"...LITTLE MEMORIES AND QUESTIONS THAT WOULDN'T LEAVE ME ALONE.": WORLD OF RIVERS' TIM BRYANT

Tim Bryan's latest, World of Rivers, lookis at decades of a family trees branches that reach out ans twist in odd ways, starting with a white soldier, Blufford Thom, going AWOL in the Philippines in WW2, then his young mixed daughter Cassandra, struggling to be a singer, then two different families who brush aup against each other in Reagan era New Orleans. Tim was kind enough to talk about his unique and moving book with us.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: What sparked the idea for World of Rivers?

TIM BRYANT: Honestly, it started the way a lot of my writing starts—little memories and questions that wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept thinking about where people come from, what they carry, and how a single life can ripple forward through generations. The “river” image came pretty naturally after that. I didn't actually name it until I got to the end though, and then it just presented itself. But rivers move, they connect places that seem far apart, and they keep going even when the water gets rough. That felt like family to me. That felt like history. And it felt like the kind of story I wanted to tell.

S.M.: Which character was the most fun for you to write?

T.B.: Bluford Thorn. No contest.

He’s loosely based on my own grandfather, so there’s a personal current running under everything he does. But what made him fun is that he’s got that mix I love in a character—he’s grounded, he’s complicated, and he’s trying to do right even when the world makes that hard. And I’ll say this too: writing him felt like getting to sit at the table with somebody I miss, letting him talk, letting him be fully human.

I should add: in my personal version, my granddaddy did return home after the war. But he told me on more than one occasion that he didn't think he would make it back. So it could have ended differently.

S.M.: Besides the family tree, do you see any other connections between the four points of view you cover?

T.B.: The family tree is the obvious one, but there are these deeper connections that show up once you’re inside the book.

For one thing, all four voices are connected by longing—the ache to belong, to be seen, to make sense of what happened. They’re also connected by the way memory works: what people hold onto, what they bury, what they can’t stop replaying. And then there’s the big one—each character, in their own way, is asking: Do I repeat what I inherited, or do I turn it into something else, something new? That question ties the whole book together more than any chart or family line ever could. And the answer to that question is complicated. 

S.M.: What did you want to get across about music in Cassandra’s story?

T.B.: Music is not just “music” in Cassandra’s story—it’s how she makes it.

I wanted music to feel like the one place where she can tell the truth without having to explain herself. Sometimes you can’t say the thing out loud, but you can play it. You can sing it. You can let the melody carry what your mouth won’t. And I also wanted to show the discipline of it—the way music asks you to show up and work, even when your feelings are all over the place. For Cassandra, music becomes both comfort and calling. It’s joy, but it’s also a kind of backbone.

S.M.: While the book has several locations, New Orleans feels like the heart of the tale. What do you like about that setting as a writer?

T.B.: New Orleans is a place where beauty and sorrow sit in the same room together and nobody pretends otherwise.

As a writer, I love that. The city gives you permission to tell the truth. There’s history everywhere—on the walls, in the streets, in the sound. And of course, there’s the music. New Orleans isn’t a backdrop; it’s a character. It has a pulse. It has its own language. When I’m writing there, and I did write part of the novel there, I feel like the setting is doing some of the storytelling for me.

S.M.: To me the two main themes are about family and art. Do you see a connection with the two?

Yes, completely. To me, they’re tied at the hip.

T.B.: Family is the first place we learn our “story”—what love looks like, what gets said, what doesn’t, what we’re allowed to feel, what we’re supposed to hide. And then art becomes the place where we finally get to tell the truth about all of it. Sometimes art is how we survive our family. Sometimes it’s how we honor them. Sometimes it’s how we forgive. And sometimes it’s how we stop a pattern from rolling downhill into the next generation.

Family and art are connected, because art is often what we make out of what family gave us. Life itself is what we make out of what family gave us. So yeah, that means art is life. And the world is the canvas.