Episode 15: Shelling Peas With Novelist Jill McCorkle

When author Jill McCorkle reaches back to her earliest memories, she is a toddler sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen sink taking a playful bath. She remembers the smell of good things baking in the oven, the carefully tended African violets that line the windowsill, the sound of her grandmother humming, and the sight of a bright red, polka-dotted bowl on a nearby shelf. Growing up in Lumberton, North Carolina, young Jill always gravitated to the world of her kind, gentle, and wise grandmother.

Jill McCorkle's career as a writer is the stuff of legend: her first two novels—The Cheer Leader and July 7th—were published on the same day in 1984, when she was in her mid-twenties. She has now published twelve novels and short story collections, most recently the highly acclaimed novel, Hieroglyphics. She has received numerous awards, and in 2018 was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Jill’s work is included in Eno Publishers’s anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, and she also contributed to Eno’s 27 Views of Hillsborough. She was featured on a previous episode of the 27 Views podcast: Episode 5, “Hunting Down Stories With Jill McCorkle.”