Threatened Species

Jeff Vande Zande


Two weeks—that’s all the time Ed Winters has with his son Danny before Ed’s ex-wife and her new husband move with the boy to Paris. Those days, filled with fly fishing, camping, and an unplanned cross-country road trip, grow ever more desperate as Ed struggles to face the reality of losing his son, and Danny of losing his home. Set amid the streams and backroads of Michigan and Montana, Threatened Species is a harsh but beautiful ode to fathers and sons. The novella is collected here with five other Michigan stories by Jeff Vande Zande.


Jeff Vande Zande knows the midwestern mind, and depicts it masterfully in all its despair, stubbornness, and wisdom. The desperation and longing of his characters is inextricably bound to the beauty of the landscape around them. His honest prose will break your heart and even give you a little faith.

— Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage and Q Road


Jeff Vande Zande's lean and heartbreaking stories will stay with you long after you've read them. They are about people struggling to do the right thing against all odds, while learning the hard way "how to keep going, even when things fall apart." These dispatches from the front lines testify to the courage required just to live an ordinary life.

— Jerry Dennis, author of The Living Great Lakes and A Place on the Water


Jeff Vande Zande writes like a cartographer of Michigan's roads, its rivers, its small towns. He is the most trusted of tour guides who speaks out with the authenticity of a man whose world is tattooed on the insides of his eyelids, and he makes his readers see, and feel, all that he knows about fathers and sons and the ties and secrets that they keep.

—Peter Markus, author of Bob, or Man on Boat


ISBN 978-098003757-9       $14 US       Includes free shipping!

Jeff Vande Zande lives in Midland, MI and teaches writing at Delta College. He has two novels: Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press) and Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press). He can sometimes be found fly fishing the north or south branches of the Aus Sable River in Michigan.
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