Colorful characters once populated the Upper Mississippi River Valley swamps and floodplain forests. These are the river rats, hill folk, and swamp dogs whose stories Kenny Salwey tells so well. Now long gone, these legendary denizens of the river bottoms come alive in Kenny’s signature brand of storytelling, rife with insight and laughter, woodslore and a time-tested philosophy of the natural world. With a foreword by regional historian Gary Schlosstein, this deep delving into the old-time community of the Mississippi River presents a rich picture of a life as fascinating as it is fast-disappearing in our fast-paced, high-tech world.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

Kenny Salwey is a modern-day American hermit who has lived most of his life in the Mississippi river bottoms, coming to know the river ecosystem with an intimacy unavailable to most. Now, Kenny shares his love of, and knowledge about, the mighty river. The Last River Rat is a seasonal look at Kenny's unique life.

A post-apocalyptic fantasy by the co-author of Sorcery and Cecilia

The novel is set in 1940s rural Missouri, just as the shadow of World War 2 looms in the background. The story is from the point of view of 12 year old Kenny, who with his older brother and friends roam the countryside and hang out together in the bottoms of the Chariton River. Trouble comes with the arrival of a new boy, Henry Nichols, who is "a thin stick of a person, looking like a half-starved hound...and not like us." Can he join the River Rats? Kenny's big brother, Jim, is a bully and tries everything he can to humiliate and hurt the new boy who doesn't even go to school he so poor. Kenny has to risk losing the friendship of his own brother by doing what, deep down, he knows is right. The book tackles head-on the choices he faces.

Traveling illegally at night on the Colorado River with a mysterious cargo, two boys are shipwrecked and must depend for survival on their own ingenuity and a wild boy they find living along the river.