Everward Storyworks is pleased to announce that work is officially underway on John DeRossett’s November Rain: The River Came at Night, an ambitious book project exploring one of the most devastating natural disasters in West Virginia history — the Flood of 1985.
For DeRossett, however, this isn’t simply history.
He was there.
In November 1985, DeRossett was serving in the United States Navy and returned home to Rowlesburg, West Virginia, for what was supposed to be an ordinary weekend visit. He left Sunday evening to return to his duty station in Virginia. Within days, the community he had just left behind would be forever changed.
On November 4 and 5, relentless rainfall sent rivers throughout West Virginia out of their banks. Along the Cheat River, communities including Parsons, Albright and Rowlesburg faced catastrophic flooding.
November Rain will tell that story from a deeply personal perspective.
But DeRossett’s memories are only one part of the project.
Over the past several months, he has begun gathering photographs, historical materials and firsthand recollections from people who experienced the disaster. Those voices will help tell the larger story — not simply of rising water and destruction, but of families evacuating their homes, neighbors helping neighbors, possessions disappearing downstream and communities confronting what remained after the river finally receded.
Some of those memories have never been widely shared.
Preserving them has become one of the central purposes of November Rain.
The book will blend DeRossett’s own recollections with extensive research and reconstructed accounts based upon the experiences of survivors. Names and certain identifying details may be changed where appropriate, but the history behind the story remains very real.
And so does the place at its center.
Rowlesburg is more than the setting of November Rain. It is the West Virginia community where DeRossett grew up, went to school and first began discovering that he might someday become a writer.
More than four decades later, he is returning to that community through the written word.
The project is expected to continue through 2026 and into 2027 as additional research, interviews, photographs and personal accounts are collected and incorporated into the manuscript.
There is no desire to rush it.
Some stories deserve the time necessary to tell them properly.
For Everward Storyworks, November Rain: The River Came at Night represents exactly the kind of project at the heart of its mission: preserving stories that matter before the people who remember them — and the memories themselves — disappear.
The river came at night.
More than forty years later, its stories remain.
And now, they are being written down.