Maureen Pilkington has always been writing, often in secret. At twelve, she read a Ray Bradbury story in a textbook called Thrust about a classroom on Venus where the sun only comes out for two hours every seven years. Margot, a washed-out looking girl from earth, is bullied for being the only one who hates the rain. Just before the sun comes out, the other kids lock Margot in the closet and forget about her while they play outside, their faces turned toward the sun. Ever since that short clip of rain-free time on Bradbury’s Venus, when the silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed, Pilkington has been under the power of words, and water.
After working in book publishing in New York City as a subsidiary rights director, Pilkington received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Since then her fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies including: The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, Confrontation, Orchid Literary Review, Santa Barbara Review, Bridge: Art & Literature in Chicago, Red Rock Review, Pedestal Magazine, SNReview, Patapsco Review, Miranda, Literary Mama, Marco Polo Quarterly, Secrets: MSR Fiction Anthology, The Blotter, Fiction Southeast and others.
Pilkington also writes personal essays that have appeared in CoveyClub.com, Punctuate, The Stonetable Review, and in the fourteen editions of the Weston Magazine Group that appear in the New York Metro and suburban luxury market.
She is the founder and director of Page Turners, a program that places authors in the inner city schools of Manhattan to teach writing, under the Archdiocese of New York’s Inner City Scholarship Fund.
Regal House Publishing will be publishing Pilkington’s collection of voice driven short stories, This Side of Water, in 2019. Whether sexually troubled or humiliated, dealing with death in unconventional and peculiar ways, or discovering the cover-ups of their lovers or parents, each character feels the effects of the waterfront—the Atlantic, the Long Island Sound, the sulfur polluted Monongahela River, the Hudson, a Koi pond.
Ernesto Quinonez, author of the bestselling novel, Bodega Dreams, has this to say about This Side of Water: “Brutally eloquent. A mesmerizing collection with a heat seeking eye for brilliant humor and intense passionate loves.”
Pilkington is an avid kayaker, cook and traveler. Currently, she is working on a novel that begins in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. She divides her time between Rye, New York and Manhattan.
