Jon Chaiim McConnell

Work Samples

Along the Tether (2025)

Since my mother’s fall, nearly every day it’s can you take me to the sound bath again. She holds her injured arm up for me to see. This bruising down her side could be mitigated. There is numbness to her second knuckles, and her toes. In fact, she blames her lack of improvement on not having gone in so long.

So, nearly every day, I walk her request back in from the gas station side mart, where she now stays, to our rest stop’s main building, to the council. Today I find them steeping coffee grounds together from one cup to another by the condiment dispensers. Is that a walk that she could make anymore? Even clipped and following the tether? They shake their heads at the questions that they’ve posed. Not a one of them will venture outside to evaluate and see her for themselves, however; they’d prefer to know as little as they can about the invalids. There is no help to be offered, after all.

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About the Artist

Written by Gail Obenreder

Jon Chaiim McConnell has been writing “since I was a kid,” but he began to take his craft seriously in college. “Doing very poorly in computer engineering,” McConnell switched majors to creative writing, found his métier, and has been pursuing it seriously ever since.

When he was young, McConnell’s family moved around, but he grew up mainly in Crofton, Maryland and West Grove, Pennsylvania. He studied creative writing at both Penn State University’s Erie campus (for his undergraduate degree) and Boston’s Emerson College, where McConnell earned his MFA. He also lived and worked for several years in Los Angeles, but about six years ago he moved to Delaware and lives in New Castle.

Over the past decade, McConnell has published a novella, and his short stories have been included in over a dozen literary publications and online journals. He’s been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, an award for the best publications in American small presses, and he’s also edited for five literary journals and anthologies.

McConnell had always written what he calls “slipstream,” where he “leverages strangeness of language and imagery” to convey how he feels, making sure that each piece had “one weird thing” nestled among its traditional storytelling elements. Lately, he’s also begun incorporating more social commentary into his work.

This change has meant that McConnell now seeks to “earn the strangeness … through the confidence of the prose itself.” If a reader feels that “I know what I’m doing,” they will trust him to follow wherever he goes as a writer. “I just have to make sure to stick the landing at the end.” Working in this new way has made a change in his prosody, turning writing “into play … an endlessly changing puzzle to solve in an actual conversation with the world.”

McConnell “gets bored easily,” and so as he writes he’s begun to hold himself to a challenging standard: “What’s audacious about this idea?” If he finds that the answer is “nothing,” then he knows that his premise needs to be expanded. And the more things he wants to accomplish with a piece of work, “the more challenging it becomes” because each story “presents its own rules as I write it.”

One of McConnell’s greatest rewards is “the act of writing itself.” Craft-focused, he loves “sitting down to a blank page, having a creative impulse,” and working through how to communicate that impulse to a reader. But he also enjoys it when a reader takes away “something entirely different than what I was going for.”

A cinema fan, McConnell has written and produced short films and is on the artistic committee of the Rehoboth Beach International Film Festival. He also manages Arts Focus Delaware, an “accountability group” of writers and artists meeting every two weeks. There, people work on a variety of projects, things that can be accomplished in a library. “Sitting next to somebody working on something makes it that much easier for me to get my work done.”

McConnell attended the Division’s 2024 Writer’s Retreat, and he plans to use his award for the promotion of his novella, which is slated to be republished in the winter of 2026. He also plans to participate in events and conferences and travel to readings. The Fellowship will connect him with other writers, building a community so that “the energy of … being around other creative people will fuel my own work.”