Book Debut, Gordon Johnston’s ‘Seven Islands of the Ocmulgee’

A reading and talk about Johnston’s book of seven interconnected river stories, which draw on European American, Native, and African American traditions and relationships with the upper Ocmulgee from near Jackson to below Macon. 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. Each story engages a specific place, among them Pittman’s Ferry, the Seven Islands, Smith Shoals, the levee in Macon, and the Ocmulgee Mounds of the Mississippian and Muscogee peoples.

Novelist Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, had this to say about the collection:
“Seven Islands of the Ocmulgee is not a quiet book of meditations on a river. Rather, it is a deeply engaging set of intertwined stories that feature the complexity of character one associates with literary fiction while also offering surprising, twisty plots that send the reader rocketing through the pages. This is a terrific book. I loved reading it.”