“That was the thing about all those Shamokin kids. They looked real tough, didn’t have the cleanest language all the time, hands all buggered up from picking stones from the coal piles for pocket change, but if a person was really down on his luck, they knew it….”
—The Shadows Outside
Echoes From the Hocker House
Selected as a BEST INDIE BOOK OF 2023 by KIRKUS
“Entrancing, edgy, and melodramatic tales with a palpable bite…Watts writes with a profound, confident voice.“ —KIRKUS REVIEWS
2024 FEATHERED QUILL BOOK AWARD WINNER (BRONZE)
2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Category Finalist (honorable mention)
Devil’s Party proudly presents ECHOES FROM THE HOCKER HOUSE, a collection of short stories by multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee Virginia Watts. Featuring 15 powerfully imaginative tales, Watts is frequently praised for her strong dialogue and fully realized characters.
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2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee Fiction
Hannah Fisher keeps the curtains closed in every room of the farmhouse night and day. Windowsills are stuffed with juice glasses brimming seasonal wildflowers: delicate, snow-white Queen Anne’s Lace, purple chicory, periwinkle cornflowers. She’s been working miracles with her monthly budget too, squeezing out extra cash for her husband Rex’s cases of Miller High Life and ingredients to prepare elaborate, formal dinners on the weekends, recipes she downloads on her laptop. If there’s any spare change after all of that, she drives fifty minutes to the Wal-Mart in Scutters Mill and returns home with cases of French vanilla or lavender-scented candles…
2020 Best of the Net Nonfiction 2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee Nonfiction
Along Route 322, an often-traveled roadway of my childhood, past the turnoffs for Annville, Cleona, and Quentin, a thing of exquisite and recurring beauty—an automobile salvage yard that everyone simply called “the junkyard.” Cars dumped and clumped, leaning affectionately into each other. A handsewn quilt of many colors rolling up and over the gentle hills so common in Central Pennsylvania.
VW bugs of all hues, the baby blues and reds standing out among the rest. A yellow school bus once. Tractors weak and boney without their massive, earth spitting tires…
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Words & Whispers, Sky Island Journal among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for Best of the Net. Her work in five anthologies and a debut short story collection Echoes from The Hocker House can be found at https://www.amazon.com/author/virginiawattswrites
