Tomorrow Night: We're Going to Burntwood

There are fictional places that provide a setting, and then there are fictional places that begin behaving like they were there long before the writer arrived. The Burntwood is the latter.

Tomorrow night, the Unsolicited Press Book Club is sitting down with David Loring Nash to talk about The Burntwood Anthology, his collection of six dark, interconnected stories set around the fictional Wondrous Bluffs, Wisconsin, and the river running through it.

Thursday, August 27
6 PM Pacific / 8 PM Central
Live on Zoom

If you've read the collection, you already know that calling the Burntwood a setting doesn't quite cover it. The river witnesses things. It conceals things. People disappear into it, escape toward it, obsess over it, project themselves onto it, and make spectacularly bad decisions beside it. It can be playground, refuge, hunting ground, confessional, graveyard, and something considerably stranger. That's where we're beginning tomorrow.

We're also going to talk about the human darkness running alongside the supernatural one. The collection opens with “The Float Trip,” in which two sixteen-year-old boys head into the Wisconsin wilderness for a night on the river. Tanner and Alex are best friends, but friendship isn't the only thing moving between them. Their story brings tenderness, desire, fear, shame, masculinity, violence, and the terrifying possibility of being known into the same canoe.

From there, Burntwood expands. People and places reappear. Stories begin talking to one another. Local history becomes mythology. The line between rumor and the supernatural gets increasingly difficult to locate. Men who are very certain of their own importance discover that certainty isn't the same thing as power. Women see things the men around them have missed. Wolves appear. So does witchcraft. Revenge begins to look considerably more complicated than deciding who is good and who is evil. And through all of it runs the river.

David writes in his author's note that rivers contain both life and death, that some hide dangerous secrets in their dark bends and deep holes, and that both light and dark magic live there. That idea gives us a lot to talk about.

Tomorrow, we're asking:

What does the Burntwood allow David to explore that another landscape wouldn't?

Why are so many of the men in these stories convinced they're in control?

What happens when violence, masculinity, sexuality, and secrecy begin feeding one another?

Why do the women of Burntwood so often perceive dangers that the men dismiss?

When does revenge become justice? Does it ever?

Is the supernatural force in these stories judging anyone, or are humans perfectly capable of arranging their own destruction?

And perhaps most importantly: Who deserves to be pulled under? Because one of the pleasures of The Burntwood Anthology is that David doesn't make that answer easy.

Join Us

Book Club members can find the Zoom information in Discord. You don't need to arrive with a thesis. You don't even need to have finished every story. Come with a question, a favorite character, somebody you hated, a theory about the Burntwood, or the scene you haven't been able to stop thinking about.

We'll take it from there. See you on the river.