Susan Tekulve’s Savage Pilgrims includes five poems and five stories, most of which were first published in journals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Denver Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Emrys, Connecticut Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. These short stories and lyric interludes roam from suburban America to the trellised landscapes of Europe, exploring the revelations of love and fear in characters thrust into fierce journeys.

Fired from his sales job, a middle-aged Ohio man becomes a full-time Civil War re-enactor. A faithless Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Poland leads a group of elderly Catholic women on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a Black Madonna. After learning of her husband’s ocular disease, a wife takes him on an urgent quest to Scotland to see the sights she believes he will miss after he is blind. Regardless of their circumstances, these characters all wrestle with the complex disappointments and hopes that keep them searching for savage truths about themselves and others as they take off-kilter paths toward healing, love, grace and solace.

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Author: Susan Tekulve
Paperback, 2009, 100 pages
ISBN-10: 0982546203
ISBN-13: 978-0982546208

About the Author

Susan Tekulve’s newest book Bodies of Light is forthcoming in 2024 from Serving House Books and will be her first full-length poetry collection. She is the author of Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press) and In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press). Her photo essay, “White Blossoms,” appeared in Issue 12 of the KYSO Flash Anthology. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appears in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series, and her story collection, My Mother’s War Stories, received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.

Such stories as these are evidence of the heart’s generosity. Their rich detail and meditative lull open a door on the joyful and poignant and sad enchantment of lives real and lived. There is pleasure to be found within. There are moments like breaking glass.

—Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse and America By Land

Savage Pilgrims is an intimate tapestry of the lives of two generations of middle Americans, made memorable by the subtlety and grace of the author’s prose.

—Dan Wakefield, author of Going All The Way and New York in the Fifties

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