Artist Spotlight: Jeanne Leiby's Downriver
A collection of short stories about life just south of Detroit.
by Jennifer Guerra
(2008-03-15) Even if you haven't had a chance to visit Detroit personally...you can still get a taste for what life there is like. There have been countless books and films set in Detroit: Detroit Rock City, 8 Mile, Middlesex, and any number of Elmore Leonard books, to name a few.
But what about the cities just south of Detroit? Cities like Riverview and Taylor and Gross Ile.
Author Jeanne Leiby set out to give those cities their literary due with a collection of stories called Downriver.
Now, when you drive through Downriver, the first things that jump out are all the steel mills and chemical plants. Then the small, brick homes with Ford and Chevy cars and trucks in the driveway. You may even pass Jeanne Leiby's downriver childhood home in Riverview.
"In Riverview," Leiby says, "we had the landfill that became Mt. Trashmore. I think it had a better name, but we called it Mt. Trashmore. Behind my elementary school there was the Nike Site, an old deserted missile sight, that I remember people telling stories about. The sort of myths of this place and hidden caverns and all these nefarious things that happened in the Nike Site. So those are the things that left really lasting impressions."
She carried those impressions with her to Ann Arbor, where she enrolled in a creative writing class at University of Michigan. At first, she tried writing about stuff she didn't really know - like clowns and fantasy landscapes.
"Because," she explains, "I think I believed there were no stories to tell about the place I was from. Because it's downriver. It's Riverview. And then I read the poetry of Philip Levine who is a Detroit poet. Reading his work showed me that there is poetry here and there is beauty here. That Downriver itself is a unique place, a beautiful place, with people whose stories needed to be told."
Here's an excerpt from her short story collection, Downriver:
Once I thought it was possible to leave here. Possible to run away and say to anyone who asked, I'm from someplace else. But the truth is: there's something we downriver won't admit. No amount of gentrification can hide who we are. Our hearts and blood are industrial too, and in the end, we have to believe its beautiful here.
"I think we do have to believe it's beautiful," says Leiby. "And I think in many ways it is beautiful. Not the kind of classic beauty of pastoral Vermont or rolling green sloping hills or maybe the quaint beauty you find in small towns in upstate Michigan. We have made this landscape. And it is beautiful, it is magical. If you choose to look at it that way."
The stories in Leiby's Downriver collection are lined with potholes – both figurative and literal. The infrastructure is crumbling. The characters are flawed. They get laid off, they curse, they skip church, they have affairs. A young girl sticks her hand in the Detroit River and get stuck with a hypodermic needle. But they also laugh and sit down to family dinners and the kids play games like spud and foursquare. And the characters reach for their dream of a good job, eight-hour shifts with paid overtime and benefits. And, for Leiby, that's good enough.
"Part of the beauty of the people and the place is that it survives," says Leiby. "Even when so much seems stacked against it. When the automotive industry isn't doing well, when in the '70s the gas crisis...even in light of that, they go on. They don't give in, they don't buckle under."
Jeanne Leiby says she didn't discover the resilience of Downriver and the beauty of her hometown until she went away. She now lives in New Orleans. But she comes back a lot, mostly to visit her folks who still live Downriver.
