The Mill Valley Library presents a special conversation with award-winning author Nina Schuyler in honor of her inventive new ecological novel, Open the Floodgates.
In an unnamed California town, the River is granted personhood and has the right—and urgent need—to argue in court for its existence. But powerful, well-funded enemies are determined to keep the River exactly as it is: gunk-filled, toxic, a convenient dumping ground for waste. The story moves like water, entering the minds of the town’s people, pigeons, deer, dogs, cats, the trees, the River’s home, and the River itself. When the River is ultimately jailed, the town faces a reckoning: what do we owe the River? And the River must answer in turn: what, if anything, does it owe humans?
Nina Schuyler is the author of four other fiction books and teaches creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and the independent bookstore, Book Passage. Nina Schuyler's newest short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. It was also a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics and earned a law degree at UC Law San Francisco. She is also the author of How to Write Stunning Sentences and has an extensive following of her Substack newsletter of the same name.
Our bookseller for this event will be the Friends of the Mill Valley Library Bookstore.