Seven Islands of the Ocmulgee: River Stories

"A middle-aged woman who has lost her father and the pawn shop she inherited from him kayaks a wild Seven Islands rapid, looking for solace or self-destruction - an orphaned boy finds purpose and a path toward self-definition through borrowed Native culture and gar-fishing -- the river baptism of a scarred, violent man tamed by a stroke revives a congregation even as it reopens old wounds - a long-exiled, past-her-prime call girl returns to Macon, Georgia to uncover, thanks to an old house on the levee and a sandbar and a college art class, a surprising sense of belonging - Towaliga River memories carry a Navy sniper through his grim wartime duty... These seven stories, written after their author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European-American, Native, and African-American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river - and their ignorances 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 people"--