I’ve been thinking a lot about water this summer. Where it comes from and where it goes. I grew up in a little-known town in Texas next to other little-known towns. One of these towns is not so little known anymore. Not since July of 2025, anyway. Not since the Guadalupe River swept in from the headwaters under cover of night and washed away whole worlds in one fell swoop.
Experts refer to the region our towns were founded as Flash Flood Alley. I’ve written elsewhere about my own experience with floods in this alley, but with the anniversary of the 2025 floods having come and gone, and after more recent flooding, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the waters of my childhood. I’ve found myself thinking of those cool, sparkling waters that were both balm and harm. I live away from the Hill Country these days, in a different flood-prone part of the country, so the only way I know to dip my feet in those waterways of my youth is through stories — real and fictional, short and long, joyful and filled with mourning.
I’ve been thinking about water this summer. Where it comes from and where it goes. Won’t you join me?
Goodbye to a River
By John Graves
The foundational Texas river narrative. Goodbye to a River is both a quiet, bittersweet farewell paddle down the Brazos before impending dams threatened to alter the river forever and a rousing call to protect those waterways we love. Ultimately, Graves captures the ways in which a river can hold the memory, history, and spirit of the land it carves.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Here
By Nancy Wayson Dinan
Set against the 2015 Memorial Day flash flood in the Texas Hill Country, this surreal, ghost-laden novel wanders through a drowned landscape where rising waters surface old histories and hidden truths.
“After the Flood” (free article; requires email address to read)
Where the River Took Us (podcast)
By Aaron Parsley
A harrowing, deeply raw firsthand account and companion audio journey through surviving the deadly 2025 Fourth of July floods, laying bare the profound grief, resilience, and quiet humanity left in its aftermath.
“We Were Known for our Rivers”
By Kimberly Garza
An essay on the physical and emotional geography of Texas waterways in the aftermath of the 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting, probing what it means to belong to a landscape defined by volatile, life-giving, and terrifying forces.
Viva Texas Rivers!
By Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester
An expansive anthology bringing together decades of writers, naturalists, and poets to celebrate the wild beauty, sacred grace, and fragile future of Texas’s storied waterways.
Is a River Alive?
By Robert McFarlane
An urgent work of nature writing and advocacy that urges us to see rivers not merely as resources to be dammed or managed, but as living, breathing beings with rights and agency of their own.
Salvage the Bones
By Jesmyn Ward
A novel following a Mississippi family bracing for Hurricane Katrina, exploring the fierce bonds of love, poverty, and endurance as apocalyptic waters close in around them.
The Water Dancer
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
A haunting fusion of antebellum history and speculative myth, in which water serves as both a site of historic trauma and a supernatural conduit of memory that carries the enslaved toward freedom.
Southern Review of Books 