By Steve Polston
Greg Schwipps’s first novel, What This River Keeps, will ruin a few mornings for you if you’re like me and read late at night after the TV news goes off.
The young DePauw University teacher and catfisherman has given us Hoosiers a novel we can give to others from far away when we want to describe what rural people are like and what our beautiful land gives us.
Schwipps must have been an odd little boy, lingering just a little longer in the chicken coop and recording in his mind how it smells on a hot, humid day. He must have been a kid to keep an eye on as he looked a little farther than across the field and saw the end-of-day sun tracing the haunches of a doe eating at the edge of the corn stubble. He has vision and understanding.
This book is full of rich detail that describes what the land smells like, how it soaks up rain and how it floods. It also tells as well as any book how people smell and sound and how they absorb and rebuff the blows life gives them.
Schwipps’s first novel is about family, the land, catfishing, and how rural people deal with the imminent threat of government seizure of their land for flood control projects.
This last subject is, perhaps, prescient, as Indiana government plans and builds an extension of I-69 through parts of southern Indiana that many object to.
Schwipps’s novel is not a polemic, however, about the cruelty of forcing people from their land, and it would be unfair to dwell on that.
I met Schwipps sometime in the last decade when I bought his journalistic work to publish in Outdoor Indiana magazine when he was finishing his master of fine art degree at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He was a beginning writer and I was a beginning magazine editor. His is the sort of work that makes editors look like geniuses.
Schwipps introduced me to his brothers as we were touring some local hunting ground, once. They are physical giants, of the Ripley County variety. Their brother, the author, is a giant talent.
Perhaps because I’ve read them in the past five years or for no reason at all, I can compare Schwipps’s fiction to Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By and his screenplay Hud; and James Galvin’s The Meadow; and Wallace Stegner’s Shooting Star. Each -- and Schwipps’s – include detail that puts you in a place and in somebody else’s path and mind.
What This River Keeps is a novel that should be made into a movie, and if you read it I think you’ll come to the same conclusion.
You can learn more about Greg Schwipps at this link. The book’s ID No. is ISBN-13: 9780981652559.
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