Meredith Sue Willis Author and Teacher Books

To order online, click A Space Apart.
New Edition from the Authors' Guild Back In Print Editions

Meredith Sue Willis's first novel, just reprinted as part of the Authors' Guild Back-in-Print series, was first published in 1979 by Charles Scribner's Sons.Says Willis of the novel, "The most remarkable thing to me when I reread this novel is how little awareness I had at the time of any cultural or historical background to West Virginia and the Appalachian region. The novel is emotionally and artistically sophisticated, but it is undergirded with a conviction that time had stopped in West Virginia: I wrote primarily of the years just before I was born and in my early childhood [nineteen fifty to ninety sixty, say]. For all young children, of course, there is no history: there is now and there is the Age of Giants, when there were your people before you. The situation in this novel is stripped down to a small town as an isolated and ultimate place. Even though I had been living in New York for a number of years at the time I wrote it, and even though I had participated in some of the political events of the late sixties and early seventies, working against war, for people abandoned to poverty, my West Virginia was captured in a crystal ball, in a snow crystal. It was a place where the most important building was a church, the most important social relations between those who lived more or less genteelly in town and those who had once lived without indoor plumbing in the outlying mining camps.

"What I specifically was thinking about thematically (as opposed to feeling) as I wrote it, was moral and social strictures and transgressing them. I wrote in a journal enty in late April, 1974, when I was still calling the book Soap Opera, that 'Soap Opera of course is about a small town of the mind, Galatia, but perhaps I can work through, get out all my feelings about the rigidness, the laws: community imposed, family imposed, self-imposed. All the Galatians know the laws so very well.... They do not really know how to seek out freedom. I am thinking of naming the novel The Galatians. I just read Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. Its theme is faith over law, new freedom in love over old law; also backsliding of those who have seen the revealed truth into demand for circumcision & other legalistic manifestations of grace.'"

First novelist Willis shapes her story with exquisite care, detailing the lives of a West Virginia preacher's family: John Scarlin, minister and son of "the Preacher," a wild old born-again Baptist; John's sturdy sister Mary Katherine; his capricious wife Vera, a strong character who commands attention in one fine scene after another; and his daughters Lee and Tonie who grow up to reject and embrace the meaning of Galatia, their hometown. In a novel of character more than event, these five people reveal themselves in chapters which progress in time, alternate in point of view. Finally what is revealed is a family, inextricably bound together while struggling with each other's need to find "a place apart." Narratively skilled and disciplined, this is an impressive debut.

A Space Apart is so deftly and subtly written, I hardly noticed how involved I'd become until I'd read the last page and turned it, wanting more. The Scarlin family is going to be with me for a very long time.

Willis fleshes out with warmth and tenderness the omplexities of family love, which not only defines commitment but deepens the need. An important new talent.

Ms. Willis writes with wisdom and with warmth, weaving a web of subtle suspense and poetic perception. And when she is finished, she has left the reader contentedly fulfilled– yet longing for more.

This is the story of a broken family trying to mend itself through three generations. It is a painful but essential process, and like all such repair jobs, it is only partly successful. Before it is over we come to know John and Vera and Mary Kay, as well as Vera's daughters, Lee and Tonie— to understand the wars they must declare and the peaces that they are able to proclaim within the state of being Scarlins

Willis views the Scarlin family ties and loyalties, limits and tensions, with realism, sensitivity and precision. A noteworthy first novel.

The narrative carries warmth and strength. The people are as real as your next door neighbors.

For readers who have enjoyed Anne Tyler's novels or Frederick Busch short stories, the arrival of Meredith Sue Willis will be cause to celebrate. She has written with depth and honesty about a life style available to many of us only through books.

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The Blair Morgan Trilogy

To order online, click on Higher Ground;
Only Great Changes; Trespassers.

...The story of Blair Ellen Morgan, the daughter of teachers in rural West Virginia, who grows up to experience all the turbulence at the heart of the 1960's.

Miss Willis sustains a reader's attention...throughout the trilogy by being a master of what might be called thumbnail episodes. Every significant encounter between consorts, friends, parents, neighbors has a setting and a beginning, middle, and end. The effect is the feeling of being eased along story to story through a narrative where the meaning of each episode will be revealed. Even the most disturbing episodes have some measure of grace, and this comes because of Miss Willis' steady, assured narrative style.

Higher Ground and Only Great Changes deeply moved me and convinced me of three very important things. One, it is possible for a writer to join a social vision with a creative vision. Two, it is possible to think and write of Appalachia in new and empowering ways without resorting to stereotypes. And three, well-crafted, stylistically sophisticated fiction can do positive political work. The political and social relevancy of these two novels rests in Willis' representation of Blair Ellen Morgan's coming of age over the approximately twenty years from the late 1950's to 1974.

— Tal Stanley, "Making That New Place: Blair Morgan's Coming of Age and Meredith Sue Willis' Social Vision," The Iron Mountain Review, Volume XII

Higher Ground

Willis's breathtakingly subtle soundings of homes and small towns (where everything happens and nothing happens) reaffirm her as a writer of real consequence.

The adolescence of Blair Ellen Morgan, who attends the high school where her parents teach, is richly realized in the complexities of relationships begun when she was 11, with the slatternly Odells, hill-country people who were her aunt's neighbors. Blair is a delight of paradoxes in her quest for "my special friends who mean exactly what I want them to mean...." Higher Ground is heartwarming, funny and sad, quite delightful reading.

A look at the secret feelings of a growing girl. These feelings might be shared with a best friend, if you had one you trusted completely.

Meredith Sue Willis...writes with tenderness and ease of the trials of adolescence. With an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue, she has produced a vivid account of growing up in a small town in the late fifties and early sixties. Though the time, place, and personalities are specific, the thoughts and emotions are universal.

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Only Great Changes

Willis makes a familiar story fresh and engaging with her wise perceptions and unusual language.

Willis again picks meaningfully at the charge-laden fences between peoples, castes, and individual needs

Authors....pretend to write about all of life, but mostly they opt for the excitement. It takes talent, observation, and a particular caring to bring the average person's experience to life in a book. Willis does it here, making gold out of common materials. There are indications that she is not done with Blair Ellen yet, and I can't wait for the alchemy of her next book.

. . . "[M]oments of personal anguish are at the heart" of this novel, and they add up to a complex and convincing portrait of a young woman coming to grips with change."

– Jon Volkmer, "Review of Only Great Changes" in Prairie Schooner # 60, 134-135.

In Meredith Sue Willis's Only Great Changes, the familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation. Willis locates the experience of coming of age in the matrix of a larger history, focusing 1960's young and political culture through finely cut lenses of region, gender, and race.

Take a half dozen of the novelists who routinely show up as repeaters on the best-seller lists, ask them to put their united talents into one collaboration, and the chances are they couldn't write a page which Meredith Sue Willis couldn't do better. She would beat them with the acuteness of her eyes and ears, her unfaltering way of bringing the fruits of her observation alive on paper and her sure sense of where to look in the crannies of human affairs for the materials of drama.

While visiting WV last week, I stopped in Taylor Books in Charleston and picked up Only Great Changes. Boy, I was glad I did! Gobbled it up in two days, really relating to the '60s political/sexual scene. Very real characters, including the community folks, and surprising plot twists. I loved the "new name for God" speech from Dave and your tough-but-tender protagonist. Thanks for writing it.

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Trespassers

With the same attention to detail she brought to her character's small town childhood, Willis brings the people, ambiance and events of the urban experience out of the past and into a fresh light 30 years later. The silky locution that springs from the Appalachian heritage of storytelling is fully empowered here. Critics agree: Others have written of the same era, but few write as well.

Trespassers, the final volume in Meredith Sue Willis's luminous Blair Morgan trilogy, brings its West Virginia-born heroine to the brink of adulthood and to the epicenter of her generations' rage. it is 1967, and 20-something Blair is off to New York City to begin life on her own....The novel is different in tone than the earlier books of the trilogy, in which it was possible to detect the cadence of West Virginia (right down to Blair being called Blair Ellen by those who knew her then). This book is blunter, with more dialogue. There's no mistaking New York.

Willis demolishes dreaded Appalachian female stereotypes....Blair Ellen is a particular girl, to be sure, from a particular region of the country, which itself represents the reforming spirit of the turbulent ‛60's, but her aspirations and experiences in social action speak to a collective, inclusive identity which makes her a representative of her generation, not her region.

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In the Mountains of America

(Or, vistit the publisher's
page at Mercury House)

To order online, click
on In the Mountains of America

Ms. Willis...provides a[n]...important lesson on the nature and function of literature itself.

Love affairs and murder fantasies are rarely spoken, but their presence infuses these smart stories with tensions beyond the limits of plot.

Terrific stories. Rueful, humorous, close to the bone. You cannot help but like and feel for Willis's characters. In these stories you hear the pure mental clarity and honesty of distilled experiences, and a life-long dedication to craft.

Rich with the traditions of Appalachia and even richer with the wise intelligence of its author...Willis explores her characters' bonds with family, home place, landscape, God, and nation, noting the strength of such bonds and the individual accommodations they so often demand. Willis defines the boundaries between mountain hollows and towns, between rural regions and urban ones, and she uses those boundaries to limn the spiritual reach of her characters....The characterizations are detailed; the dialogue is spry; the prose sings.

— Alyson Hagy, "In the Mountains of America,"Appalachian Journal (Vol. 22, Number 1)

....That, finally, is what creates the true power of narrative in Meredith Sue Willis' or any true artist's work: the ability to give the reader or the listener moments of real life, but in so doing to capture the mystery, the translucence which makes art transcend life.

— Jack L. Wills, "The Story's the Thing: The Power of Narrative in In the Mountains of America," The Iron Mountain Review (Vol. XII)

...Meredith Sue Willis's In the Mountains of America ...will give you family values in their unvarnished state....

....Willis' writing– like the quilts described in the closing story "Family Knots"– is exquisitely rendered with multiple textures and complex designs.

In the Mountains of America is a beautifully-written, tender and clear-eyed collection of short stories set in Appalachia in which the reader is invited to shed big city ways, and settle back--way back like the country people who inhabit these mountain hollows and tales and who enjoy a good story themselves--and to "just listen. Listen." Meredith Sue Willis's characters are worth listening to. Distinctive, quick-witted, and touching, they, like all of us, are searching to make sense of lives bounded by family, community, geography and social class.

Willis creates dialogue you can hear, details you can see. In "The Little Harlots," Roy Critchfield, a ninth-grader, struggles to reconcile "the raw burden of his body" with his burgeoning desires and his father's strict religious views. "I don't chew my cud twice," his father snaps at Roy after his mother leaves home and refuses his father's angry demand to return. In "The Birds That Stay" the meaning of a young woman's death is examined through the four voices of her daughter, grandmother, father, and mother. Jody Otis, the dead woman's father, mulls violence. He sits in the kitchen glaring at the passing thick-soled shoes of his daughter's "pit viper" husband, Buddy, the man he blames for her death, while Ellen Morgan Otis, the dead woman's mother, wants only "to feel love for all these fine pople here today grieving with us," understanding by the story's end that no matter how strong one's desire to affix cause and blame to life's tragedies, we dwell somewhere between darkness and beauty, in an "unknown" middle.

This understanding permeates each of these twelve stories. In the luminous "Family Knots," we follow Narcissa Foy, a patchwork quilter, from childhood into middle age as she creates complex quilting patterns that parallel the unexpected complexities of her own quiet mountain life. As a child, Narcissa has always liked "the crazy quilts best . . . following trails of color wherever they led and then later discover[ing] shapes that contained [her] discovery." Narcissa bears five children, the next-to-last a difficult labor. Her breasts become inflamed and she dreams of a quilt "the color of her struggle to nourish this baby," a quilt with colors that "trickle and form paths like veins, twisting, weaaving, plaiding, bursting open like fireworks or zinnias unfurled"--a pattern called Family Knots. Its creation ushers in a period of Narcissa's limited recognition as an artist by city collectors. When Narcissa's college-educated daughter, Lou, implores her to move to the city and study art--"It will smother your talent, never leaving here," insisted Lou--Narcissa wonders "if she had been smothered, and allowed it was possible that something had been, but something else had been made strong." Her destiny has been more than quilts. It has also been raising a family, stitching together "the pattern of people"--and she, Narcissa, "was in the pattern."

Some of the stories in In the Mountains of America are long, some short, some dense, others more like yarns. But all illuminate a kind of double consciousness, the fact that we know the world by the stories we tell and we know ourselves through the creation of these narratives. Willis herself is attracted to tales that reveal how an event, or landscape viewed from one vantage point (the New York City skyline, the lights, the war in Vietnam, in "Evenings with Dotson," a wonderful tale of high school romance revisited) can be perceived as the opposite from another's point of view--and even from one's own point of view in another context. With her ancestral roots in Appalachia and a present-day family life in New York and New Jersey, Meredith Sue Willis brings a surprisingly convincing optimism and far-reaching embrace of cultural differences to her readers.

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Quilt Pieces

Oradell at Sea

(Visit the publisher's page at WVU Press)

To read Chapter 3 of Oradell, click on Big City Lit
To read Chapter 9 of Oradell, click on Big City Lit

'Zank heaven for little girls.' Not since Carson McCullers has anyone given us a Southern bell-ringer as scabbed and admirable as this motherless widow from Shacky Hill.

Oradell Greengold is the brassy narrator of Meredith Sue Willis' Oradell at Sea (Vandalia Press, $22.50). She spends her days and her deceased husband's fortune cruising on first-class luxury liners where young Greek deckhands wait on her hand and foot-rub.

While aboard the Golden Argonaut from Acapulco to San Juan, Oradell describes her gritty Appalachian upbringing in a West Virginia coal-mining town. Her first husband, a passionate union organizer, was the love of her life. Her next husband showed her the seedy side of Las Vegas. In New York she got lucky with her third and last husband, whom she met while waiting on tables in a Greek restaurant.

In between reminiscences, Oradell befriends a jaded young California girl and spends more time with the Greek staff than with the other ship passengers. Oradell is a modern-day Mae West who unapologetically enjoys her wealth and its privileges, which includes boozing it up with the help. She never turns sloppy and sentimental, even when faced with a potentially life-threatening illness. Willis, a native of West Virginia, is the author of 10 books.

Meredith Sue Willis moved away from West Virginia a long time ago, but like the protagonist of her newest novel Oradell at Sea, she never really left the mountains. Willis is a prolific writer. Her previous books include several novels, children's books, a collection of short stories, and three nonfiction books about the craft of writing. One of these, Personal Fiction Writing, is a wonderful resource for any writing coach, and I return to it again and again when I work with young writers. Some of my favorite exercises in the book have to do with character development.
     According to Willis, the character of Oradell Greengold grew from a casual meeting with a drunk old lady, someone with whom she happened to share a dinner table years ago. In the novel, Willis has done what she recommends to beginning writers– allowed a brief encounter to blossom into a whole life history. The old lady's life sings out in flashbacks and memories as her favorite cruise ship, The Golden Argonaut, makes its way through the Panama Canal toward Puerto Rico.
      For Oradell, old age is one long cruise, but neither gin nor travel can carry her away from her past. One of Willis's great gifts as a writer is to get out of the way when a character becomes unruly, and Oradell is one of the most unruly characters you'll ever meet. She embodies a popular fantasy: a rich man has died and left her a windfall, and she also has the potential to be a nightmare. She's loud, she's unabashedly crude, and she has a lot of money. For those of us who are sensitive to Beverly Hillbillies stereotypes, Willis is definitely walking a tightrope with this character.
     But despite her drawbacks, or maybe because of them, Oradell is an engaging, endearing protagonist. She may be in a permanent drunken haze, but she hasn't forgotten where she came from: the coal mining town in West Virginia where her grandfather died in a mine explosion and where she met her beloved Mike Brown, the first of her husbands, whose union organizer soul lives on in Oradell. And if Oradell Greengold doesn't make you laugh out loud at least a few times– well, you should seek professional help.
      For this reader, however, both the plot and the setting of the book were a bit cramped, compared to the big, bold character of Oradell. More than once I found myself wishing the ship would run aground or stop in some port where the old lady would be obliged to spill her drink, abandon her memories, and get into some real trouble.

There have been many acts in the life of Oradell Greengold, a boozy widow whose life has become one long vacation on luxury cruise liners. The heroine of Oradell at Sea (WVU Press), a new novel by Meredith Sue Willis...crows, "It's great being rich; you can do any damn thing you please." And she does.
Told in the forthright West Virginia cadence that marks Willis's literary fiction, the novel strips away the layers of experience that Oradell has accumulated as she teams up with a sullen teen and foments rebellon by the ship's staff. Her unpropitious beginnings as an abandoned child in an Apalachian coal mining town chug insider her like a ship's engine, informing her aging heart.

This short, engagingly written novel is the story of a woman's journey of the self from a spunky but passive victim to a person capable of moral action on behalf of another. Willis' style is a clean, unpretentious realism with lyrical moments that bring depth and believability to her character.

The most extraordinary people are the seemingly ordinary ones. Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, Oradell is one of the best, most fully drawn characters you'll every have the privilege of meeting. Silas House (author of Clay's Quilt)

Oradell is a feisty, funny outspoken woman, engaging and indomitable. Bon voyage!
– Edith Konecky (author of Allegra Maud Goldman)

South Orange novelist Meredith Sue Willis' most recent offering, Oradell at Sea (Vandalia Press, 2002), is the story of a West Virginia coal miner's daughter in her old age, wealthy through marriage, widowed, spending big bucks on herself as a gin-guzzling permanent residence of a cruise ship in tropical waters. What a way to go! In spite of these limiting materials, it is a strong, solidly structured novel. The story line toys with the reader in giving almost no hint of the heights of the victories of the human spirit the old girl will achieved. Oradell at Sea, a powerful, deeply moving classic, deserves reprints, prizes and awards, and a stage or film adaptation by someone not Hollywood, someone British, French or Italian who would give the lead to Maggie Smith (Breakfast with Mussolini) if she can manage a coal town accent

You meet Oradell aboard her favorite cruise ship, the Golden Argonaut, but you learn how her character was formed by flashbacks that punctuate the story. She doesn't claim to be refined, addicted as she is to bright red and splashy jewelry. Oradell is herself, forged from a life of poverty where happy times were too infrequent and a bold front carried her along.

To order online, click on Oradell at Sea

Dwight's House and Other Stories

To order online, click on Dwight's House and Other Stories
Read a sample in the Hamilton Stone Review

The title novella is a marvel that successfully experiments with point of view, rapidly gyrating between the four main characters in the piece–Dwight, Fern, Susan, and Elaine. Willis pulls off this exhilarating As I Lay Dying technique quite nicely, managing to probe the inner states of each character, as well as allowing the innate conflict to surface in an almost organic fashion. Within a rustic Massachusetts setting, Willis introduces us to Dwight, an abusive and malicious man from West Virginia who envies the sleek modern cabin of the Jewish couple by the lake; his withdrawn wife Susan; Fern, who hates her stepfather; and Elaine, the neighbor who has retreated to her lakeside cabin to come to terms with the lump in her breast. In superbly piercing, almost brittle prose, the story ultimately manages to portray class conflict, the roots of anti-Semitism, the consequences of adultery, as well as render a family's free fall.

In Dwight's House and Other Stories, Meredith Sue Willis's eclecticism and layered prose releases us from the moorings of "regional fiction." This is a significant book from an accomplished author much deserving of a wider readership.

-- Nathan Leslie, Main Street Rag, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2005 (To read the whole review, click here and scroll down).

The occupants of two summer lake houses in western Massachusetts spend a couple of stormy winter days coping with their own problems and getting involved with each other's. Privileged Elaine Roth, a housewife whose children have grown, has fled to her summer home to escape the twin revelations that her husband has been committing adultery and that she has a lump in her breast.

Next door, in a rundown fishing cottage, jobless Dwight and Susan huddle in blankets trying to avoid the cold. Their two young sons and Susan's adolescent daughter Fern haven't gone to school in weeks, since Dwight's truck stopped functioning. When Elaine impulsively invites Dwight's family over for brunch, the situation turns explosive.

Willis breaks out of the narrow borders of the short story by switching among the points of view of Dwight, Elaine, frazzled Susan, and obdurate Fern. She develops the four corners of this stubborn rectangle with equal care. Although Dwight is the obvious candidate for the villain of the piece, even he is not a totally unsympathetic character. Willis nicely balances empathy with implicitly moral judgment....Willis regards all of her characters with unsentimental compassion. Her fiction leads us by the hand into dark places, and then leaves us on our own to find our way out.

This collection includes the 109-page novella, Dwight's House, and four short stories, ranging in length from seven to twenty-four pages. Most are set on lakes surrounded by homes which could be located in Willis's native West Virginia or the Northeast where she has now lived most of her adult life. Willis allays offers the reader a good old-fashioned straight-forward tale, but her fascinating and sometimes quirky characters are what distinguish her as a story-teller.

Written by a prize-winning member of the Appalachian Renaissance in literature, Dwight's House & Other Stories is an anthology of short stories by critically acclaimed author Meredith Sue Willis. Focusing on believeable characters put in paralyzing dilemmas, these tales examine the troubling paradoxes of the human condition with sympathy and synchronicity. The stories presented are "Dwight's House", "Attack", "Tiny Gorillas", "Another Perversion", and "Tales of the Abstract Expressionists". Highly recommended.

Meredith Sue Willis...has delivered a new collection of short fiction, Dwight's House and Other Stories (Hamilton Stone Editions). Known for pitch-perfect rendering of her native Appalachia, she is in top voice, pitting the familiar against other American subcultures and threats ranging from surreal air attacks to the specter of death in old age. She creates messy lives hurtling toward even worse complications, but they always release a slyly reassuring spirit, as when a scandal-ridden narrator concludes, "I don't know. I'm worn down by loneliness and fear. I'm afraid I may be on the verge of trying altruism, the last, the greatest, perversion."

This author has the rare ability to get under the skin of wildly different characters to such an effect that the reader is not only entranced but emerges with a deeper understanding of these poor mortals, of which we are one. Beautifully written, powerfully effective.

The title story in Meredith Sue Willis' second collection is set during a year of explosions: the first space shuttle; the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl; the rundown little cottage at the lake. In this new collection of stories and a novella set at summer houses and around lakes, Meredith Sue Willis explores the places where we are most exposed.

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The City Built of Starships

...A gripping tale. I love the way the ethical imagination is torqued into a surprising, nightmarish narrative. Some of the characters are astounding– and there is the Death yaeger and his dive. It's a wonderful, dark, hope-giving book.

The novel stands out because it's a story of a failed colonisation that ends with only a sliver of hope. There are no magic fixes, no lost technologies....

.... the versatile Meredith Sue Willis...has returned to writing for young adults. Her science fiction tale, The City Built of Starships (Montemayor Press), stars Espera, a girl caught up in the volatile colonization of a far planet.

The novel opens in a desert some undisclosed distance from the City Built of Starships. Espera, whom the narrative initially positions as its adolescent heroine, has been raiseed in this desert, in isolation from other humans, by her mother, Soledad, a mystic and healther....Occasionally Espera's father, Leon, visits. And then Soledad and Leon argue. Leon wishes to make "the lavender world" – also known as "the second worlds" – the possession of humans; Soledad insists that humans are guests on the world and that it is not theirs to possess. Espera is not exactrly torn between yere parents: Since Soledad has raised her, she shares her mother's ethics and values. But her father's visits bring exciteemnt into a life that revolves around her mother's meditations....

L. Timmel Duchamp, The New York Review of Science Fiction . June 2005, Number 202, Vol. 17, No. 10

After a cloistered, puritanical childhood, Espera ventures into a fallen world on a quest to redeem– or perhaps destroy– it....

....A surprising flavor: it uses science fiction tropes and concepts convincingly, and yet it feels all the way through like fantasy! It's partly the dragonlike yaegers and the Far-Seers, familiar fantasy types, and the magical-seeming properties of the glowworm. But the binary system and the class theme of hands vs. officers are solidly science fiction, ditto people who deal with their lives by staying drugged all the time...plausible explanations for phenomena like Big Cook and the morbid flatulance and why the desert ghouls can live on so few calories, so it's hard to pin down exactly why all the characters feel to me as if they're in a fantasy.

But the cover art--starships viewed through a lavender mist--bears out the exact genre-spanning effect I'm talking about....I enjoyed it and enjoyed being puzzled by it.

– Judith Moffett, author of eleven books in five genres, including science fiction. She has won both a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial award for the best science fiction story of the year.

Readers will love Espera. Hero. Adventurer. Readers will love the wise sayings and the wise women who say them. Here's a whole world that needs changing and this girl has a part in it. Meredith Sue Willis knows how to be wise. She knows how to write a rousing adventure story.

.... I'm a jaded old reader of SF and it held my attention - good planet-building, a nice premise about the officers versus the hands as that evolves over time, and thank heavens someone considers that eating alien food might not be a good idea! So many books people just eat it without much thought.

I found Espera to be a strong heroine, and found the tension between her parents particularly apt for young readers who are often torn between divorced parents. They would see themselves in her.

The plot was solid and in the midst of the danger and sometimes terror humor found a place - the eccentricities of people and especially the Scion, who moves from abusive power to helplessness and then into a sort of redemption.

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Read a sample!

Novels for Children

Billie of Fish House Lane

Thoughtful books are not always entertaining, and entertaining books are not always thoughtful, but this book merges both into a joyful look at family, friendship, and race. Eleven-year-old Billy Lee and her family live in a rickety house on the edge of a marsh, amid freeway overpasses, power lines, and old warehouses. Billy's father, an artist who suffers from a debilitating disease, is African American. Her mother, who makes African robes and bakes sunflower seed cookies, is white. Billy has never met any of her mother's family, until one day when a cousin invites her for a visit. The conflicting pulls that Billy feels between loyalty to her best friend, Eutreece, and a desire to befriend her "new" white cousin, Celia, set Billy pondering questions of race in a unique and concrete way that will inspire young readers to ask their own questions. If she is half-white and half-black, Billy wonders, what does her white side feel like? Does it feel different from her black side? What an interesting way to frame this issue—placing the essence of racial conflict inside a single character allows Willis to explore these questions in a nuanced, non-pedantic way. Billy's voice is as fresh and interesting as her story. Children of all races will find both humor and understanding—as well as plenty to ponder —in Billy's open, enthusiastic approach to life. This book would be an excellent choice for book clubs and classroom discussions.

-- Barbara Carroll Roberts, The CriticsChildren's Literature

Biracial Billie Lee leads a harmonious life in a funky New Jersey neighborhood until her white cousin comes to town. There’s that, and a mysterious neighbor alerts her inner detective. Billie Lee’s an appealing problem solver.

– Claudia Ebeling, Bucknell World Vol. 34 No. 4

...I was surprised by many aspects of this contemporary children's book. Beyond the obvious (knowing references to illicit drug use), it is far grittier -- and far more richly imagined -- than most of the kids'-lit I recall from my own childhood. (The protagonist lives under a highway near a disused canal, for instance.) At times, as in a dreamlike episode during which two pre-teens very calmly take a car from the garage of a parent and drive around the neighborhood at night, BILLIE OF FISHHOUSE LANE transcends the genre altogether, bringing to mind great books about children for adults such as THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolf and Jamaica Kincaid's ANNIE JOHN. Recommended.

-- Adam Sexton, author of Master Class in Fiction Writing: Techniques from Austen, Hemingway, and Other Greats

Smart, sassy, and eleven years old, Billie Lee lives with her eccentric family in a home on Fish House Lane. Her dad is an African American artist who carves tree trunks into sculptures; her mom, who's white, sews African-style robes that she sells at the Boutique Afrique. Billie loves her parents, her two younger brothers, and her know-it-all best friend, Eutreece, and she feels completely at home in her swampy neighborhood under an elevated highway in New Jersey.

Then Billie's white cousin, Celia, shows up and changes everything. A sleepover at Celia's fancy suburban home releases a flood of questions. How can Billie be Black but also White? How can she convince Eutreece that Billie hasn't betrayed their friendship? And, when these kids get thrown together at Fish House Lane's summer barbecue, how can Billie and her friends accept one another long enough to solve the mystery of a neighbor named Neighbor, who has hidden something strange—and maybe dangerous—down by the canal?

The answers to these questions challenge Billie far more than she ever thought possible.

-- Publisher, Montemayor Press

To order online, click Billie Of Fish House Lane.
To order by mail, click on order.

The Secret Super Powers of Marco

(Or visit the publisher's page at Montemayor Press)

Marco and Tyrone live in a poor urban neighborhood , with deserted buildings, drug dealers, and gangs. Marco navigates his way through with help from his mother, his uncle, and a growing belief in himself. He passes on that sense of confidence and self-worth to Tyrone through their strong friendship. The characters are strong and likable; the setting is believable; and the story is both exciting and thoughtful. Willis gives her readers a sense that each person has "super powers," but she never resorts to simplistic solutions for complex problems.

-- The Horn Book

In this appealing novel, narrated by the title character, we're never quite sure where Marco's superpowers end and his imagination begins. Can Marco fly?...Can he see the future? Unfortunately, what he can't do is avoid Tyrone, the bully at his new school....Marco's earnest voice convinces us that it doesn't matter if his superpowers are real or not–it's really the powers of friendship, trust, and imagination that count.

-- ALA Booklist.

A promising debut with this tale of a clever young peacemaker in a rough neighborhood.

-- Kirkus Reviews

If you haven't gotten your hands on Meredith Sue Willis' "Marco" books(for kids) DO! I bought The Secret Super Powers of Marco (and its sequel) to give to my 9 year old grand-daughter and, as fate would have it, I neglected to send them to her. I just found them in my "gift shelf" and decided to read The Secret Super Powers. It's swell! Marco, a street-smart kid of 9, knows how to handle himself in a tough world and not only keeps himself safe in his bad-ass neighborhood but sees a decent future for himself and his friends and family. Can't wait to read the sequel!

– Rosalie Sussman

A fast moving story.

— Children's Book Review Service, Inc.

To order online, click on The Secret Super Powers of Marco
To order by mail, click on order.

Marco's Monster

(Visit the publisher's page at Montemayor Press)

Marco's Monster has been Included in a list of"
100 of the Decade's Best Multicultural Read-Alouds"
at the Reading is Fundamental site.

In a sequel to The Secret Super Powers of Marco, Marco and his best friend Tyrone participate in the annual fourth-grade class play, this year called "Cool Girl and the Main Monster." Marco is the narrator and keeps the play on track, just as he keeps life on track for his little sister Ritzi and for Tyrone. Tyrone, the "Main Monster," works to stay in the play in spite of his penchant for getting into fights with classmates. There is a great deal of action in this short novel, and several themes that Willis neatly pulls together in the conclusion. Tyrone sometimes feels as if the Monster inside him is taking over, but with Marco's help, Tyrone takes the first steps toward managing his anger. Both boys must deal with the realities of living in a run-down urban neighborhood, in which empty buildings are sites for drug deals and the local park holds more dangers than pleasures. Ebullient characters, a fast-moving plot, and a realistic setting all contribute to Willis's lively, sometimes poignant story.

-- The Horn Book

Fourth grader Marco wants the part of the Main Monster in the play his class writes. But his teacher, Mr. Marshan, assigns him the role of Narrator and gives Tyrone, Marco's best friend, the coveted part. Marco, so jealous he feels like a monster is inside him, provokes a fight with Tyrone. When Tyrone accepts the blame for the fight, Marco is caught in a string of problems that the two boys resolve together. Quirky and funny, with unforgettable characters– like little sister Ritzi, a prodigy who plays operating room on her Barbies– this short, deftly plotted novel will hold everyone's interest.

-- Instructor Magazine

The two friends from The Secret Super Powers of Marco are back. Their fourth grade class is putting on a play....Marco is sure he will be the Main Monster but the role goes to Tyrone and Marco is cast as the narrator. The two boys and Marco's little sister, Ritzi, are engaging characters set in a sometimes unpleasant inner-city reality. They face a variety of unsavory people, including street thugs, Crazy Wee-wee (a local homeless person), and a substitute teacher who accuses Ritzi of killing the class gerbil. Throughout the traumas, the play progresses. The performance is a definite hit, complete with the appearance of Tyrone's mother, who never comes to school....This quick, easy read is full of humor and angst, and features a strong single-parent family, a theater experience, and lots of adventure.

-- School Library Journal

To order online, click Marco's Monster.
To order by mail, click on order.

Books about Writing and Teaching

Personal Fiction Writing

Publishing HIstory: Personal Fiction Writing was first published in 1984, and has been in print constantly since that time. In the year 2000, it received an updated and expanded edition.

I have read Personal Fiction Writing with both pleasure and enthusiasm....This book has something for teachers at all levels....It contains many useful suggestions for helping students...and it's easy to use.

-- Editorial Board, National Council of Teachers of English

A terrific resource for the classroom teacher as well as the novice writer.

-- Harvard Educational Review

When I was a senior in high school I decided to take correspondence courses instead of attending a regular school. This was the text used for my creative writing class. I absolutely loved it and have been trying to snag a copy of it ever since. This book is GREAT at giving you ideas for how to make up your own work of fiction even if you never tried before. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in seeing where their imagination can take them.

-- Marsha A. Kyrmse

Writing samples, ideas for invention, describing people, places, action, developing structure, revision - all ages and skill levels.

-- Shevi Arnold

"Best How-To Books for Writing Fiction"

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers.
To order from Amazon.com, click on Personal Fiction Writing .
To order by mail, click on order.

Blazing Pencils

I recommend it highly to teachers who write, writers who teach, and the students who keep all the others honest.

-- David Berry, Merlyn's Pen

Blazing Pencils will help shape and channel all that practice so ardently advocated to its most productive and rewarding end results.

-- Wisconsin Bookwatch

...There's a great overview for lower level writers about the five paragraph essay. If your students are like mine, you'll use M. S. Willis's lesson every term. Some of the better students will get the idea of a thesis and topic sentences just from the one lesson. Others will need a blazing pencil inserted under the fingernails....

-- "Marcus Aurelius"

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers.
To order from Amazon.com, click on Blazing Pencils
To order by mail, click on order.

Deep Revision

Hundreds of ideas of how to enjoy the work of making writing fresher, richer, and more authentic.

-- Kliatt

Best All Around Resources for Writers: New Pages

Send Mail to MSW

New Book for Kids Billie of Fish House Lane From Montemayor Press Read a chapter: Click on Catalogue, Literature for Children

A literary Map of West Virginia!

Writers' Links & Resources Resources for writers Poetry Daily Writers Almanac How Artists Get Paid Int. Women's Writing Guild New Publishing Paradigm Resources for writers Thunderburst Edwards Bros. Printers

Here's a webpage at Yahoo that I set up in about 5 minutes. It has ads, but it is REALLY quick and REALLY easy to do.

Writing by MSW Online Fiction Online Nonfiction Article on Revision Article on Dialogue Getting Published Reviews Books Adult Fiction Books for Children Books on Writing Free Newsletter for Readers

FamilyOriented Websites Ellen Kahaner's Mural class Reading and Traveling with Kids

More Jeremy Osner

Photos and Art Linda Adato Rachel Burges

Spire by Rachel Burgess Charlie Cowger Ann Olson Rochelle Ratner Kevin Scanlon Duane Smith Randi Ward Ella Yang

Brooklyn by Ella Yang

Want some great graphics? http://ann-s-thesia.com/

Music& Mixed Media Websites Peter Sciaino Deep Listening

Blogs The Compulsive Reader National Book Critics Circle Claudia Carlson Sherry Chandler Fred First Cat Pleska Valerie Nieman Dee Rimbaud Larissa Shmailo Christopher Vera David Weinberger Lisa WIlliams Loho (Group Blog about the Lower East Side) Brooklyn Parrots Blog!

More Links

Meredith Sue Willis Author and Teacher

Special offer-- Buy books at discount!

Commentary and Other Information on Books by Meredith Sue Willis

Fiction for Adults

A Space Apart

To order online, click A Space Apart. To order by mail, click on Order

The Blair Morgan Trilogy

To order online, click on Higher Ground; Only Great Changes; Trespassers.

Higher Ground

To order from Amazon.com, click on Higher Ground To order by mail, click on Order

Only Great Changes

To order from Amazon.com, click on Only Great Changes To order by mail, click on Order

Trespassers

Trespassers, published in in 1997 by Hamilton Stone Editions is the final book of the Blair Morgan trilogy. In this novel,Blair goes to New York CIty and involves herself in the anti-war movement.

To order from Amazon.com, click on Trespassers To order by mail, click on Order

In the Mountains of America

(Or, vistit the publisher's page at Mercury House)

To order online, click on In the Mountains of America

Meredith Sue Willis's highly praised collection of short stories set in the Appalachian region, has been in print since 1994. It has been used as a text in college classrooms. To read a sample story, click here .

To order from Amazon.com, click on In the Mountains of America To order by mail, click on order.

Quilt Pieces

Oradell at Sea

(Visit the publisher's page at WVU Press)

To read Chapter 3 of Oradell, click on Big City Lit To read Chapter 9 of Oradell, click on Big City Lit

To order online, click on Oradell at Sea

Dwight's House and Other Stories

To order online, click on Dwight's House and Other Stories Read a sample in the Hamilton Stone Review

To order online, click on Dwight's House and Other Stories To order by mail, click on order.

The City Built of Starships

To order online, click on: The City Built of Starships To order by mail, click order. Read a sample!

Novels for Children

Billie of Fish House Lane

To order online, click Billie Of Fish House Lane. To order by mail, click on order.

The Secret Super Powers of Marco

To order online, click on The Secret Super Powers of Marco To order by mail, click on order.

Marco's Monster

(Visit the publisher's page at Montemayor Press)

Marco's Monster has been Included in a list of" 100 of the Decade's Best Multicultural Read-Alouds" at the Reading is Fundamental site.

To order online, click Marco's Monster. To order by mail, click on order.

Books about Writing and Teaching

Personal Fiction Writing

Publishing HIstory: Personal Fiction Writing was first published in 1984, and has been in print constantly since that time. In the year 2000, it received an updated and expanded edition.

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers. To order from Amazon.com, click on Personal Fiction Writing . To order by mail, click on order.

Blazing Pencils

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers. To order from Amazon.com, click on Blazing Pencils To order by mail, click on order.

Deep Revision

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers To order by mail, click on order.

For information on obtaining the out-of-print editions illustrated below, click here or on the book cover:

Featured Book

If you order this month's featured book by direct mail, you may take 10% off your total order, excluding shipping & handling and tax. Order from the Order-by-Mail page.

Billie of Fish House Lane

Thoughtful books are not always entertaining, and entertaining books are not always thoughtful, but this book merges both into a joyful look at family, friendship, and race. ...This book would be an excellent choice for book clubs and classroom discussions.

-- Barbara Carroll Roberts, The CriticsChildren's Literature

Subscribe to Meredith Sue Willis's Free Newsletter for Readers and Writers:

Subscribe! Enter your email to join ReaderBooks today!

New Book for Kids
Billie of Fish House Lane
From Montemayor Press
Read a chapter:
Click on Catalogue,
Literature for Children

A literary Map of
West Virginia!

Writers' Links
& Resources
Resources for writers
Poetry Daily
Writers Almanac
How Artists Get Paid
Int. Women's Writing Guild
New Publishing Paradigm
Resources for writers
Thunderburst
Edwards Bros. Printers

Writing by MSW
Online Fiction
Online Nonfiction
Article on Revision
Article on Dialogue
Getting Published
Reviews
Books
Adult Fiction
Books for Children
Books on Writing
Free Newsletter
for Readers

FamilyOriented Websites
Ellen Kahaner's Mural class
Reading and Traveling with Kids

More
Jeremy Osner

Photos and Art
Linda Adato
Rachel Burges

Spire by Rachel Burgess
Charlie Cowger
Ann Olson
Rochelle Ratner
Kevin Scanlon
Duane Smith
Randi Ward
Ella Yang

Want some great graphics?
http://ann-s-thesia.com/

Music& Mixed Media Websites
Peter Sciaino
Deep Listening

Blogs
The Compulsive Reader
National Book Critics Circle Claudia Carlson
Sherry Chandler
Fred First
Cat Pleska
Valerie Nieman
Dee Rimbaud
Larissa Shmailo
Christopher Vera
David Weinberger
Lisa WIlliams
Loho (Group Blog about the Lower East Side)
Brooklyn Parrots Blog!

Meredith Sue Willis
Author and Teacher

Commentary and Other Information
on Books by Meredith Sue Willis

To order online, click A Space Apart.
To order by mail, click on Order

To order online, click on Higher Ground;
Only Great Changes; Trespassers.

To order from Amazon.com, click on Higher Ground
To order by mail, click on Order

To order from Amazon.com, click on Only Great Changes
To order by mail, click on Order

To order from Amazon.com, click on Trespassers
To order by mail, click on Order

(Or, vistit the publisher's
page at Mercury House)

To order online, click
on In the Mountains of America

To order from Amazon.com, click on In the Mountains of America
To order by mail, click on order.

To read Chapter 3 of Oradell, click on Big City Lit
To read Chapter 9 of Oradell, click on Big City Lit

To order online, click on Dwight's House and Other Stories
Read a sample in the Hamilton Stone Review

To order online, click on Dwight's House and Other Stories
To order by mail, click on order.

To order online, click on: The City Built of Starships
To order by mail, click order.
Read a sample!

To order online, click Billie Of Fish House Lane.
To order by mail, click on order.

To order online, click on The Secret Super Powers of Marco
To order by mail, click on order.

Marco's Monster has been Included in a list of"
100 of the Decade's Best Multicultural Read-Alouds"
at the Reading is Fundamental site.

To order online, click Marco's Monster.
To order by mail, click on order.

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers.
To order from Amazon.com, click on Personal Fiction Writing .
To order by mail, click on order.

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers.
To order from Amazon.com, click on Blazing Pencils
To order by mail, click on order.

To order from the publisher, click on Teachers & Writers
To order by mail, click on order.

Subscribe to Meredith Sue Willis's Free Newsletter
for Readers and Writers:

Subscribe!

Enter your email to join ReaderBooks today!