A boy who fantasizes about Playboy models while his mother recuperates from a serious heart ailment, a grandmother who takes target practice with a nickel-plated .38 caliber revolver in her crowded apartment building in a Detroit suburb, an elderly man who plunges naked into a northern Michigan lake during the late fall while recalling his life, and a police officer who finds a youth murdered under a highway overpass in the wee hours of the morning just outside of the Detroit city limits-these are a few of the stories that comprise Gary James Erwin’s collection of stories, Trail Crossing Sixteen Counties.

Trail Crossing Sixteen Counties is a moving investigation of love and loss and what it means to be a family. The stories in this collection are rich with beautiful moments, beautiful writing, and Erwin has a real gift at getting to the humanness of a thing. A remarkable debut. - Daniel Abbott, Author of The Concrete

The humanity of Gary Erwin’s stories is striking. Each story begins abruptly, enters the private world of his characters and reveals their common struggle for dignity. Erwin is also to be commended for the simplicity of his language and the no-nonsense development of each story. - Richard Dokey, Author of The Loneliness Cafe

Gary James Erwin’s stories, essays, literary criticism, communications research and science journalism have appeared in many literary journals, reviews and publications, including Red Cedar Review, The Sun, Pebble Lake Review, The MacGuffin, Driftwood Review, Michigan Avenue, Technology Century, and Sante Fe Literary Review among others. His fiction has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and has been anthologized in The PrePress Awards Volume II: Michigan Voices.