Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain

 

Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain.

Published 15th May 2023 by Melville House.

From the cover of the book:

Set in the bruised, mined, and timbered hills of Appalachia in western Pennsylvania, Sidle Creek is a tender, truthful exploration of a small town and the people who live there, told by a brilliant new voice in fiction.

In Sidle Creek, McIlwain skillfully interrogates the myths and stereotypes of the mining, mill, and farming towns where she grew up. With stories that take place in diners and dive bars, town halls and bait shops, McIlwain's writing explores themes of class, work, health, and trauma, and the unexpected human connections of small, close-knit communities. All the while, the wild beauty of the natural world weaves its way in, a source of the town's livelihood - and vulnerable to natural resource exploitation.

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 between Annie Proulx, Joy Williams, and Louise Erdrich.

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Small town stories are one of my favourite things, in all their disparate glory. This series of stories from Jolene McIlwain forms a collection about life among the mining, farming and logging communities in the hills of Appalachia, western Pennsylvania. 

Right from the first story, Sidle Creek which gives the anthology its name, you know you are not going to be treated to cosy tales that weave a romantic picture of the people McIlwain writes so beautifully about. These are tales that conjure up powerful feelings and delve into the gritty depths of real lives, and the trials and tribulations that come with scraping out hard livings, and forming connections with people and places. 

The stories take place in homes and work places, among different sorts of communities, and mostly explore knotty themes of isolation, alienation, loss, the class divide, and unresolved trauma. Cowell does not hold back in doing her level best to evoke visceral emotion (something she achieves with aplomb), but there are glimmers of golden nuggets that thrum with love and healing too. For me, the best stories here are ones which spin well-contrived suspense among the grit, with my favourite being Those Red Boots, which has the makings of a cracking TV drama set around the town of Wampum.

These are stories for those who love to push their boundaries into the realms of the discomfitting, which makes them strikingly memorable, and you will find yourself thinking about the characters long after you close the covers. This is an excellent debut collection, and I look forward to reading much more from Jolene McIlwain. 

Sidle Creek is available to buy now in paperback and ebook.

Thank you to Melville House for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author: 

Jolene McIlwain's fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in West Branch, Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, Northern Appalachia Review, and 2019's Best Small Fictions Anthology. Her work was 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 Fiction's 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.