Go As A River: Why author Shelley Read’s debut novel took so long

Author Shelley Read

Call American writer Shelley Read a late bloomer, she’s fine with that. As she describes it, she needed to weather some heavy storms before she was ready to write her luminous debut, Go As a River.

“I grew a lot as a human and the book grew a lot both in depth and understanding of the human experience, especially how women often have to fight a little harder to figure out exactly who we are in the world outside of who we’re being told to be,” she says via Zoom, sitting in her parents’ home. She has popped in to check on them before she embarks on the European leg of her book tour. “I think our growth and how we become ourselves is often a two steps forward, one step back journey.”

Read, in her mid-50s, is a proud fifth-generation resident of the Rocky Mountains, descended from people who homesteaded in Colorado before it was a state. She always wanted to be a writer and was the first person in her family to graduate from university. She performed so well that she was offered a teaching fellowship, spending the next 27 years helping other people hone their writing skills at Western Colorado University. That work was consuming, but it was motherhood that made finding creative space and energy for herself just about impossible.

Shelley Read in the Rocky Mountains.

“I loved being a mum and I loved being a teacher and I poured my heart and soul into those things. I adore my children but I know how messy it can be and how much it takes from us as well as it gives to us. It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, that love. It’s the most challenging on a moment-to-moment basis. It’s why I didn’t write for a decade when I had one child who didn’t sleep at all. So I will not be romanticising motherhood …” she breaks off laughing, “but at the same time I will say what a sacred, profound experience it has been for me. All of it – it’s all of it.”

Go As a River is also “all of it”, the full human experience with its peaks and valleys, beauty and horror. It’s a book to pass among friends, sure to be a book club favourite. Remarkably, for a first book, it has sold into 30 territories (and counting) and appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK on release.

Readers respond to the beautifully evoked mountain setting, the plight of a community sitting in the path of “progress” and an unconventional love story. But most of all they connect with the main character, Victoria Nash, who is hit with tragedy and privation again and again, and just keeps going. Read was inspired by the women in her family and the farmers and ranchers in her community. “They just get up every day and do exactly what needs to be done - and I love that,” she says.

About 15 years ago Read was camping alone and spotted a mother deer and her two fawns stepping carefully into a clearing. One of the fawns was noticeably smaller and weaker. “I looked into that doe’s eyes, very much mother to mother, and I thought, ‘God, how are you going to keep those babies alive?’” she recalls.

She wrote about it in her journal, capturing what she had seen in exquisite detail, a scene that appears in the book. As she wrote she imagined it from the point of view of a younger woman living in a small town called Iola in 1948 – Victoria. Read continued to write snippets about Victoria for the next six years, painstakingly building a portrait of a hard-working woman who cares for her family following her mother’s death and falls in love with a beautiful Native American man, Wilson Moon, risking the disapproval of her community. Adding further tension to the story, Read wove in the real-life events of the damming of the Gunnison River in 1966, which drowned the towns of Iola, Cebolla and Sapinero.

At this stage she realised she was working on a novel and she spent another six years stitching together her story fragments to complete a draft. The most challenging part of the book concerned Wilson Moon, given the tragic history of the Ute people of the Southwestern US, who were violently removed from their land in the late 19th century. As a white woman, Read knew that wasn’t her story to tell, but she felt strongly that grappling with the displacement of people in the Gunnison Valley who lost their homes to the Blue Mesa Reservoir would be inadequate without also addressing the displacement of Native Americans from that very same land.

She chose to tell Wilson’s story through the eyes of Victoria, and to focus on their relationship.

“I tried to bring these two characters together only as human heart connecting with human heart, two young people who saw the beauty in one another completely transcendent from those cultural biases that they very well could have inherited,” she explains. “They could have seen each other through the lens of the hatred and the prejudice and the vitriol that they could have inherited from the culture – but instead they were able to transcend that and just see each other as two human beings. I find a lot of hope in that.”

Go As a River by Shelley Read (Doubleday, $37) is out now.