Johnston, Gordon
SEVEN ISLAND OF THE OCMULGEE RIVER: STORIES
ABOUT THE BOOK
These seven river stories, written after the author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European American, Native, and African American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South Rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon, Georgia. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river—and their ignorance of it—are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gordon Johnston is author of the award-winning poetry collection Scaring the Bears and of the poetry chapbooks Durable Goods and Gravity's Light Grip, and is coauthor, with Matthew Jennings, of Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief Guide with Field Notes. A former journalist with work in The Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Susurrus, and other journals, Johnston is professor of Creative Writing at Mercer University. This fiction collection, his first, draws on fourteen years of canoeing Southern rivers.
