percent.
At least in some quarters, there was a hope that we might be entering a post-ideological moment. That our divisions are mostly superficial, that we all ultimately want the same things and are reasonable enough to embrace the policies most likely to deliver these things, that society is capable of being rationally managed — these are very seductive ideas, and ones to which our culture inevitably returns. When we do, we always have some reason why this time will be different — we know more now; we have the proper technology; etc. And then we get reminded all over again of the self-destructive impulse that can never be wholly removed from individual humans or human society.
As Kant’s famous expression goes: From the crooked timber of humanity no perfectly straight thing was ever made. We hardly need reminding of the fact right now, but there will come a time when we do again. That’s what made that moment interesting to me.
Wrapping Up: The New Wilderness
Points of Inspiration đź’ˇ Diane Cook on the people, places, and things she was thinking about while writing The New Wilderness Cascade Head, Oregon / Photo by Eric Muhr on Unsplash â—Ź Hiking the Cascade Head Preserve is when I first had the initial idea for The New Wilderness. It changed a lot from that first spark over the years, but this landscape has fueled me more than any other during the last decade of writing.
● The Newberry Caldera in Oregon is an area I drove by repeatedly but could never visit because the road to the top was always closed whenever I happened to be driving by. It has two lakes at the top, and because I couldn’t visit it I think it loomed larger and larger in my mind until it became a focal point for me and for the characters. Summer Lake Hot Springs / photo: amandajolovesu ● I spent a couple of months at a residency at Summer Lake, Oregon. My cabin sat at the edge of a 20-mile-long dry empty lakebed. I sat there every day and would think to myself, This whole place could fit all of Manhattan and everyone in it. That landscape was a major inspiration for where the Community walks, and is where I staged the dust storm scene.
● My old boss, who was a meticulous editor, was a believer in leaving something small in the manuscript that delights you, even if it could technically get cut. I’ve always loved this idea because it challenges the idea of what perfect can look like. Anyway, the hot springs in the book are my little bit of pleasure. They are based on very real hot springs in Summer Lake, Oregon. And that carved horse is really on the wall. But the water isn’t too hot. In fact, to be honest, it’s not hot enough. Shrug.
(P.S.: You may have noticed from these four locations I've mentioned that the book was hugely inspired by the Oregon landscape.) Viking Press; Signet Classics ● Originally, I wanted to model the structure of The New Wilderness on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. In earlier drafts this was really obvious, but as I revised and reshaped, that homage became a little harder to parse — but it’s still there. Steinbeck alternates between the general experience of a grand community of people — the everyman — and the experience of the Joad Family. They are the micro expression of the greater problem of the everyman. I loved this grand to microscopic view and thought it would benefit the novel.
● One of my foundational texts is Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I love it. Don’t @ me. Once I settled on the idea that my Community was part of an experiment, I was intrigued that theirs was an experiment in living much like Thoreau’s. But the stakes for them were life and death. Puffin Books; Vintage ● My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George is about a boy who runs away from home in the city to live in the woods, in a hollowed out tree. He very methodically details how he lives for the better part of year off the land. It’s a young adult book but I found it hugely informative and used it for light research and for inspiration. Even though my Community probably wouldn’t have encountered acorns on their walk, I included acorn cakes as a food they ate because it’s one of the foods the Sam makes in My Side of the Mountain and I was completely charmed by that.
● The Call of the Wild by Jack London: The end, when Buck is running with the pack, is perfect and moving, and is so much of what I wanted to capture in my novel. Drag City ● With lyrics like “Her drag and click had never yielded anything as perfect as a dragonfly” and odes to long gone computers, Grandaddy is your guide through the wilds of the Anthropocene. Even though as a band their project is more interested in technology than The New Wilderness is, I see Grandaddy as birds of a feather with the novel. They are digging at the intersection of all things wild and all things manmade and trying to find emotion and solace there.
● When Purple Mountains by Purple Mountains came out, it was the soundtrack of the summer when I finished the novel. If you know anything about David Berman I don’t need to say more. But if you’ve not heard of him, listen to his last album as Purple Mountains and get into his previous band, Silver Jews.
● The New England Literature Program (NELP) is an experiential college course offered through the University of Michigan (but open to students from any colleges.) Students and staff live in a rustic camp and read essential New England authors and transcendentalists — Thoreau, Frost, Emerson, Dickinson, etc. I attended as a student and taught for over a decade. So much of the agony and ecstasy of being part of a community, of being uncomfortable, of learning from landscapes in the book was shaped by my years in this program.
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