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Starting a novel is always difficult for me. I usually begin by going back to ancient folktales and myths—the stories that have withstood the test of time because people need them to be told and retold. In 2018 I discovered a Mexican folktale called “The Weeping Woman.” It’s about a ghost who wanders near bodies of water, mourning the loss of her children, whom she has slain. The River Is Waiting goes far afield from that story but it, too, is about a parent who accidentally kills his child and goes to the river to seek his truths.

As to real-life experiences, the writer Tom Drury said it best when he answered this perennial question: How much of you is there in your characters? Think of it this way, Drury said. A fiction writer takes a baseball bat to a stained-glass portrait of himself. Then he sits before the broken pieces and creates a whole different portrait. There are shardss of me in Corby Ledbetter, but he and I are different people.