“I never met this great-grandfather and he disappeared from our family mythology, hidden behind secrets and fear and very obvious anger from my grandmother. And while I wasn’t told further tales of that one great-grandfather, I was told plenty of tales of the Detroit River. I was told stories of cars sunken at the bottom of the water, graveyards of steel and suede, true to the automotive cities the river played keepaway with. Sometimes I was told of riches that could be dredged up from the opaque water, but rarely. Rather than entice me with stories of treasures, I was warned. Not of the missing statue per se (like my great-grandfather, she was a tale no longer told) but of the water itself. My grandmother and mother saw in me the need for stories, saw the search in my hungry eyes for something that would make me special, and told me stories of sunken Model Ts like pirate ships.”

“The Woman Who Drowned in the Detroit River” is about a fictional urban legend ode to my hometown and the many weird things I believed about the Detroit River growing up.

Amazon US paperback. Amazon CAD paperback.