05/06/2026
The Achill Heinrich Böll Association is pleased to invite you to a reading from Soda Lake by John C Hampsey. 7.30, Saturday June 20th at St Thomas’ Hall Dugort F28 H320. Admission free.
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.
“In his new novel--Soda Lake, from its Hitchcockian opening scene to its hallucinatory conclusion, John Hampsey—author of Paranoia and Contentment and Kaufman’s Hill—continues to do what he does best: narrating through a series of “evolving epiphanies,” those existential moments that unmask our false selves only to reveal a new way of being that just keeps unfolding into radically new manifestations-- taking the narrative, the protagonist, the reader, and yes, even the author, into startlingly unexpected worlds of shifting perceptions, and brilliant emanations.”
-Robert Inchausti, author of Subversive Orthodoxy: Thomas Merton’s American Prophecy and other works.
John Hampsey was artist in residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage in September 2018, when he worked on the final chapters of Soda Lake.
John C. Hampsey is a 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. He received his BA from Holy Cross College and his PhD from Boston College.
Hampsey’s book, Paranoia and Contentment: A Personal Essay on Western Thought (hardback 2004, University of Virginia Press) won enthusiastic endorsements from fellow writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Tim O’Brien. O’Brien judged Paranoia and Contentment to be “sharply reasoned and intellectually bold . . . This beautifully written book turns upside down our standard thinking about creativity, imagination, and what it is to be wholly human.” Paranoia and Contentment was the first book to view paranoia in a positive light, and to use the concept to re-examine Western thought.
Hampsey's memoir Kaufman's Hill (hardback 2015, Bancroft Press) is the "best book written on American boyhood in decades," according to the renowned historian Howard Zinn. Kaufman's Hill focuses on the twilight years between 1961and 1968, between the fading culture of the 1950s and the full-on cultural revolution of the late 1960s. In fact, each chapter of Kaufman's Hill has a key scene at twilight. The success of Kaufman's Hill led to a second printing, a national tour of readings, and the book's development into a screenplay for possible film development.
His novel, Soda Lake, released in hardback in October 2025, was followed by an international tour of readings.
During his career, Hampsey has had more than thirty stories and essays published in such places as The Gettysburg Review (four times), The Midwest Quarterly, Antioch Review, The Alaska Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Arizona Quarterly, European Romantic Review, Witness, Colby Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and McNeese Review, among many others.
Admission free. St Thomas’ Hall Dugort F28 H320.
