“My gang when I was a kid was important to me. These were the first friends I chose for myself (though proximity made some of the choices inevitable) and the first occasion I had to observe people who were, sometimes radically, unlike me.” So notes author David Brendan Hopes, discussing the relationship dynamics that permeate his 2019 novel, The Falls of the Wyona, which Kirkus Reviews named one of the 100 Best Indies of 2024.

In a starred review of this “plangent romance,” set in the 1940s, Hopes chronicles the emotionally fraught tale of four teenage friends coming of age in a North Carolina mountain town. The author introduces us to mild-mannered narrator Arden; athlete and heartthrob Vince; offbeat outsider Tilden; and, perhaps the most memorable character, enigmatic Glen, a “sissified” new kid obsessed with astronomy and nature. Most of the action takes place around the massive waterfall on the Wyona River. As the boys navigate both the treacherous natural wonders and equally challenging social dynamics of Eddie Rickenbacker High School, Glen and Vince begin to fall in love. Their burgeoning relationship causes significant upheaval when Vince’s father, the homophobic football coach, discovers the romance.

While Vince, Tilden, Arden, and Glen form the heart of the story—secondary characters, less well-defined, meander in and out—the Wyona emerges as a primary character as well. In memorable passages throughout the book, Hopes capably evokes the beauty and the danger of the landscape, as well as the outsize influence of the Wyona on the lives of his characters:

Wyona is a shy mountain boy, reluctant to leave home, rising from the smoky Carolina hills, flowing a little toward the Tennessee Valley, lingering with many a meander among the tulip poplars and sweet gums, looping back, delaying, uncertain, before squaring his shoulders and foaming bold toward the Gulf of Mexico. Once he makes up his mind he goes pretty fast, and our town, or rather the Falls below our town, is the place where he faces the inevitable and all his meandering turns to hurry, the Wyona to the Minangus, the Minangus to the Tennessee, and with all waters reaching the Great Water at last amid the herons and alligators of the Delta.

Sometimes the river is lazy. Mothers take their children to paddle in the shallows. Sometimes the river possesses terrible purpose, rooting under the mountains, swallowing barns, pushing towns on his back down toward the sea. The flood of 1916, when two hurricanes dumped their torrents at once, left its mark on walls and cliffs, so high that nobody believes there could be that much water on the dry land. Sometimes he plays like a big boy in the rocky shallows, and the gentlest thing can come to him and slake its thirst, the fledgling birds, and the blue-black butterflies that drink from a pool on a stone in a pool of the river bend.

Though the physical environs surrounding the Wyona are not directly biographical, Hopes points out that his experiences as a child in the woods near Akron, Ohio, as well as his time at Hiram College (“which itself provided farmland and wilderness enough for long walks and deep meditations and an organized effort to learn and understand what I was seeing, making me a decent naturalist, even though my heart turned finally to literature”) are crucial to his crafting of the novel’s setting and character development. “The creek my gang played at in Akron became the Wyona River in Tennessee. We had no falls, but we had the various perils of life in the wild suburbs, and we squeezed them for every drop of adventure,” he says. “I suppose I’m Arden—always the observer—though there are huge passages of Tilden in me. None of my gang, or later my Boy Scout troop, was gay that I recognized then (except me), but I suppose that we would have greeted that revelation with the same acceptance of individual quirks we manifested at other times. It was very ‘live and let live,’ unless I’m just making that up to gild my past.”

The author’s keen examination of the natural world around Wyona dovetails nicely with the emotional and spiritual journeys of his protagonists. “Hopes’ yarn vividly portrays the fervent bond between young boys—camping out, bantering, double-daring each other into crazy stunts by the falls—with its occasional erotic undertow, and the way it fractures under the pressure of stereotypes and bigotry,” noted the Kirkus review. “His young characters are full of vigor but also experience poignant, tongue-tied confusion over their warring impulses. . . . The result is a gripping read with an undercurrent of elegiac yearning.”

Hopes, who has a doctorate in literature from Syracuse and has taught the subject for 40 years (he’s currently at UNC-Asheville), is thoughtful in his consideration of how his own reading and teaching habits contribute to the creation of his narrative worlds. Among others, he lists “Yeats, Blake, Melville, Tolkien, Elizabeth Bishop, [and] Shakespeare” as his favorite writers; at the same time, he demonstrates the wisdom of navigating the writer’s duty to creativity and originality. “The task of the artist is to fight off influence,” he says.

Whether he is delving into the inspiration for Wyona (“probing it as a literary scholar, I suppose it had something to do with energy and perception emerging from darkness—a favorite trope of Ezra Pound, by the way, on whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation”) or contemplating the influence of his students as “an endless source of encouragement and inspiration,” Hopes is consistently aware of how instinct, flashes of inspiration, and prose style interact within an artist’s work.

“I hope when my style is stream of consciousness, it’s evoking thoughts or momentary impressions, which are, of course, streams of consciousness,” he says. “In some ways I’m the least conscious of writers, reading over a passage and thinking either ‘that’s lovely’ or ‘that must be changed’ without much regard for plan or theory. I write by ear. In poetry, I hear a rhythm and essential heartbeat of the work before I begin to write it down. It’s messier with prose, but the principle is the same. The parts I must usually edit out of a work are those parts [that] I inserted as explanation of the musical revelation, which, if one trusted it, can almost always stand alone. As a teacher of creative writing I was sometimes not very helpful to my students, as when they were stuck or didn’t know how to begin I couldn’t help them very much. I wanted to say, ‘Just Listen!’unaware for a long time that this isn’t a universal principle. Poetry helps the novelist because it is the art of condensation, teaching one to say the most in the least space. Of course, you must conceal what you’re doing, lest someone call your prose ‘poetic.’ I write poetry, plays, fiction, [and] nonfiction, and I paint, and though the scholar in me can enumerate the ways in which these pursuits should be different, in the moment of creation I myself am aware of no difference.”

Hopes is currently at work on a new novel, In the Garden of the Bears, in which “a kid falls into a lake, drowns (sort of), and then, revived, discovers he remembers nothing about his past life but is probably the Messiah.” Readers of The Falls of the Wyona will anticipate more careful observations of the natural world, fully fleshed-out characters, and yes, lyrical prose.

Eric Liebetrau is a freelance writer and editor based in Charleston, S.C. He is a former longtime managing and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews, and his work has appeared in a variety of national publications.