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.](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/CESFODBG4JEOJGETNT5FTAT3VI.jpg?auth=be68085d7bb2971e8aa0c13f5449e020c1ef36406f9b1a4902b45981251f369b&width=16&height=12&quality=70&smart=true)
“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.”