The Pittsburgh Book Review

A Lit Fuse: Damian Dressick’s 40 Patchtown   and the Windber, PA, Coal Mine Strike of 1922 by Bonnie Proudfoot In the Acknowledgements to his debut novel 40 Patchtown (2020, Bottom Dog Press), author Damian Dressick thanks his Grandfather, Alex Valentine Dressick, for stories he told about a coal mine strike in Southwestern, PA, in 1922, and he thanks his Grandmother, Margaret Swincinski, for conversations about farm life on the outskirts of the coal camps. That is likely why 40 Patchtown is a novel told in a voice so authentic that readers will feel like they have lived beside the teenage narrator, Chester (Chet) Pistakowski (a young “trapper boy” in the coalmines) in 40 Patchtown, one of a series of linked mining camps in Somerset County, outside of Windber, PA. Told in the first person, through the point of view of fourteen-year-old Chet, 40 Patchtown begins a couple of months after the start of a miner walkout that eventually costs Chet’s family their home and most of their poss