Greg Schwipps
Author, Teacher and Catfisherman
Copyright 2009 Greg Schwipps
Published by Ghost Road Press Denver Colorado
What This River Keeps
What Other People Are Saying
Like the best work of Richard Russo, Greg Schwipps lushly creates the depth and breadth of a single community with absorbing detail, a refreshing keenness and lyric kindheartedness. These are likable, imperfect people, beautifully drawn, living without pretense in what they want from the world. They are connected to the place in which they live, through their animals, their children, their machines, and most of all by the small river that drifts - muddy and rich - through the space they occupy. Schwipps is a potent young master, ready to become a steady companion to the American reader." - Tom Chiarella, Fiction Editor and Writer at Large, Esquire magazine.
"With this tender, clear-eyed novel, Greg Schwipps has added a worthy volume to the American literature of place, in the tradition of Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Wendell Berry. He hears music in country speech, sees marvels on back roads, senses dignity in ordinary lives. Because of the loving regard he shows toward his characters and their land, he strengthens our own attachments to neighbors and home ground." - Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto.
"With vivid, lyrical prose, Greg Schwipps has taken an age-old theme - man's relationship to the land - and made it new. You don't have to know anything about fish or rivers or even country living to be swept up in this story about how a vanishing landscape can tear apart a fragile human ecosystem. His characters are a delightful crew of misfits who sneak into your affections and set up camp. They fish and cook and fight and lie and love and take off down the highway in search of answers. We worry for them and celebrate their wit and perseverance."- Lili Wright, author of Learning to Float.
"Often very funny, always lyrically beautiful, What This River Keeps is a powerful reminder of the cost of the American romance with profit and progress, and of the abiding strength of the people of America's Heartland. Even more, it's about that eminent domain, the heartland, and the complicated ways love - for a friend, a spouse, a child, a parent, a dog, a river - endures, even when the waters are rising and all hope seems lost."- Beth Lordan, author of And Both Shall Row and But Come Ye Back: A Novel in Stories.
Read what Steve Polston of Examiner.com says about What This River Keeps - 5 star rating