The Wondrous Springs of Balmorhea
By Gretchen McCullough
Grappling with his own mortality, small town lawyer Sam McCabe returns to one pivotal summer in West Texas, forty years ago. In 1935, Sam was the company clerk at Balmorhea, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, where they dammed artesian springs to build one of the largest freshwater pools in the nation. But the camp full of hungry farm boys was rife with intrigue. And the sultry camp nurse has a deadly secret…
Blurbs:
“A CCC camp in the mid-1930s. A makeshift community of men of varied backgrounds brought together by need and the U.S. government. And a big, rollicking story that only Gretchen McCullough could tell:of naïveté and skullduggery, longing and lust, deep in west Texas, deep in the Depression. In this wonderfully researched yet deeply imagined novel, Sam McCabereflects on his time as a young man working at Balmorhea and learning about the ways of the world.”
Jennifer Horne, former Poet Laureate of Alabama, winner of the 2025 Hall-Waters Prize for Excellence in Southern Writing, author of four books of poems, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower: Stories, and Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author.
“Gretchen McCullough, in her heart-breaking and deeply-empathetic novel, The Wondrous Springs of Balmorhea, utilizes the Civilian Conservation Corps; 1936 construction of the Balmorhea, Texas pool to reveal a diverse, fascinating cast of characters. The exotic project brings together people with traumatic and provincial pasts, and their isolation leads to loneliness, the toll of keeping secrets, and complications from misogyny, racism, illicit activity, and the demands of leadership…This book is primarily a deep investigation of people, the frailty of their bodies and minds, and the vicissitudes of responsibility. They all pay a price to bring to life something stunning, beautiful, and lasting.”
Tim Parrish, Author of The Jumper, Red Stick Men: Stories, and Fear What Follows: The Violent Education of a Christian Racist.
“Gretchen McCullough has written a wild ride through Cairo and beyond, a rollicking adventure tale peopled with grifters, reprobates, scalawags, and scoundrels—plus a few femmes fatale tossed in to keep things teetering on chaos. I couldn’t put it down!”
–Tom Lutz, Portraits: Moments of Intimacy on the Road, Founder of The Los Angeles Review of Books
about Gretchen
Gretchen McCullough was raised in Harlingen Texas. After graduating from Brown University in 1984, she taught in Egypt, Turkey and Japan. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and was awarded a teaching Fulbright to Syria from 1997-1999.
Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Archipelago, National Public Radio, Story South, Guernica, The Common, The Millions, and the LA Review of Books. Translations in English and Arabic have been published in: Nizwa, Banipal, Brooklyn Rail in Translation, World Literature Today and Washington Square Review with Mohamed Metwalli. Her bi-lingual book of short stories in English and Arabic, Three Stories from Cairo, translated with Mohamed Metwalli was published in July 2011 by AFAQ Publishing House, Cairo. A collection of short stories about expatriate life in Cairo, Shahrazad’s Tooth, was also published by AFAQ in 2013.
Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo.
A Song by the Aegean Sea: A Book of Poetry Poetry of Mohamed Metwalli
Translated by
Gretchen McCullough & Mohamed Metwalli. New York. Egret Chapbooks
shahrazad's gift: short fiction
By Gretchen McCullough
Gretchen McCullough’s latest book captures the magic and absurdity of the city and its people with a humour few local writers have managed to achieve.
—Egypt Today
Novel look at Egypt: history, mystery and just plain quirky for your bookshelf.
—Kate Durham, Egypt Today
McCullough displays all the idiosyncrasies of Cairo in a slightly comic, nondramatic tone. Cairo is endless amounts of fervor, hoopla, commotion, confusion and turmoil. For all its corruption, pollution, noise, havoc, chaos and double standards, Cairo is still endearing for both foreigners and Egyptians and they long for it when they leave. This is what McCullough captures best.
—Sherine Elbanhawy, Scoop Empire
Gretchen McCullough is an American academic who has lived and worked in Cairo for several years. The Cairo she writes about is full of bizarre, anarchic, extraordinary characters—a scissor-throwing Swedish belly-dancer, a man known as Ugly Duck with a colorful and very public love-life, a pair of fugitives who sneak back into the country after Tahrir. She writes cracking dialogue and deft dead-pan internal monologue. Read this book. It is very funny stuff.
—Annemarie Neary, The Orphans
Also by Gretchen
The Wonderous Springs of Balmorhea
Confessions of a Knight Errant
a song by the aegean sea
THREE STORIES FROM CAIRO
Shahrazad's Gift
Praise for Gretchen 's Books
Few literary works have dealt with the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 as well as this novel did, whether in Arabic or English, by the American author, Gretchen McCullough. McCullough survived the events of the uprising at Tahrir Square—the novel focuses on a group of expatriates who stayed in the country. It would appeal to the lovers of detective novels as much it would appeal to wacky fantasy lovers and uses literary humor, which is emphasized in an alleged message by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. The reader might share the author’s sarcasm about overwhelming globalization and the American lifestyle, whose advocates want to impose it on the rest of the world. Wait! It’s not just that. The reader might get free lessons in the art of cooking.
—Sonallah Ibrahim, Egyptian novelist
GRETCHEN'S PODCASTS
