One miracle is plenty for any novel, but Gwyl Ford’s soulful, funny, poignant and celebratory “Tilly & Turp,” set in a public elementary school on the poorer side of Fresno, gives us two. Ford, who is in his 70s, somehow inhabits the minds of five 11-year-old girls – newcomer Tilly Foote and the Black, Hmong, Ukrainian and Filipina friends she makes in the fifth grade. There’s a snake in this Eden – a boy whose bullying prompts Tilly, the poet of the group, to write a curse that, to her horror, seems to come true. But good people help – Tilly’s friends, her spunky single mother, an inspired teacher, a school janitor who sees everything, administrators who do their honest best and an old Italian neighbor…with a bucket list.
Nothing is harder to describe than a good person, much less a community of them, but such are Ford’s gifts that we believe in them all.
Mickael Harris, Book Reviewer, Los Angeles Times
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In their young adult novel, Tilly & Turp, Zona Soares and Gwylym Ford have together crafted nothing short of a modern classic. Imaginatively conceived and brilliantly transmitted in sparkling prose, it treats readers to a contemporary tale revolving around the traumatic coming of age of pre-teen Tilly and her profoundly multicultural cohort of creative female classmates in the Sa Joaquin Valley city of Fresno, California, the largest metropolis in the greater Central Valley. In reading this work, I was struck by how much it resonates with and complements that published in the past and present by such Fresno area writers of distinction like Armenian-American William Saroyan (1908-1981), Japanese-American Lawson Fusao Inada (1938- ), Mexican-American Gary Soto (1952- ), and Hmong-American Mai Der Vang (1981- ).
Art Hansen, Emeritus Professor of History and Asian American Studies and founding director of the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton
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Tilly & Turp was published June 28th, 2025 and is available in paperback and ebook versions.
$500 first prize, $200 runner-up. $10 entry fee. Finalists will be published in the 2026 Best in Rural Writing print anthology.
Accepting fiction and nonfiction under 7,000 words. To enter, click here.
Deadline: September 15th, 2025
The 2025 Best in Rural Writing Contest is sponsored by The Daily Yonder. The Daily Yonder offers news, analysis and stories from Rural America, free for readers to enjoy. Visit dailyyonder.com to get more great rural stories, or sign up to their newsletter to receive rural reporting directly in your inbox. Alternatively, you can listen and subscribe to their podcast, Rural Remix, wherever you get your podcasts.
