HOW THE PINES PRAY
“Our voices burned through another pile of rotted wood, as the oak logs turned on November’s sleepy side.”
In the shadowed woods of Gilt, Oregon, How the Pines Pray begins with a rupture: the blazing loss of River’s safe haven and the murder of the one person who made survival possible in a grueling small town—his best friend Scarlett.
Grieving, River is haunted by the cruelty of Scarlett’s murder. Until he meets Rocky—an outsider like him who arrives carrying his own loss, and in their shared solitude, offers River a fragile, dangerous possibility of connection somewhere far, far away.
“The smell of singed tobacco and wet earth sauntered into one another like airborne dancers, incinerating the hairs of my nostrils like a perfume that reminded me just how aromatic sorrow could be.”
As a writer, Jace Erich Evans is drawn to the tension between brutality and lyricism—how bodies can endure crisis, then be restored to beauty through the act of loving someone else.
River and Rocky’s relationship offers a counter-narrative in which queer identity is reconciled within the hometown space—where the act of running away to San Francisco, away from the town called Gilt, cannot resolve the violence and silence that has shaped them. Rather, they must face their fears by eventually returning.
This story confronts selfhood and grief while rejecting the notion that love must be exiled in order to survive a hate that has lingered for generations in their town. How The Pines Pray insists on love’s power to affirm belonging—even in a forest that has tried trap its wanderers in its deep, dark wood.
To read a draft, contact Jace Erich Evans