Downriver
Jeanne Leiby
Winner of the 2006 Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman. Contest judge Quinn Dalton wrote: 'These eleven stories are fueled by a robust mix of voices children, young women, mothers, fathers all of whom are driven to survive past losses or the overwhelming challenges of their present circumstances. Take for example Nike Site, told from the perspective of ten-year-old Petie, which starkly depicts the landscape of children, where a nuclear plant defines the edge of their world. The story buzzes with the tension between what children are exposed to and what they are told; what they know and what the adults try futilely to hide from them. Within this collection, I had my favorites, but every story delivered on its promise to let us into a world of fully realized, breathing human beings whose lives might be different from ours in the details, but whose hopes and fears we recognize, and whose fates matter to us as much as our own. Another pleasure of this book was the precision of the language, the tight and natural dialogue, simple on the surface yet rich with subtext. I didn't want to stop reading, and when I had to, I went back as soon as I could as we do with any place we love to visit.'
Jeanne Leiby grew up downriver Detroit. She graduated from the University of Michigan, earned her MA from the Bread Loaf School of English/Middlebury College, and her MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories, many of them collected here, have appeared in Fiction, New Orleans Review, The Greensboro Review, and Indiana Review, among others. For ten years, she has lived in Orlando, Florida, teaching creative writing at the University of Central Florida and editing The Florida Review. In 2008, she will move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University and editor of The Southern Review.