2023 COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Awardee Feature of the Week:
Brian Malloy, In the Boundary Waters (Novel)
One night in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness, drunken locals threaten a family of campers in an incident that reveals the fault lines between “deplorables” and “elites”.
“I hope the novel will remind readers of our common humanity.
As an AIDS activist in the 1980s, the struggle of gay men has informed most of my work. Climate change is this generation’s AIDS. Like AIDS, climate change will require behavior change on a massive scale. I write to better understand the resistance to steps we must take to mitigate climate change, particularly in rural communities, where residents often struggle with economic insecurity. My goal is not to be polemic, but to sympathetically depict characters in opposition, and identify common ground through our common humanity.”