Maureen Pilkington, Author of This Side of Water Book

In This Side of Water: Stories, Maureen Pilkington’s bright debut collection, precise and vivid language delivers flawed characters to their moments of reckoning. A married woman goes to the cemetery to resurrect her father; a young girl at a beach club witnesses her parents’ infidelity; an icy New Year’s Eve leads a devoted husband to violent clarity; a teenager spies on her mother and a Catholic priest; a Russian “dancer” visits her American husband and plays a dangerous game. In these sixteen stories, the backdrop of water—the Long Island Sound, the sulfur polluted Monangahela River, a koi pond, a basin of holy water, a tear in a boy’s eye—provides a salve for these characters, ferrying them to personal ports of resolution.

Maureen Pilkington’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines including The Antioch Review; Ploughshares; Puerto del Sol; Confrontation; Bridge: Art & Literature in Chicago; Orchid Literary Review; MSR Fiction Anthology; Fiction Southeast; Punctuate; Santa Barbara Review; The Pedestal Magazine; Literary Mama; Still Point Arts Quarterly; CoveyClub.com; Red Rock Review; Confrontation; The Blotter Magazine; and The Weston Magazine Group’s fifteen NY/CT/NJ editions covering the New York City metro and suburban markets. Her work has also been read live WCOM, FM. Pilkington worked in book publishing and received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently writing a collection of personal essays, and a novel about a friendship between two women that begins at a Catholic boarding school. Pilkington is also the founder and director of the writing program, Page Turners, bringing authors into the inner-city schools of New York City to teach writing. Born in New York, Pilkington splits her time between Rye and Manhattan.