38 days (and counting) until The Waters splashes down!
The Reading Group Guide
There are many moving parts in presenting a W.W. Norton book to the world! And the folks at W.W. Norton have kindly created a Reading Group Guide to accompany The Waters to help inspire conversations at book groups and in classrooms. This guide will probably be printed in the back of the paperback version when it eventually comes out, and until then, it will live on the W.W. Norton site for my book.
Here is the Once Upon a River Reading Guide. It’s nine simple questions. It’s fine, just a few words to start a conversation or get folks focused in case the book group is made up of wine drinkers.
When I received the draft of the new Reading Guide for The Waters, I was blown away. It was long (20 questions), comprehensive, deeply thoughtful, and I didn’t even know the answers to most of the questions. Right away, I wanted to discuss these questions with somebody. A professor could teach a whole semester-long course in the book by exploring the questions presented therein.
I wrote to W.W. Norton and asked them to please thank the author of the guide. I hadn’t noticed, while looking at it that the initials “hb” were attached to the file name. Well, if any of you are ever lucky enough to have a file with “hb” on the end of the name, then you may be working with the extraordinary editor Heidi Bell. No wonder the questions were brilliant.
As it happens, Heidi Bell was the copyeditor of The Waters, and if you think the prose has a good consistent texture all the way through, then you can thank Heidi Bell for this. She happens to be my very good friend, and I love her. Heidi is busy right now preparing her own manuscript for publication by Cornerstone Press, so prepare yourselves for a magnificent book of stories next October. It is a soulful dive into our problematic American existence with a good dose of fairy tale wisdom. You will laugh a lot and be haunted by the madness of ordinary-ish people, and you will be also made hopeful that our struggles are worthwhile.
In the meanwhile, I suggest you do NOT look at the reading guide for The Waters on the W.W. Norton page because it contains spoilers galore. Below, I’m pasting in a version of the excellent readers guide with all the spoilers redacted (I have to do it as series of screen captures). And again, thank you, W.W. Norton and Heidi Bell. It sure takes a community to create a book and all the parts it needs to venture out into the world!
