Shelley Read on Quieting the Mind

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Shelley Read about her novel, Go as a River.

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Mitzi Rapkin: There’s a time when your main character is in a period of isolation, and it’s hard to go from the busy world from all your problems and be in isolation. And you write, “I needed to quiet my mind”. That was from your character. You also write in the very back of the book, you thank Thich Nhat Hanh and Anam Thubten who inspired you, who inspired the title. And I’m assuming that you do some work to quiet your mind. I don’t know if you meditate, but I’m wondering if you could talk about that as it reflects in your creativity, and then maybe talk about the title.

Shelley Read: You know, I think that all of us have the opportunity to tap into the great wisdom traditions all over the world, various cultures and find something that resonates with you. But I think the key is to be able to find something that we can turn to in our lives that feels so much greater and deeper than ourselves, as well as greater and deeper than whatever distracting human folly is. I say that with a smile, because there’s a lot of it right now, distracting human folly that’s trying to steal our attention away from what deeply matters to our own souls. And you know, luckily, human beings didn’t just show up on the scene. We have great and deep and long wisdom traditions that have grappled with the same questions about existence and how to live a good and centered life, just as we are grappling with that today, they’ve been grappling with it for, you know, as long as human beings have been alive. So, I personally have turned quite a bit in my life to the great wisdom traditions of various Native American ways of being in the world. I’ve been grateful that I was raised with a tremendous amount of respect for indigenous people through my family and have spent a lot of time just studying the ways of various indigenous tribes in the United States and also, I’ve turned quite a bit to Buddhism in my life. I will never be able to say that I am a Buddhist. I don’t know about claiming that identity, but I do know that it’s meant a great deal to me, and Thich Nhat Hanh and Anam are both teachers of mine that have meant a great deal to me, as I’m sure Thich Nhat Hanh has meant to many of you.  The title of the novel Go As a River. I took from a beautiful, very simple, lovely calligraphy painting that Thich Nhat Hanh did. He did hundreds of calligraphy paintings, just meditative, simple, little paintings that he did. But years and years ago, I saw the one that he did that simply said, go as a river. And it just stopped me in my tracks. I thought I have been sitting along the banks of wild rivers my entire life, deeply wanting to know what they know. I climb big mountains because I want to know what the mountains know. I want to know what the rivers know. There is something so essential in the natural world and in wild landscapes that we can all learn from. And I pondered this idea of what does it mean to go as a river for quite some time after seeing that painting, and then, interestingly, I actually struggled with the title for this book for quite a while. I’m not great at titles. When I even write a magazine article, I have no idea. Titles have to do a lot of heavy lifting. They’re very difficult for me. It took me a while to remember how much that phrase go as a river meant to me and apply it to the title of this novel. But once I did, it all kind of came together as the dominant metaphor of the novel.

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Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go as a River, is an international bestseller that has been translated into thirty-four languages and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, the Reading the West Book Award for Debut Fiction, and le Prix de l’Union Interalliée,