Alicia Rouverol is currently touring Europe with her novel Dry River, giving presentations and performances at venues in France, Germany and Sweden before heading to North Carolina for a project connected to her previous work at a male prison there: The Men of Brown Creek: Lessons from a Penitentiary.
You can read about Alicia’s upcoming public events (and more) on her website here.
Alicia has also been keeping her own diary of the tour in progress, see below. Phase Two will appear in a future post!
Dry River European tour – 12 May to 21 May, 2025 (Phase One – France)
Our tour began in Angers, France, on Monday the 12th of May, where host Michelle Ryan collected us prior to our talk at the University of Angers, located some twenty minutes out of town on the other side of the Maine river. It was late afternoon and the leafy green campus was quiet; we wondered, my colleague Andy Broadey and I, whether this first event, my talk, might be sparsely attended, due to the late season in the academic year. Upon arrival, Andy—UCLan lecturer and fine artist, and the designer of the novel’s cover—was keen to explore the spaces in our host site. So we sidelined to peruse the auditorium where I would read and he would present his exhibition: ‘Untitled: Angle of Repose’ on the evening of the 13th. Andy’s exhibit, originally launched at University of Salford in September 2023 as part of my book launch, was entering its second (series) phase, and we were both looking forward to the presentation the following day.
My talk that first afternoon, ‘Landscapes as Sites of Contestation: A Study in Creative Practice’—our first event of the tour—proved well received. Faculty, alongside MA and PhD students, crowded into the corner seminar room, brightly lit through natural light, in the MRGT (La Maison de la recherche Germaine Tillion). Later, we learned the University has hosted British writers like Toby Litt and Jon McGregor, so I was very honoured to be invited. CIRPaLL Short Forms and Short Stories Research Group, our official host, was until recently run by Michelle Ryan (she remains the Directrice of the ENSFR (European Network for the Study of Short Fiction). Colette Colligan is now leading CIRPall; she had organised our visit, and we were pleased finally after months of planning to meet them both. Both teach within the department of English Studies at the University.
My talk featured exploration of (and generous readings from) my forthcoming short story collection, Granite Rock and Other Stories, focused on the conflicts in specific sites across place and time, as well as an examination of Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and whether it can similarly be ‘found’ in short fiction. The talk was made also made available to staff and faculty virtually; a lively discussion ensued, with some great questions from the PhD students especially. My favourite: is there ever a way in which place and time don’t intersect in fiction (say, in different genres). This took our discussion down the path of literary experiment, which tied in nicely with the kind of work we do here at Salford. It also featured substantive discussion of ‘place’ in short fiction, with students and staff both enquiring as to how one ‘writes’ place, how much research is required, and whether I might ever find the short form confining. I have not as of yet!
That evening, we shared a meal with Colette and Michelle and learned about their respective writing projects—which feature hybrid forms and autofiction/medial experiment, respectively.
On the subsequent morning, Andy returned to hang the exhibition which took much of the day, whilst I reviewed my talk, put finishing touches to the PPT for my conference paper for later in the week (at Narrative Matters).
Andy’s images, alongside the MRGT’s auditorium art made for a gorgeous space in which the audience that night could experience the images. Many of the students had returned for our second presentation alongside faculty members accompanied by their child. Following my reading, Andy spoke about his ‘series two’ of ‘Untitled: Angle of Repose’ explored also in ‘newspaper’ format (a kind of broadsheet) available for viewers to take away. As noted in his statement: ‘Untitled (Angle of Repose) is an art installation, currently comprising two photo-series, that examines the contradiction of individual achievement and social necessity developed in the formation of the American West. The work engages with Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose (1971), set in the late 19th Century and narrated from the viewpoint of the 1960s, and Alicia J Rouverol’s novel Dry River (2023), which recasts Stegner’s book in the context of the 2008 global crisis.’ Andy defines the exhibit’s concept in his newsletter: ‘The phrase angle of repose, which denotes the steepest gradient at which a pile of loose material can remain stable, is central to how Broadey’s work thematises the course of individual aspirations in these novels, through time, and under the centrifugal force of circumstance.’
Again, we had a super engaged audience with discussion facilitated by Colette and Michelle, topics ranging from Dry River’s play with narrative time and the role of landscape in the novel’s settings of Northern California and North Carolina, to the notion of sedimentary ‘folds’ of socio-political history as featured in Andy’s work. The latter (in series two, made in 2025) combines images of the 19th c. mining world (the subject of Stegner’s novel) with a series of theatre sets (popularised by Nickelodeon theatres in the final decade of the 19th c.). Each one progressively recedes from view whilst highlighting the spectacle of the extractive world of mining and industrial development at the western frontier with the mythologisation of American individualism that Stegner addresses in his novel and which my novel additionally explores.
At dinner that night, Michelle and Colette raised the possibility of future collaborations: from student exchanges (which I can explore with Tim Isherwood upon return) to the exciting prospect of a faculty exchange or even a ‘visiting professorship’ where I might teach for several weeks. Michelle’s expertise in short fiction (on Angela Carter) and Colette’s specialism of 19th c. literature, but most particularly their respective experimental autofictional work would be an excellent match for our department.
Two days later I presented my paper at Narrative Matters 2025 in Paris, ‘Prison Narratives as Fragmentary Writing’ on our Writing Prison Narratives panel, drawing on my work on The Men at Brown Creek: Lessons from a Penitentiary. There at the American University of Paris, I was joined by Rosa Whitecross (Bath Spa) and Monica Thomas (Birmingham City), both writing on research projects conducted in women’s prisons in the UK. Beyond further building my networks in UK, I met South African scholar Bianca Rochelle Parry (University of Pretoria), programme director for the Centre of Mediation in African (CMA) at University of Pretoria, South Africa, with whom I hope to connect as I further develop my book project, The Men at Brown Creek.
Next up: The Munich Readery, Saturday the 17th at 7 pm!