Concerning Shad River
I started Shad River in 1995, finished a complete draft in 2001 and put a version of it up on Amazon under the title Rockfish in 2009. An entire American generation has grown up since I started this book and another generation is growing up now. Meanwhile the historical issues portrayed in Shad River are still thriving in America. As recently as the summer of 2017, Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis violently invaded my home town, causing many injuries and loss of life. Clearly, Americans remain somewhat fraught about their identities, literally on a local level.
Reflecting on events in 2017, I re-issued another iteration of Rockfish in 2018. Too many people pointed out that no one really reads 900-page books. I wanted to make sure nothing obstructed the book's original purpose.
The original Rockfish probably owes its existence to a collection of short stories I wrote around 1980, briefly collected as Ten Rockfish Tales. One of the Ten Rockfish Tales was published in Southern Exposure magazine and another in the Virginia Review student magazine at the University of Virginia. The tales were loosely fictionalized stories told by my grandparents' generation, many of them concerning their own parents or grandparents. Ten Rockfish Tales could just as easily have been called “Grandparent Stories.” Most of the stories dated from the 1880s to the 1920s.
Subsequently, I removed the two versions of Rockfish, one 300 pages longer than the other, and their various editions, to the 'out of print' category and used 2023 as a likely moment to reissue the current work as Shad River, the original title. Rockfish is a real place, and many readers naturally took the novel as a history of the real Rockfish. Fair to say, Shad River is as close to a history of the actual Rockfish as there will ever be, and the long original even more so, but the setting of the novel conflates of several Central Virginia locations. Countless incidents in Shad River are quite true and the resemblances to people dead or alive are not coincidental at all. But a novel is not a history and Rockfish needs to go its own way into its own future. Very few families dating back to 18th-century Rockfish remain there now. The colonial era families moved out and others moved in to become the new natives. Nothing could be more American than this kind of mobility and transformation.
Reflecting on events in 2017, I re-issued another iteration of Rockfish in 2018. Too many people pointed out that no one really reads 900-page books. I wanted to make sure nothing obstructed the book's original purpose.
The original Rockfish probably owes its existence to a collection of short stories I wrote around 1980, briefly collected as Ten Rockfish Tales. One of the Ten Rockfish Tales was published in Southern Exposure magazine and another in the Virginia Review student magazine at the University of Virginia. The tales were loosely fictionalized stories told by my grandparents' generation, many of them concerning their own parents or grandparents. Ten Rockfish Tales could just as easily have been called “Grandparent Stories.” Most of the stories dated from the 1880s to the 1920s.
Subsequently, I removed the two versions of Rockfish, one 300 pages longer than the other, and their various editions, to the 'out of print' category and used 2023 as a likely moment to reissue the current work as Shad River, the original title. Rockfish is a real place, and many readers naturally took the novel as a history of the real Rockfish. Fair to say, Shad River is as close to a history of the actual Rockfish as there will ever be, and the long original even more so, but the setting of the novel conflates of several Central Virginia locations. Countless incidents in Shad River are quite true and the resemblances to people dead or alive are not coincidental at all. But a novel is not a history and Rockfish needs to go its own way into its own future. Very few families dating back to 18th-century Rockfish remain there now. The colonial era families moved out and others moved in to become the new natives. Nothing could be more American than this kind of mobility and transformation.
What Rockfish Looks Like Now
Rockfish today is being swallowed by forest, at the moment anyway. When I was growing up, Rockfish was much more open. My father told me that when he was growing up in the 1930s, the Rockfish landscape was largely abandoned fields turning into scrub. When my grandparents were young, the landscape of Rockfish was mainly field, pasture or orchard between narrow woods; there was no primordial timber left and deer were scarce. Below are some recent pictures from Rockfish. The scrub in the right foreground was flinty, skinned pasture when I was in my teens.
Parked near the head of Drumheller Hollow
An unrestored 18th Century survivor, clad in porches and additions of the 19th and 20th century
Bridge to the center of the world
Rockfish River
Fall on the river (photograph by Alan Mawyer)
Rock study (photograph by Alan Mawyer)
Near the old mill (photograph by Alan Mawyer)
The post office of 1900 (photograph by Alan Mawyer)
The railroad trestle (photograph by Alan Mawyer)
Smith’s Cash Store circa 1925. Post office on left. Photo taken from the train station platform; both train station and store are now gone.
The James River near Scottsville (photograph by Alan Mawyer)
The Blue Ridge
The beginning