Back Creek is the first novel written by Leslie Goetsch, a graduate of Duke and Johns Hopkins universities, and English department chair at an independent girls’ school in Baltimore (Roland Park Country Day). Although she currently lives in Baltimore with her husband and two children (and has for the past 25 years), she’s a native of Virginia, having grown up in an area much like Back Creek, one of hundreds of deep tributaries that cut through the state. Awarded a Maryland State Arts Council grant to develop Back Creek, she’s now at work on her second book—what she calls a “coming-of-middle-age novel.”
It’s the summer of 1975. Eighteen-year-old Grace Barnett knows she should be preparing to leave for college in September. But a strange Memorial Day boating accident on the creek near her Virginia home--she’s the only witness to the apparent suicide--kicks off a series of events that will define her family’s future as well as her emerging view of life.