The River, in author Nina Schuyler’s new novel Open The Floodgates, is on trial to determine if it actually qualifies for “personhood.” Existing uncomfortably in the dark confines of the courtroom, surrounded by “man-stink,” The River listens as well-intentioned defenders tell stories of their memories of it, when it was clear and free flowing. When enormous amounts of trash and industrial waste hadn’t been dumped into it. When there were many fish, and they were healthy. When all the cottonwoods were still standing on its banks.
Open The Floodgates takes place in “an unidentified California town.” Imagine the River to be the Guadalupe River, when the Tamien Ohlone lived alongside it. Before the quicksilver mines contaminated it with mercury, before the salt evaporation ponds were built in the 1930s, before the Army Corps of Engineers “straightened” it in the 1960s. When Chinook salmon and steelhead trout flourished in it. Imagine if the Guadalupe was a person.
In Open The Floodgates, the River is trying to revise part of its statement to the court: Defining Person (per-son) 3.(for now) dusty, crackling land / a deep cut in the earth / no rushing water no bubbling, no babbling / no gushing whirling streaming gurgling / no, none, nothing.
But to begin at the beginning: Open The Floodgates, release date Sept. 15, is a stunningly written, captivating environmental fable, featuring characters such as Larry Skolnick, “The Judge,” or, as The River thinks of him, “Crow Man;” nine-year-old George, called as a witness for the River; Ed Jacobs, whose First People family has lived by the River for generations; Willard, who dreams he is a seahorse but hates the River and perhaps most indelibly, along with the River, Hazel.
Hazel, 75, is a retired schoolteacher who now owns a beauty salon and is an ardent supporter of the River during the trial’s opening. She refuses to be curtailed in her testimony by The Judge. “Hazel is like an old-growth tree,” says the River…”Ring after ring of life: wisdom with each ring sunny years rainy years a couple of tornadoes years of hardship and struggle and death she turns around the sun like the gloriousness she is.”
Yet even Hazel has second thoughts when, later in the story, the River floods her home and the whole town during days of torrential rain. (She has third thoughts even later.)
The Author
Hazel, Schuyler revealed in a telephone interview, is one of her favorite characters. She grew up next to the Deschutes River, which flows north from the Cascade Range through Central Oregon. “We hiked along it,” she said. “I learned how to fly fish there. I loved the sound of the river, the birds.”
Open The Floodgates is her fourth novel; she has also published a book of short stories, and two books on writing, which draw on her experience teaching multiple creative writing courses through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, including “Reading Like A Writer: Unlocking Creativity Through Literary Analysis.”
She is also an instructor in the program’s two-year novel writing certificate course, which, according to Stanford materials, “is a comprehensive six-course series designed to guide…from the first spark of an idea to the completion of a novel-length manuscript.” She teaches approximately 15 students in “The Powerful Beginning.”
Like many teachers, she also learns from her students. “You get well-educated people who challenge you,” she said. Some students have gone on to publish short stories and novels of their own.
Open The Floodgates, with its unique formatting, multiple points of view and successful pairing of magical realism with courtroom drama, reflects many of her own literary inspirations. In the book’s acknowledgements, she cites Ursula K. Le Guin alongside Virginia Woolf, writing that Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style helped her evolve a “river-of-consciousness style, swishing between characters, because at the heart of things, we all have little rivers inside.”
Asked about the possible influences of other writers, such as Donald Barthelme, especially his short story, “A Shower of Gold,” she agrees that his writing and hers share both humor and the sense of unexpected combinations of things. George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo comes up, as do Claire Oshetsky’s Poor Deer, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, and especially Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, with its trickster Crow.
The reader for Open The Floodgates, Schuyler suggested, is “someone who wants to experience the world from the point of view of a river, of pigeons, [of many other beings], while being immersed in a courtroom drama.”
As she points out in the book’s introduction, in 2008, Ecuador “became the first country to enshrine the rights of nature into its constitution.” In 2017, New Zealand granted personhood to the Whanganui River, and since then, rivers in Columbia, Canada and Bangladesh have been given personhood.
“A forest in Quebec has been given personhood,” Schuyler added. More and more people are accepting that “sentient beings” includes more than just humans, she said. Climate catastrophes are making people aware that things need to change. “Artificial intelligence is now being used to decode the languages of bees and plants,” she said, citing Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life. “I am in awe that we are on the cusp of [major] discovery.”
The Publisher
Open The Floodgates is being published by Santa Cruz-based Reverberations Books. Founder Gregory Graalfs graduated from UCSC in 1976 with a degree in “The Art of the Book.” After a career in commercial printing, print production and design management, he met Seattle’s Chin Music Press founder Bruce Rutledge, who agreed to accept Reverberations as an imprint, launching it in 2020.
In a phone interview, Graalfs explained he was well aware how difficult starting a new book publishing firm would be. “But publishing was a way I could address my environmental concerns,” he said, citing events such as the U.S.’s refusal to join the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Open The Floodgates is a step further for Reverberations. “I didn’t know about the ‘rights of nature’ movement,” Graalfs said, before receiving the novel’s submission. But he found the book enthralling. “It presents its stories in a way that gives people some hope,” he said, “[encouraging them] to think about things in a constructive way.”
Graalfs’ assessment of this aligns with its author’s goal: “to balance hope with the truth.”
All of the characters in Open The Floodgates navigate their hopes and what they perceive as the truth. In the end, the River, having been on trial, in jail, in wild, destructive flood, is now back inside its banks. An egret alights.
“swishing over to the /glowing white feathers / whirling and burbling / ripple gurgle whoosh / (hello) long black legs”
Book signing event: Sept. 29, 7pm. Books, Inc., Palo Alto; in conversation with Devi Laskar, author of Midnight, At The War. ninaschuyler.com
