The Seeds of a Novel: A Guest Post by Jonathan Miles

Beaten down by life, Ari jumps at the chance to do something meaningful. From the author of Dear American Airlines comes a richly imaginative fable about saving the world. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Jonathan Miles on writing Eradication.

Here’s one way the seeds of a novel get planted:

About twenty years ago, I was on a reporting assignment in the Galápagos Islands, embedded for a time with the Ecuadoran Navy in their efforts to combat illegal shark fishing. I happened to learn, in passing, about government programs to eradicate feral goats from some of the islands in order to restore endangered tortoise habitat. Dumped onto the islands decades ago, the goats had devoured the grasses, shrubs, and cacti that tortoises depend on for food and shelter. The government was dispatching men with rifles.

I found myself transfixed by the moral friction of it: the righteous and worthy ecological objective versus the systematic slaughter of thousands of animals. Saving lives by taking other lives. How might an individual—one holding a rifle, in my imagination—reconcile that? And how might it all feel? These questions quietly haunted me for years.

More recently, a so-called invasive species of insect arrived in my adopted home state of New Jersey. The Spotted Lanternfly was proving a scourge on certain trees and crops, such as the grapes I grow on my tiny farm, and authorities were urging people to kill them on sight. Every morning, then, I’d dutifully take a bottle filled with soapy water to spray the lanternflies on my grape vines. It felt virtuous, at first; I was protecting the native ecosystem from a threat. And at times it almost felt as pleasurable as a carnival shooting gallery.

Yet something about it also kept gnawing at me: here were these gorgeous insects—with their polka-dotted wings and blood-red underwings—that’d merely stowed away on the wrong U.S.-bound freighter and were swarming my grapevines not out of malice but for survival. So again came that unsettling prickle of moral thorniness. When is killing righteous? Is it ever? Who gets to decide?

The Texas painter and musician Terry Allen once said the shortest distance between two questions is art. So I began writing.

The novel that emerged is part survival story, part ethical inquiry, and part ecological parable. I landed a former jazz clarinetist and fourth-grade schoolteacher on a fictional Pacific island, a remote, isolated and uninhabited speck of land where feral goats had devastated the ecological balance. I put a rifle in his hands, courtesy of a conservation foundation angling to protect endangered species. And then I funneled all my questions—some that had been fermenting for decades—into him. As a teacher, he’s accustomed to explaining the world carefully, morally, and with patience. As a musician, he’s attuned to improvisation, rhythm, and the emotional undercurrents beneath events. How would he reconcile it all? How do any of us do the right thing in situations where “right” keeps slipping out of focus?