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Unexpected Psychologies
Drinking from the Stream follows two young men on the run for different reasons who cross paths and set out together exploring East Africa and their own morals in a world where dictatorship and mass murders are the norm. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I left the US to travel one week after graduating college. When I came back five years later, my mother kept asking me, “What did you really do in Africa?” How to explain what I was thinking, whom I had met, where I had gone, what I had seen and felt and heard, smelled and tasted, what I had learned, what scared me, what made me laugh, and what inspired me? I decided to write a novel, a kind of anthem for the generation that came out of the wreckage of the ’sixties and whom I met on the road. I thought the story I wanted to tell would have more weight if the character who kills his antisemitic persecutor was not actually Jewish, thus forcing him into unexpected psychologies. Having two narrators allowed me to broaden the scope and to develop the characters in many more settings and situations than would otherwise be possible, and through their eyes also to show more of Africa and of the world.
You took your time developing the characters and the story, which had a great emotional impact. How did you manage the pacing of the story while keeping readers engaged?
There are novelist tricks that I had to learn. A novel consists of scenes. Something must happen, or else there’s no reason for the scene to be there. Scenes should ”start late and end early,” not waste time, and leave the reader wanting to know what comes next. I alluded to massacres at the start of the book, which I hoped would give readers a feel for what came next. There is a rhythm to travel which speeds up and slows down, and the action of the book also speeds up and slows down.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
A partial list: friendship, long-distance travel on bad roads with little money, politics and history, courage, the world of the early 1970s, East Africa and Ethiopia, judgment, colonialism, revolution, mass murder, dictatorship, insurrection, racism, loyalty, small acts of bravery.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
Next book: A TRIP BY CANOE (short stories) to be published by Koehler Books July 2026.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Jake Ries, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, turns fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal White supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. On the run, he meets Karl Appel, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist struggling with his own personal demons. Together they throw caution to the wind and plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life.
Drinking from the Stream
Drinking from the Stream follows two young men on the run from themselves. Jake, a Nebraska kid turned Louisiana roughneck, flees the guilt of a killing on an oil rig. Karl, a disillusioned American student at Oxford, escapes the wreckage of the sixties and a painful relationship. Their paths cross, and they drift through Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania in the early seventies, bumping into coups, massacres and love affairs as they go. The book stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes region of Africa and on to Chile, and it ties private coming-of-age stories to state violence and postcolonial chaos.
I felt like the writing landed with real weight. The prose has muscle and rhythm, and it keeps a steady pace through long stretches of travel and talk. Scenes on the road, in trucks, on ferries, and in cheap guesthouses felt vivid to me. Dialogues carry a lot of the load. Characters argue about politics, race, faith, and guilt, and the conversations feel relaxed on the surface but tense underneath. I could sense the author’s years in Africa in the way a village lane or a border crossing appears in a few sharp strokes. The flip side is density. Historical detail piles up. I stayed invested in Jake and Karl, and in Beatrice, Bridget and the others, because the book lets them be flawed, funny and sometimes selfish, not just mouthpieces for a lesson.
The novel looks at racism and antisemitism inside Jake’s own story, then places him in countries where mass killing happens out in the open and on a terrifying scale. It plays with the dream of revolution and tears it apart. Young Westerners arrive full of ideals, then watch soldiers and militias burn those ideals along with villages. The book keeps asking who gets to walk away and who does not. Jake carries private guilt from the rig into places where guilt comes in rivers. Karl drags his Vietnam-era anger into a world where America is almost irrelevant. I felt anger, shame, and sadness while I read, and also a stubborn hope, because the story keeps circling back to friendship, loyalty, and small acts of courage. The novel does not pretend to solve anything. It simply puts you close to the fire and forces you to look.
I would recommend Drinking from the Stream to readers who enjoy historical fiction with grit, to people curious about East Africa in the early seventies, and to anyone who likes character-driven travel stories with real moral stakes. The book asks for patience and a strong stomach. It pays that back with a rich sense of place, big emotions, and a set of memorable characters.
Pages: 377 | ASIN : B0DXLQTN5M
LITERARY TITAN 