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The Mood of My Times: A Guest Post by Ariel Courage

A woman with a single-minded goal sets off on an unconventional cross-country quest and picks up an unassuming hitchhiker along the way. What could go wrong? Author Ariel Courage has penned an exclusive essay on writing her debut novel Bad Nature, down below.

Bad Nature: A Novel

Hardcover $28.99

Bad Nature: A Novel

Bad Nature: A Novel

By Ariel Courage

In Stock Online

Hardcover $28.99

Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny debut novel.

Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny debut novel.

The first time someone asked me when I started writing Bad Nature, my off-the-cuff response was that I started in 2020—peak pandemic times. When I later looked back through my files, though, I realized I actually started in March 2021, and wrote the first draft in what felt like a fever dream through August.

I think my time confusion related to the mood of the novel: I was confident that I started this bleak book during a time of peak bleakness. It’s not like 2021 was such a vibrant time either. I was still wearing masks in public and going on long socially distanced walks around Prospect Park. I was still working from home, putting all the time gained back from commuting into writing. I was still typing away while sweat-stuck to my couch because I wanted to reduce my dependence on AC. The bad climate change headlines of 2020 (the warmest year on record—a record we’ve since repeatedly broken) persisted into 2021 (record high Arctic Sea ice and glacier melt).

So in one sense I wrote Bad Nature to suit the mood of my times. I felt overwhelmed by the seemingly endless onslaught of bad news. I was thinking about the end of the world, and whether there’s a substantial difference between our ordinary, constant-but-mostly-suppressed fear of death and our fear of death by extraordinary disaster. How does knowing you are near the end of yourself or of the world change your behavior? Does it make you more passive or more extreme? If the latter, how does that extremity manifest? Hester and John became avatars for addressing these questions. The superfund sites that John and Hester visit reflect the reality of our damaged, polluted world as well as the damaged familial relationship that sends Hester on her vengeful quest across the country.

I wrote Bad Nature at a time when death felt very close. I felt I had to write it quickly, before the end. By the time I was done, death had not yet come for me, and I thought, “Well, now what?” The fact that I was able to publish it was a combination of human effort and arbitrary luck—a luck that helped me get out of a doomer funk. Without spoiling the ending of Bad Nature, I’ll say that chance also plays an important role in Hester’s final scenes.

In many ways, our environment has only continued to get worse. I still harbor doubts about our collective ability to effect positive change. I feel more resolved than ever, though, that a better future is possible. I’ve put in more effort through local climate organizations than ever before, and encourage others to do the same, in the hopes that, through a similar blend of applied effort and chance, our better natures will prevail.

Photo credit: Daniel Giansante