River Town: Writing about home - Books by Eric Douglas

I’ve always been intrigued by the history of the river that runs through my home town of Charleston, West Virginia. The Kanawha River is slightly less than 100 miles long, from the headwaters where the New and Gauley rivers meet to where it spills into the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, but an amazing amount has happened along that 100 miles. There have been Adena and Native American settlements, forts and battles, discoveries of salt, timber, coal, oil and natural gas, boom towns and busts.

From the time I wrote my first novel in 2005, I started dreaming about a collaborative fiction project where a group of writers would join together to write a series of stories all set in the same location. I read Thieves World in my formative years and thought that was the coolest thing ever. When I returned home to Charleston after living away for nearly 15 years, everything fell together and River Town was born.

The book is six stories (with a couple narrative pieces at the beginning and end) set in River Town in 1890. The location is effectively Charleston, but it could be just about anywhere on the river at that time. We created characters for the time and location and then shared them, weaving each other’s characters into our own stories. It was a lot of fun, although it did come with the unique challenges of sharing. Most writers are fairly solitary in their work and sharing early drafts with each other was a bit nerve-wracking.

I’ve shared the book with a few close friends. This is one of my favorite early reviews:

“Rather than the six stand-alone stories from different writers united around common characters in the same (historic) place and time that I expected, RIVER TOWN, in its whole is more like a progressive dinner where we travel to each writer’s home for each portion of a delightful collective meal. Every course is delicious on its own, but the true treat is finishing the last bite and appreciating the beauty of the sum of its parts.”

– Daniel Boyd, Filmmaker, Author

The following is the book jacket description of the book:

“Hayden Lowe may or may not have killed a man out west, and no one seems to know for sure why he’s back in River Town; his friend, Lillian Conley, is keeping secrets of her own in her journal. Will Captain JD Dawson lose his beloved sternwheeler, the Miss Jayne Marie, in a winner-takes-all bet? Julia Hubbard has a secret project; Andrew Wilson is plotting on the dusty streets of River Town, and what about that strange Dame Roxalana? There is more to her than anyone is willing to say. The men in the coal mines around River Town are showing strange symptoms no one can explain, yet everyone is whispering about them.

Before all is said and done, each of these characters will intersect in unexpected ways. The resolutions are as suspenseful as they are satisfying.

River Town is a collection of short stories set in 1890s West Virginia by six different authors. The tales range from adventure to romance to intrigue and fantasy. Each story stands alone, yet together they take readers to a time along the Kanawha River just after the Civil War when families were still struggling to recover and before the railroad came through the mountains. The river was the center of everything.

This project was created by Eric Douglas and features the work of Shawna Christos, G. Cameron Fuller, Elizabeth Gaucher, Katharine Herndon and Jane Siers Wright.”

River Town will be available in print and on Kindle next week. Stay tuned!