Meredith Sue Willis

Author and Teacher

 
If you have suggestions, corrections, or updates, or if you find broken links, please e-mail MeredithSueWillis@gmail.com

 

Contents:

Advice from experts

Agents
Articles of interest to writers
Bibliography  
Book Doctors & Private Editors

Book Publishers (small)

 

Book Publishers (Nonfiction and Self-Help)

 

Books about Writing

 

Books to Study

Characteristics list

Characters: What they Want

 

Children's Writing

 

Close-up & Long-shot

 

Conferences

Contests to watch out for
Copyright

Definitions:
Short Story

Dialog tags

Dialog - Tom Swifty

 

Discourse Types

 

Dreams

 

Editors

 

Feminist Lit. Journals

 

Film terms for narrative

 

Flashback

Flashback sample

Flashback, Undramatized

Free Advice!
Free exercises 

Free Indirect Speech

 

Grammar

 

Grounding

How Long Is a Novel?

Illusion in prose narrative

 

Improving Style

 

Journals & Literary Magazines

 

More Links

Literary Agents
Literary Magazines & Journals

Lengths for stories

 

Logistics, physical

 

Magical Realism

 

Monologue & Minor Characters

 

Markets for Literary Fiction

 

Memoir

 

Memoir and Fiction

 

More Resources

 

Multiplot Novel

Names for characters

Novel length

Notes on omniscience
Online magazines 

Physical Action

 

Places to Study Writing

 

Plot Notes

 

POD Publishers

Point of View

Present Tense

 

Presses (Small)

Printers: Recommended book producers (not publishers)
Proof Reader's Marks

Pros and Cons of Present Tense

 

Process and Product

 

Publicizing Your Book

 

Publishers (Small)

 

Query Letter Samples

 

Query Letters: Worst Ever

 

Quotations

 

Quotidian Scenes and Object

 

Readability of your prose

 

Reading

 

Resources Online

Scene

Scene example

 

Scene versus Summary

Self-publishing
and Print-on-Demand
 

Self-Publishing:
One Writer's Story

 

Short Story Defined

 

Small Magazines & Journals

Small Presses

Smaller Publishers

Some Tricks of the Narrative Trade

Story lengths

 

Style

 

Tags in Dialogue

 

Tenses

 

Tom Swifties

Types of Discourse
Types of publishers 

Undramatized Flashback

 

Weather

 

Web Pages: Getting Your Own

 

What Characters Want

 

Women Especially

 

Worst Query Letter Ever

 

Writing for Children

Writers on writing

Writers' Conferences

Writing Romance

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Today is
(Updated 6-22--09)     Featured MSW Book

Resources for Writers

 

For information about MSW's online writing classes, go to mswclasses

SPECIAL PRICES ON FEATURED BOOK


 



Dear Writer,
This page has various pieces of information and links to other sites that I hope will be helpful to you. If you come to this as a complete amateur-- and keep in mind that amateur means you do something for the love of it-- you will find some basic ideas about getting published and the book business. For others, there are lots of odds and ends that you can find by scanning the topics in the column at the left.
The ideal publishing situation, which has become increasingly hard to achieve, is to get a literary agent to represent your work. The agent sells the finished book manuscript to a commercial publisher, and the editor at the publishing house works with you to perfect the book. And you, the writer, get paid. Usually, you get 10-15% of the cover price of each book that sells, and your agent gets 10% of everything you make on the book. This scenario has become more and more difficult to turn into reality. Even a published writer often discovers that if the first book doesn't become a best seller, then the publisher may turn down the second book.
More and more people have begun to pay for their own editing and even publishing their own work-- often before it's fully ready.  Before going to a book doctor or private editor, and certainly before self-publishing, I'd strongly suggesting taking a class or joining a writing group for mutual critique, or just getting friends to read your manuscript for reactions and suggestions.  I've belonged to a group of writers for about 25 years who get together every two weeks to critique one another's work. But non-writers can give excellent suggestions, especially about what seems to be missing or if there are things that don't make sense.
There is a lot of good material on the web and also lots of good books about writing. Explore, have fun, and good luck--

                                                -- MSW

 

 

 

The back pages of these two publications have information about contests, literary magazines, and many other matters of interest to writers:
Poets & Writers Magazine
Poets & Writers
72 Spring Street
New York, NY 10012
http://www.pw.org/
Writers Chronicle
Associated Writing Programs
Tallwood House Mail Stop IE3
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
http://www.awpwriter.org/
 
For more commercially oriented information, try:
The Writer Magazine
http://www.writermag.com/wrt/

And
Writers Digest
1507 Dana Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45207
http://www.writersdigest.com/
 
You might also want to take a look at
Writers' Journal
Also useful is Writers Digest's yearly publication Writer's Market.
 

Writers' Conferences

Start with the listings at NewPagesat  http://www.newpages.com/writing-conferences/
Or the Associated Writing Programs list at http://writersconf.org/
 

Copyright information:

Copyright
 

Free advice for writers:

(By the way, I don't necessarily agree with all this advice, but it's fun to read!)
Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
Here's a free article from Book Doctor Carol Gaskin called "The Top Five Errors of New Writers." Click here for article.
Sol Stein (editor, novelist, teacher, developer of how-to-write software) shares advice he gave famous writers.
Vonda McIntyre the science fiction writer has some wonderful, funny pitfalls of novel writing at http://www.sff.net/people/Vonda/Pitfalls.htp
 

Improving your style

The Fog Index-- check how clear your writing is!

 

Readability Tests!

 

 

Places to Study Writing

There are many, many places to study writing both in person and online. Check your local area for adult school classes. The places I know best are in the New York-New Jersey area, but there are also a lot of possibilities online, including my occasional online classes. I will only list places here that I know at least a little about, or have heard something about from people I know. Mention here, however, does not constitute a recommendation by MSW.  Please send your recommendion to Meredith Sue Willis for inclusion here.

 

The Writers Studio has been around for twenty years and has in-person classes in New York and San Francisco plus online classes. Some people swear by it, but others say that the exercises, which are good, take all your writing time. Certainly worth looking into.

I teach at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies Center for Writing and Speech and it has a full range of courses that range from basic creative writing to advanced poetry, nonfiction and fiction. Very complete and solid.  The New School (also in New York City) offers a similar panoply of classes, as do  Columbia University and other universities and colleges.

Gotham Writers'  Workshop offers both online writing classes and in person classes. They run a tremendous number of sections, and, like the Writers Studio, some people swear by them and others find the classes unmemorable. This probably has to do with which teacher you get. They have several levels for most classes and pretty strict rules about how their classes are run, including what they call "The Booth," which is a technique that requires the writer to listen and not defend his or her writing. I do the same thing in my classes, only I call it listening to what people have to say.

Another New York City area place to study writing is the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop in Brooklyn. The instructors all have MFAs, and the website says that "classes are held in instructors’ brownstone apartments in Carroll Gardens."

A new online place for writing classes is WriteFine.

My online courses, usually short, and always scheduled at my own whim. That is to say, once I set up a class, I stick to my schedule, but I run them irregularly.

 

 

 

Sources of Literature Online

 

These are generally classics that are out of copyright, but at this point you can find almost anything in that category on the web. Shop around, as some are more readable than others.

 

Read Print New and very readable, a couple of Google ads at the top of the page.

 

Bartleby One of the first of these online libraries

 

 

 

Quotations: Mostly Writers on Writing:

 

Lewis Hyde writes about art and the market economy: ".....there are categories of human enterprise that are not well organized or supported by market forces. Family life, religious life, public service, pure science, and of course much artistic practice: none of these operates very well when framed simply in terms of exchange value. The second assumption follows: any community that values these things will find nonmarket ways to organized them. It will develop gift-exchange institutions dedicated to their support.

Lewis Hyde, “On Being Good Ancestors,” The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1979-2007) pp 379-379.

 

 

Grace Paley once said in an interview, "I'm an ear believer--I think the ear is smarter than the eye. The experience of reading your work aloud in a class carries you back to that original impulse, 'I want to tell you something.' 'What did you want to tell me? Tell me.' When you tell a story, it's your voice telling a story. You really can hear what's wrong with it. People think you can just sort of smear over it, but that's not true. What I'm trying to do is to remind students they have two ears. One is the ear that listens to their own ordinary life, their family and the street they live on, and the other is the tradition of English literature."

 

 

Lewis Hyde writes about art as not being part of the market economy: ".....there are categories of human enterprise that are not well organized or supported by market forces. Family life, religious life, public service, pure science, and of course much artistic practice: none of these operates very well when framed simply in terms of exchange value. The second assumption follows: any community that values these things will find nonmarket ways to organized them. It will develop gift-exchange institutions dedicated to their support.

 

Lewis Hyde, “On Being Good Ancestors,” The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1979-2007) pp 379-379.

 

 

For me there is no such thing as fiction without poetry and politics. If you excise either one, you have taken the heart of us all. You won't get rich following my advice, but you may come up with something close to true..

 

                                                                            -- Walter Mosley


 

 

[Charles Dickens and H.G. Wells ] are, both, humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details and whisking the page over irritably. They are generous-minded; they hate shams and enjoy being indignant about them; they are valuable social reformers; they have no notion of confining books to a library shelf. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears, and the face of the author draws rather too near to that of the reader. In other words, neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.

-- E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel

 

 

 

“The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”

-- attributed to Samuel Johnson, in reference to Pope’s Rape of the Lock

 

 

 

"I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody."

-- Richard Wright

 

 

"Taking a book off the brain...is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel--you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--&even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble."

-- Herman Melville

 

 

A story is...."a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. 'The king died, and then the queen died,' is a story. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief,' is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: 'The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.' This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story, we say, 'and then?' If it is in a plot we ask, 'why?'"

-- E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel

 

 

People don't turn themselves over to writers as full-blown literary characters– generally they give you very little to go on and, after the impact of the initial impression, are barely any help at all. Most people (beginning with the novelist– himself, his family, just about everyone he knows) are absolutely unoriginal, and his job is to make them appear otherwise. It's not easy. If Henry was ever going to turn out to be interesting, I was going to have to do it.

– Phillip Roth (as Zuckerman) Counterlife

 

 

...Coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two.
                                                                    — Frank Herbert, author of Dune

 

Articles of interest to writers:

A book review about a book about the state of publishing:  "The Business of Books, by André Schiffrinby Meredith Sue Willis.
On politics and poetry in fiction writing by Walter Mosley
Cantara Christopher's article on a possible future of publishing:
The New Publishing Paradigm
Article about digital versus conventional publishing.
Resurgence of interest in readings and lectures? See article  
Free writing exercises! Need a jump start? Try one of Meredith Sue Willis's ideas for writing.
Vonda McIntyre the science fiction writer has some wonderful, funny pitfalls of novel writing at http://www.sff.net/people/Vonda/Pitfalls.htp .

 

Need names?

20,000 names at http://20000-names.com/
Random name generator at : http://www.kleimo.com/random/name
 

Proofreader's marks

 

For Women

Check out the International Women's Writing Guild

 

Feminist Literary Journals

 

(Thanks to Suzanne McConnell)

Calyx
Box B
Corvallis, OR 97339
Reads from Oct. 1 to Dec. 15
Mary Sue Koeppel, Editor
Kalliope
3939 Roosevelt Blvd.
Jacksonville, Fl. 32205
Caroline Zuschek, Fiction Editor (07)
So To Speak
SUB 1 Rm 254A
George Mason University
4400 University Dr. MSN 2C5
Fairfax, VA 22030
13th Moon
http://www.albany.edu/13thMoon/13mmag.htm

THESE BELOW ARE OLD, SO CHECK THEM BEFORE SENDIN


IRIS: A Journal about Women
Fiction Editor
Box 323 HSC
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22908

The Editors
Earth's Daughters
P.O. Box 41
Buffalo, NY 14215
Room of One's Own (Canada's oldest fem. mag)


 

 

Some Small Presses:

Academy Chicago http://www.academychicago.com/. Don't use electronic means of getting in touch with them.
Black Heron http://blackheron.mav.net/
Brighid's Fire Books  specializes in first fiction.
Bright Hill Press http://www.brighthillpress.org/
Carolina Wren Press http://www.carolinawrenpress.org/index.html Andrea Selch, president, carolinawrenpress@earthlinknet
Chronicle Books http://www.chroniclebooks.com/site/catalog/
Coffee House Press http://www.coffeehousepress.org/
Four Walls http://www.fourwallseightwindows.com/
Ghost Road Press http://www.ghostroadpress.com
Grey Wolf http://www.graywolfpress.org/
Iris Publishing Group (Iris Press and Tellico Books) has been run by Robert Cumming for more than ten years and publishes writers like Ron Rash,Cathy Smith Bowers, and Jon Manchip White. They plan 10 books for 2007. Lately they have done more literary fiction and at least one work of nonfiction.
Leapfrog http://www.leapfrogpress.com/
Marsh Hawk Press is committed especially to publishing poetry that has an affinity to the visual arts. The artistic advisory board includes Toi Derricotte, Marilyn Hacker, Allan Kornblum, Alicia Ostriker, David Shapiro, John Yau, and Anne Waldman.
Midlist http://www.midlist.org/
MotesBooks is a new educational and literary press. The publisher is Kate Larken.
Nightboat at http://www.nightboat.org
Press 53 http://www.press53.com/   Small literary press, some emphasis on North Carolina and Appalachian writers, but much broader. Reprinting novels by John Ehle.
Pudding House http://www.puddinghouse.com/
Red Hen http://www.redhen.org/
Sarabande http://www.sarabandebooks.org/
Shoemaker & Hoard has a wonderful list that includes Wendell Berry and Donald Barthelme, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anne Lamott, and Romulus Linney among many others. Publisher Jack Shoemaker was the cofounder, editor, and publisher of North Point Press and Counterpoint Press. See the webpage at http://www.shoemakerhoard.com/about.html
Toby Press http://www.tobypress.com/
Wind Press at http://windpub.com publishes poetry of the Appalachian region.
Word Press publishes poetry.

 

Publishers Specializing in Nonfiction and Self-Help

 

Morgan James Publishing is a new model publisher that works cooperatively with authors of nonfiction and self-help only. So don't take them your literary work, but do check them out if you have a high concept idea for a book on how to do something.

 

 

Literary Agents

Some basic information about agents can be found on the Poets & Writers website at literary agents.  A big commercial publication about literary agents is Writers Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents by Jeff Herman. Prima Publishing P.O. Box 1260BK Rocklin, CA 95677 (916) 632-4400.
Literary Agents of North America is the most comprehensive alphabetical listing of over 800 U.S. and Canadian literary agencies. It can be found in most libraries, or from: Author Aid/ Research Associates International 340 E. 52nd Street New York, NY 10022
Reputable agents often join the Association of Authors' Representatives (see their website )  Here's another site with AAR agents listed: http://www.publication.com/aylad/aaragent4.htm  (This group was formed in 1991 through the merger of the Society of Authors'  Representatives, founded in 1928, and the Independent Literary Agents Association, founded in 1977.
To get up-to-date free information about which agents are selling what, go to Publishers Lunch  Free newsletter on publishing deals, and the Publishers Weekly "Hot deals."
 

Other Online resources. Most have links to other resources as well:

Best All Around Resource:
New Pages  

More (bold face for my favorites):
Aeonix.com Good site with lots of links for small presses.
Authorlink.com
Booksinprint.com
Bookwire.com
Duotrope allows you to put in information and it searches for the magazines that might publish your piece!
DUSTBOOKS is one of the oldest (1964) and best sources of books on publishing. I have used their directories of small presses and little magazines for years.
For Writers.com
How to Do Things  Articles on all kinds of subjects--not only writing, but the writing articles include items like "How to Write Flash Fiction" and "How to Choose a Workshop." Worth looking at.
Literary Marketplace.com 
New Pages  Excellent site with all kinds of magazines to submit etc.
Poets & Writers.org
The Practicing Writer "Supporting the craft and business of excellent writing"
Publishers Weekly.com 
Sensible Solutions.com
Short short novels: Here's something interesting: a site for writing novels in 25 words or less: http://espressostories.com/
Winning Writers.com A site about poetry contests.
The Writer
Writers Digest
Writers.net

Contests to beware of:

These sites have massive mailing campaigns and try to part aspiring writers from their money: poetry.com (also uses names Watermark Press, International Library of Poetry, and International Society of Poets); Circle of Poets, League of American Poets, FamousPoets.com, and Noble House Publishers (not to be confused with the American LIterary Press's Noble House in Baltimore.)

 

Sites for genre writers:

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
Children's Book Writers and Illustrators
Romance Writers of America
Harlequin also has a nice site with information about how to write romance novels. More Harlequin hints here.

 

 

If you Write for children:

Children's Book Writers and Illustrators
The Rutgers University Council on Children's Literature and their famous Rutgers One-on-One Plus conference with children's editors, agents, writers and more.

 

 

 

 

How long should a novel be?

The categories of prose fiction do not have precise lengths. Publishers of novels generally like manuscripts of at least 80,000 words and no more than 120,000. This is clearly a rule that is often broken. Since a double spaced manuscript page runs 250 to 300 words, this means a manuscript of 250 to 350 pages. This turns into considerably less as a printed book– maybe 200 to 300 book pages.

A short story is usually 2000 to 7000 words (less than 10,000 words); a short short is 1000 to 1500 words. A novella is 15,000 to 40,000 words (in science fiction, for certain awards, between 17,500 and 40,000). There is also in science fiction a form called novelette for contest purposes that runs 7500 to 15,000 words. In literary fiction, people would probably call something of that length a long story.

Generally, a memoir, personal narrative, or collection of linked short stories is treated like fiction for length.

 

Prose Fiction Lengths

Here's another way of counting :

 

Flash fiction or vignette:     Up to 500 words (1 - 2 double spaced pages, one inch margins, 12 point Times New Roman or similar font)

Short short                             500 - 2000 words (2 - 9 pages)

Short Story                             2000 to 7,000 words ( 10 - 30 pages)

Long Story                              7,000 to 14,000 words (30-60 pages)

Novella                                    14,000 to 40,000 words (60 - 175 pages)

Novel                                        40,000 words and up (175 plus pages)

 

 

 

 

Short Story Definition

The Short Story has its origins in oral story-telling and in the verbal sketches of situations called anecdotes. Some stories are more like miniature novels, with exposition, rising action, and a turning point or climax. They are, however, generally less complex than a novel, focused on a single plot and setting, a brief period of time, and a handful of characters. A contemporary short story typically starts in the middle of the action (in medias res), and many modern short stories also end abruptly or leave things hanging. Lengths vary, but typically a short story runs as long as 7000 or perhaps 8,000 words, with shorter more usual.

 

 

Showing and Telling

 

Anyone who has every taken a writing class has probably heard about Show and Tell. Often, we're told it's better to "show" ("His smile was brilliant and toothy, and his laugh was deep and welcoming") than to "tell" ("He was nice.") This is true part of the time but not always. I don't want a writer to show me every action a character takes upon rising in the morning (brand of tooth paste, how she turns the door knob...) unless there's a reason. Sometimes a summary is better. I like to think in terms of learning when to tell or summarize, and when to show or dramatize in a scene. Both things are part of writing narrative, and knowing when to use which is one of the most important things to learn. Here are some examples of successful scene and summary at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/materials.html#scenesummary .

 

 

 

 

Process and Product

A review in 2-27-08 New York Times Book Review  of an unfinished novel by Richard Wright makes the point that (a) this should never have been published because (b) it is a very rough draft, and while drafts are an essential part of the process of writing, they are not finished products. Wright is, of course, one of our really fine American writers-- if you haven't read Black Boy and Native Son, I recommend them highly.
 


Notes on How to Revise a Manuscript

After you've drafted your prose narrative manuscript (story, memoir, novel), or at least drafted a substantial portion of it, try some of these steps for revision:

 

• Add material to enrich– and to learn more. This should be done early and often

 

• Ask yourself if you’ve put in all the things that a reader needs. What is missing will depend on each writer’s strength, weaknesses, and methods of drafting, but might include anything from feelings (do the characters show how they are reacting to events?) to essential background facts (will your readers born in 1980 have heard of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?).

 

• Go through your manuscript to see if the essential conflicts have been dramatized. This is an especially good technique for improving flat or boring dialogue, to add drama.

 

• Cut your material so that only the best parts (adjectives, images, lines of dialogue) stand out.

 

• Cut even more out of respect for the reader’s time.

 

• Make changes to fit your audience. This can be permanent (if I decide to make my story for young adults, I may have to get rid of explicit sex) or temporary (I decide to make a short version for a reading when I only have 15 minutes).

 

• Revise action scenes and other narrative sections for logistics. Is it easy to visualize the physical movement of the men having the fist fight? Is the city street where the fight takes place described in a way that makes it easy to picture? Are the parts of the fight described in the best order?

 

• Revise for continuity or consistency. Did the character change eye color between page 10 and page 210? Indeed, did the character’s motivation change in a way not consistent with the events in the story?

 

• Revise for style: are your verbs active? Do they carry more weight than your adjectives?

 

• Polish (correct grammar, typos, and format) to get the most respectful response from readers – especially potential agents, editors, and contest judges. If you can’t spell, you may need to ask your aunt-the-retired school teacher to go over it. There are also editors for hire who will do this work.

 

• Read through the entire manuscript in order, as a reader would. Read fairly rapidly for style, shape, and rhythm.

 

• Put it away and come back later. There is nothing like time passing for getting perspective on your manuscript. Write something else, too, a story, an article. Anything to get some distance on your novel.

Thanks to many people for contributions to this list, including: June Adler, Chuck Arguello, John Birch, Nicole Dweck, Richard Errington, Kyle Frisina, Yorker Kageyama, Mark Podolsky, Olugbenga Opesanwo, and Andrew Silver.

 

 

A Selection of Prose Narrative Books...

...recommended by my friends and students as exemplary and worthy of enjoyment and even study:

 
What I Loved Siri Hustredt "Innovative Book of Ideas"
The Time Traveller's Wife Audrey Nuffeneger "Brilliant handling of flash forward and flash back and point of view"
The Glass Castle
The Case of the Dog in the Night "Excellent consistent voice"
Vernon God Little
The World According to Garp "John Irving"
King Kong on East 4th Street "Social Study Lower East Side in 80's"
100 Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Black Swan Green David Mitchell
Three Junes Julia Glass
The Secret History Donna Tratt
Cat's Eye Margaret Atwood
Possession A.s. Byatt
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle Murakai "Freedom to be imaginative"
Nine Stories J.D. Salinger "Simplicity in setting up complex characters"
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte "Just Perfect"
THe Eyre Affair Jasper Fford "This is jsut for fun i fyou love Jane Eure"
Thank you for Smoking Christopher Buckley
Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl "Clever literary murder mystery"
The Alchemist Paulo Cochlo
Woman Warrior Maxine Hong Kingston

 

 

 

 

 

Featured Book

 

Quilt Pieces , a new edition of the 1990 chapbook with poems by Jane Wilson Joyce and Meredith Sue Willis's
most anthologized short story, "Family Knots."

 

....the story “Family Knots” by novelist Meredith Sue Willis sketches the life of a turn-of-the-century quilt artist who succeeded in blooming where she was planted in rural Appalachia. With determination and daring she pieces her way though difficult relationships, heavy responsibilities, and changing times, always searching for elusive scraps of color that will bring her dreams and patterns to life. Give yourself a gift of renewal in the jewel of a book.

 

                                      -- Carol Crowley, Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine

 

 

For those who love quilts, for those who love accomplished writing, and for those who love both, this small book will come as a gift.
      

                                                                        – Sojourner


...a short, comforting, poignant reading, much like the experience of the piecing, quilting, and family stitchery the work describes.

 

                                                                — Ann Kilkelly, Ace Magazine

 

 

 

Order directly from the publisher for
$12.50 plus $2.00 to help with postage:


GNOMON PRESS
P.O. Box 475
Frankfort, KY 40602-0475

 
 
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