Go as a River: A Novel
Go as a River: A Novel
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Shelley Read on Go as a River: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A drowned town and a life deferredLong before Read had a character or a plot, she had a place. Three towns lie submerged beneath Blue Mesa Reservoir in western Colorado, and that fact lodged in her imagination in childhood, decades before she understood what story she might build around it.
I am a fifth-generation Coloradan and I have just always carried that inside of me in a sometimes kind of unarticulated way.
Read earned her MFA in her twenties and then spent nearly three decades teaching writing at Western Colorado University while her own fiction waited. At some point the gap between what she taught and what she was not doing stopped feeling like an inconvenience.
I don’t want to live an ironic life.
What finally broke the deadlock was not a writing breakthrough but a pair of losses: a death in the family and her husband’s brain surgery. Those two events reordered her sense of what time was actually for.
There are certain life experiences like that, that just focus you like a laser beam on what is real and what matters and what does not.
Victoria Nash’s story had already begun forming in her mind. Once Read understood who Victoria was, the book became the thing she could not justify postponing any longer.
How she wrote it
Twelve years, journals, and a Buddhist calligrapherThe novel began without a destination. Read had the setting, she had the emotional necessity, and she had a protagonist taking shape, but she made no outline and imposed no predetermined arc.
When I began writing, I had no idea where this story was going, only that it was a story I needed to tell.
The wilderness scenes in the book draw on decades of firsthand attention, not archival research. Read has backpacked through the Colorado landscape her whole adult life, always carrying a notebook, and those journals became the primary source for the novel’s natural world.
I don’t have a great memory, but I have great journals. It is just page after page after page of me attending carefully to the natural world, and also reflecting on what it incites in me. Even when I’m backpacking... I’ll always bring a notebook and a pen. I will always put that weight in my backpack because I know that something out there is going to move me. That’s where I do my best writing, for sure.
Wilson Moon, the Ute man Victoria loves, required a different kind of care. Read knew she could not sidestep the Indigenous history of displacement in the Colorado River valley, but she was equally clear about the limits of her own vantage point as an outsider to that culture.
I decided that I can only know him as Victoria knows him, with deep affection but from a certain cultural distance.
The title arrived not from the manuscript itself but from a calligraphy painting by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh that Read had come across years before she began writing. When she finally applied its phrase to the book, it collapsed the novel’s separate strands into a single governing image.
I have been sitting along the banks of wild rivers my entire life, deeply wanting to know what they know.
From first pages to finished manuscript, the process took more than twelve years. Earlier drafts carried different structures and a larger cast of characters before Read understood the novel belonged entirely to Victoria.
Twelve years is a long arc for any debut novel. Read has been specific about the timeline.
It took me over twelve years to write and polish Go as a River.
The personal thread
Victoria’s becoming and her ownRead has been careful to say the novel contains nothing overtly autobiographical: no borrowed scenes, no characters drawn from life. The connection she describes is something more structural, a shared trajectory between herself and the fictional young woman she spent twelve years following.
My story of Victoria is very much her becoming herself, and my journey, as a writer, is very much me becoming myself.
That parallel extends to the emotional material beneath the plot. The grief, the determination, the slow accumulation of resilience that Victoria moves through across the novel’s decades were not lifted from specific events but are drawn from the same interior life Read has been examining since her twenties.
There is nothing overtly autobiographical in Go As A River, but the novel is very much an extension of who I am—what I think about and observe, what matters to me, and what I’ve learned about grief, determination, and resilience.
What she wants us to sit with
Progress questioned, empathy earnedThe flooding of Iola to build Blue Mesa Dam is the novel’s central act of displacement, but Read frames it as one event in a longer sequence. She spent time tracing that sequence back to the Ute people who were violently removed from the same Colorado River valley before any settlers arrived, and she wants that context to travel with readers.
I hope my novel will encourage readers to consider the role the natural world plays in their lives. Wild places can be so instructive and much-needed salve for our troubled souls. I also hope readers will examine the complex notions of progress, prejudice, kinship, and grief and come away from the novel with more generosity and empathy for one another.
Beneath the novel’s historical and ecological arguments is a simpler intention, one that Read returns to when she describes what she most hopes a reader carries out of the book.
More than anything, I hope Victoria’s story touches my reader’s hearts and inspires in them a deeper faith in love and in their own strength and resilience.