The River Lock
One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk

Cloth $19.95    |    978-0-8156-0928-5    |    2008

Book Talks and Author Signings
In New York State
The Chronicle Book Fair, Glens Falls, NY, October 19, 2008
Book House, Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY, Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 7:00 pm
Mohawk Valley Arts Center, Little Falls, NY, Tuesday October 28, 2008, 7:00 pm
Utica College, Utica, NY, Wednesday, October 29, 2008
St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, NY, April 16, 2009
Outside New York State
Ashland University MFA Program, Ashland, OH, July 25, 2008, 7:00 pm
Michigan State University, School of Labor and Industrial Relations & College of Arts and Humanities, September 2008
Ashland University English Department, Ashland, OH, September 2008
Amherst College, Amherst, MA, Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Meacham Workshops, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, October 23-26, 2008
L. Liebler’s, Detroit, MI, Readings Series, September 2008
Buckeye Book Fair, Wooster, OH, Saturday, November 1, 2008

Reviews
"In Ulysses, Joyce explodes a single ordinary day into a life’s journey...Haven pulls off a variation of that trick..."
—Syracuse New times

"...a universal story, one to stand alongside such memoirs as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club or Wolff’s This Boy’s Life..."
—Michael Pearson, author of Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx

"...a story of love lost and regained, and a testament to the stories that shape us."
—Kim Barnes, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of In the Wilderness

Description
Pulled between the disparate spheres of home life with a minister father he loves and respects, and the world of sex, drugs, and violence of his closest boyhood friends, author Stephen Haven relates his journey of self-discovery in this poignant memoir. After a fourteen-year absence from his home in Amsterdam, New York, Haven returns in the week before Easter, 2003, to the town that molded his character.

A true bildungsroman, The River Lock traces the forging of Haven’s identity from the clash of his youthful home life and the streets of his native mill town. Through memories of adolescence, Haven reveals how a growing understanding of art, culture, friendship, spirituality, family, and class melded to create a man able to live fully in two distinct worlds.

Author
Stephen Haven is director of the M.F.A program in creative writing at Ashland University, and director of the Ashland Poetry Press.

6 x 9, 176 pages, 3 illustrations