27/09/2026
The latest episode of The Worldshapers podcast features John C. Hampsey, talking about his recent "strange and tantalizing" novel SODA LAKE, published by Rare Bird.
Interesting conversation--John is professor of Romantic and Classical Literature at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he has won the University Distinguished Teaching Award. Previously, he taught at Boston University and MIT.
Soda Lake opens with an unnamed narrator seeing a man disappear into a lake of white salt. This sets the narrator on a quest of discovery, shaped by a series of stories with interconnected characters who all grapple with threats to their identity. The narrator’s suspenseful journey mixes personal and collective human history, and his definition of self mysteriously fades as he gets closer to the elusive and timeless “McCuade,” who may or may not be real.
Shifting from the coastal valley of central California to Chicago, Ireland, Greece, and France, each chapter in the novel presents a protagonist in the midst of a psychological struggle wherein the idea of McCuade becomes stronger than the reality of the characters themselves. With a twenty-first-century nod to works as diverse as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Soda Lake blends elements of the archetypal detective quest with stories of the uncanny in order to freshly render the individual human psyche in its struggle to stand up to a progressively transmogrifying world.
https://theworldshapers.com/2026/09/27/episode-226-john-c-hampsey-soda-lake/
https://youtu.be/ayaHvuO68jg?si=soLJj8cBKlpilvWs
A chat with John C. Hampsey about his recent "strange and tantalizi...
