Down in the River synopsis: After the death of his sixteen-year-old twin sister, Lyle Rettew moves from the mountains of Idaho to Eugene, Oregon. His religious, well-intentioned older brother has forbidden any mention of her name. but Lyle, fighting to keep his memory of her alive, has quit taking the lithium that numbs his mind and openly rebels against his mother and brother for the first time. Taking his mourning out of the house, he embarks upon a fraught pilgrimage that is at once heartbreaking and macabre. Dark though it may be, Lyle’s fevered journey along the margins of youth culture is ultimately driven by fierce love and a deep, instinctive need to find a liturgy for loss and grief.
Ryan Blacketter is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a recipient of a literary grant from Oregon Regional Arts and a prison teaching grant from Idaho Humanities Council. He attended Sewanee as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. His stories are published in Antioch Review, Image, Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
