When twelve year old Samantha Tarryall enters Catherine and Dale Chasm’s store pleading for help and explains that her younger sister has ridden her bike into the Overland Fork River and disappeared, immediately all three lives are forever changed and forever bound together. Prior to the accident the Chasms cannot imagine that they will become Samantha’s guardians, let alone foresee how she will help them face anew the memories of their adult son’s murder and discover a path towards healing. Just as these lives become inextricably linked, so do others cast together by the Chasm’s care for Samantha—her fragile mother, her absent father, all those swept up in the flood of loss. By degrees we meet another family that has also lost a child, and over the course of the novel we learn how those lives are also intertwined with Samantha's and, by proxy, with the Chasms.
Set in a Colorado river canyon, Water Cycle spans two generations and forty years, from 1949 – 1989. The title reflects the inter-connectivity of the plot and its characters and applies the river as a metaphor of confluence and temporal fluidity, as well as playing upon the notion of cycles more familiar in song and poetry. This alternatively structured novel built of interlinked stories allows room for multiple points of view and narrative styles, just as families of what were strangers become bound by love and caring and just as the tributaries of rivers eventually merge into one. Helping transition these story lines and viewpoints, the novel is cemented together by vignettes, tiny prose pieces that focus on the parallels between natural water cycles and the cycles of grief.
Literary Fiction; 140,000 words.
Chapters Published in: Dogwood; Please Stay on the Trail: Colorado Stories (anthology); Weber: the Contemporary West; Zone 3, and You Are Here: A Journal of Creative Geography.
