By Way Of Water - Charlotte Gullick
Product Details:
Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners
Paperback: 262 pages
ISBN: 9780988225282
Cover Design: Dreux Carpenter; Photo: “Under” by Ines Batlio
About the Book:
A unique look at the Jehovah Witnesses in the rural western United States and the logging industry in Northern California during the 1970s, By Way of Water addresses the devastating effects of poverty on rural families. Struggling to feed their children in an unforgiving California forest when there are no logging jobs to be found, Jake and Dale Colby make personal vows that only make matters worse. Jake will not accept help from the government or his neighbors, and Dale won’t allow him to hunt, believing her faith will sustain them. But one other member of the family makes a promise to herself. Seven-year-old Justy believes that she alone can hold the family together, even when her father’s violence resurfaces. With a clear insight and the deepest empathy, Justy isolates the stark realities around her, even as she dreams with her mother of a safe world that only God can promise.
About the Author
Charlotte Gullick is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. A first-generation college graduate, she received her AA with High Honors from Santa Rosa Junior College, a BA with Honors in Literature/Creative Writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. She began a MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts in July 2014. Charlotte's first novel, By Way of Water, was published by Blue Hen Books/Penguin Putnam and was chosen by Jayne Anne Phillips as the Grande Prize Winner of the Santa Fe Writer's Project in 2002 and will be available November 2013 from the Santa Fe Writers Project. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony Residency, Faculty of Year from College of the Redwoods as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award.
“By Way of Water is a work of exquisite beauty.”
“Gullick’s debut novel is a lovingly rendered story of a family and a community surrendering angrily to changing times . . . few authors have paid attention to characters descended from Steinbeck’s and Norris’s, and its refreshing to see a novel that does justice to this forgotten pocket of the country.”
“The deepest beliefs of a husband and wife come into conflict in this debut novel set in the late 1970s in a California forest threatened by the opening of a mine. Gullick deftly touches on wider issues of environmentalism and racism, and her characters are well drawn. A heartfelt first novel.”