Shelley Read’s award-winning 2023 historical fiction novel, “Go as a River,” has been translated into 35 languages and has landed on dozens of best seller lists in 45 countries around the world. The book, set in the 1940s, is about 17-year-old Victoria Nash, the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men, who runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado, and Wilson Moon, a young man displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses regardless of the racism and classism of the times. Not only has “Go as a River” won a string of accolades including 2024 High Plains Book Award and the 2023 Reading the West Book Award, it was also selected as a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award, the Colorado Public Radio 2023 Books We Love list and the 2025 Prix de l’Union Interalliée. It was also selected for this year’s Park City and Summit County One Book, One Community, a program that culminates with a free presentation and book signing by Read that runs from 7-8 p.m. on Thursday, July 30, at the Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium, 1255 Park Ave. The event is made possible through a partnership with Park City Library and the Summit County Library. “I’m highly honored to come to Park City,” Read said. “I have done this type of One Book, One Community read here in Colorado and throughout the country. And I looked into the one in Park City, and it seems like a wonderful tradition for your community.” Read will discuss the book, but also her “unconventional journey” as an author. “I absolutely knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a child,” she said. “I was always that kid thinking in a narrative way about what’s the story there and speculating about people and places and why they are the way they are.” Throughout her childhood, Read wrote poems and short stories.  “My mom, bless her, kept all of them,” she said. “So we have stacks of those from when I was a kid.” Even Read’s college undergraduate and graduate degrees revolved around literary studies and creative writing.  “But then I ended up being awarded a teaching fellowship in graduate school, and I fell head-over-heels in love with teaching,” she said with a laugh. “I ended up going on to be a teacher for just shy of 30 years. Most of those, 27 of those, were at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado.” Read also became a mom. “So, all of my energies (were spent) keeping our heads above water,” she said. “With so many hours in a day, I found I was writing less and less.” Although Read did write articles for magazines and occasionally published short stories, there came a time when she wasn’t writing professionally at all. “So, ‘Go As a River’ is my debut novel, and it was published when I was 57 years old after I had been chipping away at it for 13 years in the margins of my busy life,” she said with another laugh. “I like to talk about that on stage because I want to encourage anyone who has a dream for their creativity (and say) it’s never too late.” Read believes the book came at the right time of her life. “Honestly I think I became a deeper and richer human being through all the difficult experiences I had in those years, and I think I poured all of that growth and wisdom I gathered as I aged into that book,” she said. “I think that made for a much better book, and I always say I could have never written this book as a younger woman.” Much of the book was inspired by Read’s lineage as a fifth-generation Coloradan.  “We’re very much mountain people, but I also came from farmers and ranchers,” she said. “That’s deep in our bones and blood, and I very much write from there.”  Nash, while purely fictional, was an easy character to write, according to Read. “I had all my great-grandparents and grandparents when I was a kid, and I was 11 and 12 when they started dying away,” she said. “So I was raised with generations of family all around me. They were all deeply rooted Colorado people, children of homesteaders, and I heard their stories.” Read’s mom, grandmothers and great-grandmothers were tough women, which also influenced Nash’s character. “I think a lot of what was possible for a young woman growing up in rural Colorado in 1948 — (especially her) opportunities for self-actualization — wasn’t much,” she said. “But what I learned from my own ancestors was that they had the strength to live meaningful lives in different ways than how we measure life today.” Still, there was a lot of misogyny and racism at that time, Read said. “I wanted to address that in the novel without being too heavy handed,” she said. Shelley Read’s 2023 historical novel, “Go as a River,” which is this year’s One Book, One Community read, is the winner of the 2024 High Plains Book Award and the 2023 Reading the West Book Award. It is also a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award, the Colorado Public Radio 2023 Books We Love list and the 2025 Prix de l’Union Interalliée. Credit: Photo courtesy of Grau Spiegel Nash’s deep connection to her homeland and the landscape of the natural world was almost effortless for Read to write. “Those bits of the novel were, hands down, the easiest part because I feel I know every inch of the Gunnison Valley,” she said. “So to cast her out into the wilderness and make it scary at first, but very redeeming and cathartic later, is all me.” Read sees Nash as a mixture of the farmers who live in the Gunnison Valley. “They are those humble, hard-working people who wake up every morning to do what needs to be done,” she said. “I have that grit in me, and I wanted to honor that in her. While writing this book for 13 years, I didn’t know I would even finish it. But I finished this novel for her. It was a commitment between me and her.” Moon, on the other hand, was the hardest character for Read to write.  “I was really cognizant of my limitations as a white writer to represent the Indigenous experience, and I knew his story wasn’t my story to tell,” she said. “Yet, here I was telling a story about placement and displacement in the American West, and I felt I could not tell that story without including the Indigenous experience to the degree I was able.”  Read still knew she needed to acknowledge Moon’s story, so she decided to tell it from Nash’s point of view. “Her personality was very quiet, and she is someone who doesn’t ask too many questions and left a lot of Wilson Moon’s story untold,” she said. “But I wanted to introduce his story as someone who was placeless. I wanted to ask what are the repercussions of deep and painful generational displacement and its legacy.” Still, Read, who taught Native American literature for decades, did have some knowledge and respect for the culture and saw the different layers of displacement. “There is first the displacement to reservations, and then there were the children who were stolen off the reservation and put into those horrific boarding schools, which were just indoctrination places,” she said. “When the kids got out of those places, what they found was they were often too ‘white’ to go back to the reservation and too ‘Indian’ to exist in the white world. So they became children of nowhere. To me that is a deep and special kind of pain that I can only imagine.” Taking that concept one step further, Read didn’t want to shy away from the horrors of racism. “I had to dig down to find what degree that would play in Wilson Moon’s story, and I felt it would be a real betrayal to the actual history to not allow it to play out that way,” she said. The author also wanted to ask deeper questions about what the relationship of place was to these two young people and what could become possible for both of them. “I think I wrote and rewrote Wilson Moon’s story multiple times, but think it would have been a real omission to leave his story out,” she said. “He becomes a catalyst to so many meaningful things in Victoria’s life and the concept of what it means to ‘Go as a River.’ He understands that, and the rest of the novel is her figuring it out.” One of the things Read loves about these author presentations is meeting readers. “I’ve been on five major book tours, three of which were international,” she said. “Never in a million years did I expect even one person to read this tiny quiet book about rural Colorado, let alone to see it now pushing upward of 2 million copies sold worldwide.” The book has been a hit in South Korea, China and Japan, Read said. “That left me wondering what I hit on in this story that came from my guts, heart and soul that had this cross-cultural appeal,” she said.  The book has also touched the lives of many men. “I love it when men come up to me during these author events and tell them they never cry but sobbed while reading the book,” she said. “That’s been the most extraordinary part of the journey for me in this time of political divisiveness and concern about humanity. I’ve met the nicest people no matter where I’ve been who share so many of my core values, and that’s renewed my faith in humanity. It’s a beautiful thing.” One Book, One Community Presentation by Shelley Read When: 7 p.m. July 30 Where: Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium, 1255 Park Ave. Cost: Free Web: parkcity.events.mylibrary.digital, summit.events.mylibrary.digital and shelleyread.com The post One Book, One Community ready to ‘Go as a River’ appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less