Between Two Covers: Teresa Carmody Reviews Orvain

May 19th, 2026

The landscapes in Orvain are beautiful, wounded, and impossible to separate from the people who live within them.

On the latest installment of Between Two Covers on KVNO Arts Today, Terese Carmody, associate professor in the UNO Writers’ Workshop and author of A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, reviews the new story collection by Omaha writer Danilo John Thomas.

Published in 2026 by Vallese Books, the collection is set in and around Thomas’s hometown of Butte, Montana, a city shaped by generations of copper mining and environmental destruction.

“Butte was once called the richest hill on earth,” Carmody explains in her review. “Its copper mines generated enormous wealth for industrialists and mining corporations, while miners and local communities inherited dangerous labor conditions, poisoned landscapes, and generational grief.”

That devastation remains visible today in the Berkeley Pit, a former open-pit copper mine now filled with highly acidic toxic water. Carmody says Thomas captures the contradictions of the region with striking emotional and visual precision.

In one of the collection’s opening moments, a narrator looks out across the Berkeley Pit at sunrise, describing the poisoned landscape as strangely beautiful before the shoreline becomes filled with dead birds destroyed by the toxic water.

“That collision between the gorgeous and the grotesque pulses throughout Orvain,” Carmody says. “This wounded land is still listened to and loved.”

The stories explore how environmental violence reshapes communities and bodies alike. Characters fish, hunt, drink, fight, and grieve while living within landscapes permanently altered by mining corporations and extraction industries.

Carmody compares Thomas’s work to writers like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Maclean, though she notes Thomas challenges traditional ideas of masculinity often found in classic American wilderness fiction.

“Where Hemingway’s prose often idealizes masculine containment and control,” Carmody writes, “Thomas exposes the toxicity of this masculine ideal as another poisoned inheritance.”

What stands out most for Carmody is Thomas’s language. She describes the prose as dense, strange, and deeply tied to the physical landscape of Butte itself.

“Thomas writes with stark physical detail,” she says, “but constantly reminds us that realism itself is a constructed surface shaped by industry, memory, and representation.”

Rather than offering simple realism, Orvain asks readers to confront the emotional and environmental costs of extraction capitalism and inherited violence.

“This is not a collection to rush through,” Carmody says. “These stories demand slow reading, rereading, revealing new emotional and linguistic textures.”

She ultimately calls the collection “an extraordinary work of ecological fiction” that is “fierce, haunting, and deeply layered.”

Danilo John Thomas currently lives in Omaha, where he serves as co-publisher of Octopus Books, managing prose editor of Baobab Press, and assistant managing editor of the Kenyan Review.