One Book, One Canyon features ‘Go as a River’ | News

It hasn’t been reviewed by the New York Times, yet Colorado writer Shelley Read’s book “Go as a River” (Spiegel and Grau, 2023) has sold over one million copies worldwide and was translated into 30 languages even before it was released first in the U.S.

On Aug. 11, Read visits the Wilkinson Public LIbrary (WPL) for a conversation about the book, her indelible characters and her love for Colorado during the annual One Book, One Canyon (OBOC) event.

“I am super honored and excited to be chosen for this year’s event,” Read said. “My love for Telluride is decades deep.”

Read spent time as a child in the San Juans and has climbed most of the 14ers here. Not only that, she is excited to talk to people who understand this place.

“I am a deeply Colorado woman and this is a deeply Colorado book,” she said. “I’m all over the world talking about Colorado, but when I just get to talk with a Colorado audience who gets the truly deeply transformative quality of being in these mountains, it’s the best.”

“I love, love, love Colorado libraries,” she added. “I always try to say yes to a library because I deeply value Colorado libraries.”

Laura Colbert, who has been a part of OBOC since it began in 2017, has been looking for an opportunity to bring Read to Telluride for some time. Colbert is the adult programs specialist for WPL.

“Several people have asked that Shelley come speak,” Colbert said. “I’m really psyched to have her as our writer this year.”

Read visited Between the Covers bookstore in Telluride in March 2023, shortly after the book came out. She remembers the blizzard that shut everything down for a few hours that afternoon. Nonetheless, in the very depth of that storm, nine people came to hear her. It was her smallest event to date. Her largest was in Indianapolis with more than 1,000 attendees.

“Go as a River” has won numerous awards, is now in 34 languages, and just this June came out in paperback. It’s currently in development as a film with Mazur Kaplan, a production company that focuses only on bringing books to the screen.

“Go as a River” is Read’s first novel, and though some big time publications haven’t given it a glance, it took off on Bookstagram — the Instagram book group — and was hand-sold reader to reader and book buyer to book buyer.

“I feel really proud and grateful about how this book was supported by the public,” Read said.

Read is a fifth-generation Colorado native and lives in Crested Butte, where she writes, hikes, raised her kids and commuted to Gunnison while she taught at Western Colorado University for 27 years.

Her journey as a novelist was slow, but steeped in her own childhood and love for Colorado.

She remembers swimming, fishing and playing around Blue Mesa Reservoir outside of Gunnison as a kid and being hyper aware of the towns that were still underwater. Iola is one of those towns, and the setting for “Go as a River.”

“It was very haunting,” Read said. “Those were ancestral farm and ranch lands and some of the best gold medal fishing waters in the state.”

That feeling as a child and Read’s love of place finds its way into one of the main themes of the story.

“This is about place and displacement because place means so very much to me,” Read said.

After three decades of teaching literature and writing to undergraduates and writing for various publications, she published “Go as a River” at 57. That was after 13 years of scribbling occasionally and thinking deeply about the characters and the story.

“I wrote this book from a deeply quiet, authentic place inside myself,” Read said. “It has layers and layers of themes and concerns that I hold most deeply in my heart.”

The language itself is important, too.

“I wanted the language to reflect the landscape I’m so attached to,” Read said.

Overall, though, the novel was driven by the main character.

“I had one goal in mind: to tell Victoria’s story as well as I possibly could. It’s had this very authentic reaction from readers.”

The success of the novel has taken its time, but its popularity has now taken over Read’s life. She hasn’t really stopped touring since it was released as a hardback, and now with the release in June of the paperback, she’s still going.

Right now, she is scheduled through the end of the year with events, mostly in Colorado, and with a couple of long breaks in between.

“My primary feeling with all of this success is gratitude. My secondary is overwhelm,” she laughed. “But the best part is meeting the readers.”

Read is working on a second novel that also takes place in Colorado, but it’s not a sequel to “Go as a River.”

“This takes place in a very different part of Colorado, in the Sangres [Sangre de Cristo mountains]. I’m hoping to end these public events and just spend next year on it,” she said.

One Book, One Canyon started in 2017 with Reyna Grande’s “The Distance Between Us” and until last year has been focused on nonfiction.

“For a long time, Wilkinson had the distinction of having more nonfiction than fiction readers,” Colbert said. “It also used to be true of Between the Covers, but it’s not any longer.”

In February 2024, then-WPL Director Sarah Landeryou wrote in the Daily Planet’s Local Voices column, “As for print circulation, our library is still a non-fiction leader, with non-fiction outpacing fiction checkouts almost two to one, which is unusual for a public library in the United States. But in the digital sphere, fiction leads non-fiction by nearly five times.”

Each year, OBOC is sponsored by the Friends of Wilkinson Library. The group purchases around 50 copies of the chosen novel and distributes it to the first people to register to attend the author event.

This year’s free copies are already spoken for, but the book is available for checkout in print and online.

For OBOC last year, readers visited with Peter Heller after reading his 2023 novel, “The Last Ranger.”

“Both Heller and Read are Colorado-based, yet they’re well-known nationally,” Colbert said.

The event usually has a strong turnout, and Colbert encouraged everyone to attend on Aug. 11.

“It’s totally fine if you haven’t read the book yet,” she said.

Read will also be at the first annual Grand Mesa Writers Symposium in Cedaredge on Aug. 9 with Tim Winegard and Wendy Videlock in conversation with Christie Aschwanden. For more on the weekend events, visit grandmesawriters.org.

For more information on the WPL event on Aug. 11 at 5:30 p.m., visit telluridelibrary.org.