My enormous thanks to Nikki Griffiths at Melville House for inviting me to participate in the blog tour for Jolene McIlwain’s Sidle Creek. I’m delighted to share my review today.

Published by Melville House on 18th May 2023, Sidle Creek is available for purchase here.

Sidle Creek

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.

My Review of Sidle Creek

A collection of short stories.

Sidle Creek took me by surprise. Stupidly I hadn’t realised that all the stories revolve around the one place; the Sidle Creek of the title. This has the effect of deepening the impact of the stories and creating simultaneously the sense of community and of isolation that life in a small town often has. Jolene McIlwain writes with such beauty and economy that not a word is wasted and yet both nature and humanity are presented in their most raw state. I thought this collection was exceptionally good, completely moving and beautifully written.

With a few exceptions, these stories are frequently just a few paragraphs long – more akin to flash fiction – but each is steeped in emotion so that it is impossible to read them quickly. Rather, they need to be savoured and given the reader’s full attention to be fully appreciated. Perfectly crafted, the narratives don’t actually feel consciously created at all. They feel organic, natural and as if they have always been part of a literary canon. There’s real elegance in Jolene McIlwain’s writing even when she’s conveying the darkest of theme or action.

Every aspect of life is present between the pages of Sidle Creek. Life and death, relationships of all kinds, nature, employment, mental, emotional and physical health, great pragmatism and deep spirituality are presented with affecting insight. It’s impossible not to react in a kind of primeval and visceral manner to the writing in Sidle Creek. For example, I confess I was thoroughly undone by The Fractal Geometry of Grief and Seeds in particular. Indeed, all these stories pulsate with emotion, truth and luminosity, making them unforgettable. 

Sidle Creek is intense, literary and filled with a stark beauty conveyed through exquisite and varied prose. I thought this collection was quire, quite wonderful. I absolutely loved it.

About Jolene McIlwain

Jolene McIlwain’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net 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 Glimmer Train’s and River Styx’s contests and semi finalist 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 Mountains’ 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.

For further information, visit Jolene’s website, follow her on Twitter @jolene_mcilwain or find her on Facebook and Instagram.

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