Jolene McIlwain’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in numerous online and print literary journals including West Branch, Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Smokelong Quarterly, New Orleans Review, LITRO, and more. Her work was included in 2019’s Best Small Fictions Anthology and named finalist for 2018’s Best of the Net, Glimmer Train’s and River Styx’s contests, and semifinalist in Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize and two American Short Fictions contests. She’s received a Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council grant, the Georgia Court Chautauqua faculty scholarship, and Tinker Mountain’s merit scholarship. She’s taught literary theory/analysis at Duquesne and Chatham Universities, and she worked as a radiologic technologist before attending college (BS English, minor in sculpture, MA Literature). She was born, raised, and currently lives in a small town in the Appalachian plateau of Western Pennsylvania. Her debut, SIDLE CREEK, an NPR and Library Journal Best Book of the Year, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and Shelf Awareness calls it a “riveting debut collection” and “a rare gem, a compelling blend of nature and humanity perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Daisy Johnson’s Fen.”
An NPR Book of the Year
&
A Library Journal
Best Short Story Collection of the Year
Set in the timbered and mine-bruised landscape of western Pennsylvania’s Appalachian hills, a tender exploration of small-town life told by a brilliant new voice in fiction . . .
With stories that take place in diners and dive bars, town halls and bait shops, Jolene McIlwain skillfully and lyrically interrogates the myths and stereotypes of the small, close-knit, mining, mill, and farming towns where she grew up.
While the finely etched stories explore themes of class, work, health, and trauma, the wild beauty of the natural world weaves its way in as the vulnerable source of the town’s livelihood.
With an alchemic blend of taut prose, gorgeous imagery, and deep sensitivity for all of the living beings within its pages, Sidle Creek will sit snugly on bookshelves alongside Annie Proulx, Joy Williams, Louise Erdrich, and the other great storytellers concerned with people in troubled landscapes just trying to get by.
Gale Force
The rain comes down in sheets, the wind, a gale, as I suppose is just right, for I’m still grieving, shocked, and after all I, we all, need something green to lean into after a good rain in this empty spot where you once held ground.
I write to you in many ways, each day, asking questions. You, a person who knew where solutions lived. But there is no solving your death, no formula, no recognizable theory answering why you’re gone from here, from me, from all of us you touched.
Once you told us you were sad that you’d left behind Lea, Cal, Walt, the Blue Dog, and that great friend Roni, a character you’d built, a person we needed in our lives—someone who gave us a bed to sleep on, a meal to eat, meaningful conversation. She lived on your page, but you were our Roni. So, I ask Roni—who’s now left behind in those paragraphs, annotated by each of us—to help us understand: What does this mean?
I can’t hear her voice, but I hear what you told your Ferncliff characters—on a smoke break, waiting for your return, waiting for you to finish writing them: “I’m here. I have a few things to catch up on, but you’re on my mind. I haven’t forgotten you.”
In your apartment, among amulets, artifacts, books, photos, cups and bowls you’ve left behind, we’ve discovered the meticulous files you’ve kept us in, the ways you’ve written us into your notes. Records of how you thought of us, told us about that book, that show, that place we should research, walk, run, travel to someday, that person who might steer us in the right direction.
It’s quiet now. The rain has lessened to a drizzle. Creek’s high. The water table full again. Diversion ditches guide the overflow. The ground swells, rich to fruit and flower everything waiting in it. I say to my garden, I want you back more than I need flowers and fruit. I say to my writing friends, I want you back more than your characters do. I say to you, I want to write you into a poem so you’re seen in a way we couldn’t see you while you traveled this earth, swimming, learning, feeling. I want your smile again, that way your earrings sparkled when you laughed.
Lightning flashes over the trees. And if I look closely enough, you’re here.
It’s a tough thing, losing a friend, a sister, a guide.
I’m turned around. Direction is unclear. But the rain and the wind find their way.
Making their paths known. As you have, so elegantly, so true.