Marin author and writing instructor Nina Schuyler focuses on her passion for environmental conservation in her latest novel, a modern fable that imagines a 3-million-year-old river going to court to seek protection from both polluters and uncaring townspeople.
Writing “Open the Floodgates” (Reverberations Books, 225 pages, Sept. 15, 2026), Schuyler was inspired by a New Zealand law enacted in 2017, after decades of legal and political advocacy, that granted personhood to the Whanganui River.
“The river becomes a person—it’s cloaked with personhood and now has rights and responsibilities,” says Schuyler, who is making numerous appearances across the Bay Area this month to launch the title.
Schuyler, who has a Juris Doctor from the University of California College of the Law, adds, “It’s a huge legal reframing and a psychological reframing and inter-relational reframing.” It’s unlike Western law, where, she says, nature is considered property, and owners can do what they want with it.
After completing 2024’s acclaimed short story collection “In This Ravishing World,” a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, Schuyler wanted to concentrate on environmental concerns, but also to create “something playful.”
“So much of climate literature is despairing, apocalyptic, dystopic, nihilistic… And with ‘In This Ravishing World,’ I met so many people that said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to read climate literature—it’s too sad,’” Schuyler says.
Schuyler, who also has a Master of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco State University and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, wasn’t aware of any books that combine magical realism and environmental fiction, so she decided to try her hand at it.
She says she wanted to write something that might draw a larger crowd to climate fiction than those who already are convinced that the climate crisis is here.
So, in “Open the Floodgates,” the river — filled with reasons why it needs defending, and enough toxins and dead fish to prove it — flows into court, with support from key townspeople ages 9 to 75.
Setting the story in California made perfect sense to Schuyler, who has been in the state long enough to witness five- and seven-year droughts, and is watching snowpack today.
At the same time, she says the book could be set “anywhere where they’re siphoning off water from rivers or dumping waste.”
A question the novel poses is whether California could be the next place to grant personhood to rivers. Schuyler says yes.
“We are a very active and progressive state, and usually on the cutting edge of things,” Schuyler says, noting, “The Yurok Tribe granted personhood to the Klamath River within their own legal framework.”
Four dams have come down along the Klamath River — “and now the salmon are able to move again. And the riparian life along the river is repairing itself,” she says, pointing out, “I think the next iteration will be granting personhood so that rivers are at the table and have a voice.”
Schuyler, who grew up in Washington state and regularly was on or in Gravelly Lake, feels like she’s always been near water. Now living near Stinson Beach, she says, “I’m constantly out in the water, boogie boarding with the dogs. I feel a little claustrophobic when I ‘m not near water.”
A teacher of creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and for the retail store Book Passage, Schuyler has authored seven books, including “Stunning Sentences: The Creative Writing Journal with 80 New Prompts from Beloved Authors to Improve Your Style,” which was released in January.
While working on short stories now, she admits a new novel is stirring: “I like to do something different each time, so this one might be a little more surreal, but I intend to stay in the human and ‘more than human’ realm, and the climate crisis.
“After spending three years imagining myself as a river, I feel vaster than I’ve ever felt and moved by everything. Now, everything feels alive to me, the flowers, the trees, the bugs. If you’ve read anything about plants, they’re talking to each other and they’re helping each other,” Schuyler continues: “It’s like everything that you took as static or inanimate is now to me alive, and I feel connected to everything.”
Nina Schuyler speaks about “Open the Floodgates” on Sept. 14 at Green Apple Books on the Park, San Francisco; Sept. 15 at Book Passage, Corte Madera; Sept. 16 at Napa Bookmine; Sept. 17 at Bookshop West Portal, San Francisco; Sept. 22 at Towne Center Books, Pleasanton; Sept. 28 at the Mill Valley Library and Sept. 29 at Books Inc., Palo Alto. Visit ninaschuyler.com.