Scott Gould: PEACE LIKE A RIVER with Brian Railsback

Name: Scott Gould: PEACE LIKE A RIVER with Brian Railsback
Start: 2025-09-06T15:00:00-04:00
Location: 3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779

Schedule

Sat, 06 Sep, 2025 at 03:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779 | Sylva, NC

Scott Gould will be in conversation with Brian Railsback at City Lights on Saturday, September 9th at 3:00pm to discuss his new novel, PEACE LIKE A RIVER.
Peace Like a River, the latest novel from acclaimed Southern writer Scott Gould, weaves a lyrical and heartwarming tale of fathers, sons, and grandfathers…and the intricate bonds that define them. Sixty-something Elwin McClennon returns to his hometown in Lowcountry South Carolina—and the dying father—he fled fifteen years earlier. Accompanied by Thom, his odd and precocious thirteen-year-old son, Elwin embarks on a journey to reconcile with his father and their complicated pasts, along the banks of the syrup-slow Black River.
A captivating exploration of forgiveness, redemption, and the enduring bonds of family, Peace Like a River invites readers into a world where love and loss intersect with the healing power of nature and introspection.
Scott Gould is the author of five additional books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Pangyrus, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, and New Stories from the South, among others. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina and teaches at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities.
Brian Railsback has been a sewage ditch digger, church janitor ("maintenance minister"), commercial fisherman, graphic artist, journalist, comedy show writer, instructor, department head, dean, and professor of English. He has published newspaper articles, scholarly essays, short stories, scholarly books, and one novel. He has been invited to give lectures on John Steinbeck throughout the U.S. and in Japan, Mexico, Portugal, and the Republic of Georgia. In 2004, he was named WCU's University Scholar. At Western Carolina University, he founded the Spring Literary Festival and The Honors College. When he was 15, he met a girl in high school who was also 15: Sandra Gary. They married in 1983 and have three children: Travis (musician and composer/graduate of UNCG), Justin (engineer/graduate of NC State and doctoral student at Northwestern), and Cadence (graduate of film studies at UNCW, presently on a global mission trip across three continents). The Railsbacks live on Savannah Ridge, where the only noisy neighbors are coyotes and barred owls.