Personal Blog

 January 25, 2012

I started late, but watched most of the State of the Union speech last night.  I tried to keep up my cynical front, but in the end I was bowled over by President Obama's confidence, his insistence on economic fairness, and also by the enthusiasm on the floor.
     You forget, reading the papers, watching professional actors and models, how ordinary most of us are in appearance: chubby women (like me!) in red skirt suits, Gabby Giffords looking fragile, the people in Michelle Obama's box....    (Continued at Blogger)

 

 

 

Third Saturday Salon

February 18, 2012, 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
 

I'll be reading from my new book of short stories, Re-Visions: Stories fromStories, in an informal salon setting.For details on the event and some quotes about the book, go to http://3rdsatarts.blogspot.com/ and scroll down.

This event takes place at the Ethical Culture Society of Essex County building at 516 Prospect Street, Maplewood, at the intersection of Prospect Street and Parker Avenue.

 

                                           Meredith Sue Willis

 

     

To buy from the Amazon Kindle Store, click here, and search by book name.
To buy for the Nook, click here, and type in book name in search box.

 

 

 

Praise for Out of the Mountains:

New Pages called Out of the Mountains "full of engaging plot and rich characters. Strongly evocative of place."
Out of the Mountains was nominated for a Weatherford Award. For more information, click Here.
Booklist Praised Out of the Mountains : "Her characters possess a conversational familiarity, and the reader feels absorbed into the small community that is both distinctly Appalachian and markedly universal. This finely crafted collection is worth reading twice to discover all its intricacies and connections."

Praise for Re-visions

The stories were so vivid and natural that after a while I forgot to think of them as based on actual classic myths and felt them alive in my modern world, real as any other stories. My favorite was the one about Lazarus (for the wonderful imagery about fire and moths and desire) --but so many engaged and moved me.
        -  Leora Skolkin-Smith, author of The Fragile Mistress
T.S. Eliot, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," wrote that every new story or poem takes its place in the context of all the stories and poems that have ever been written. An ideal reader would have read them all, yet would bring fresh appreciation to each new work. The old stories -- "the tradition" -- would set up expectations about form and content that the new story would confirm or rebel against. And the new story in turn would make us read the old stories in new ways....Most of these eight stories are about women in pre-feminist times. Willis doesn't create 21st-century people and insert them into costume dramas, as pop novelists and Hollywood often do. These women remain embedded in the mental atmosphere of their own times and places. Yet she somehow makes us see them in ways the original stories never intended -- whether her heroine is the legendary storyteller Scheherezade, the slave girl Topsy, St. Augustine's teen-age concubine or Martha, the practical sister of Mary and Lazarus, who has to see that the house is clean and guests are fed when Jesus comes to work a miracle.
         -- Michael Harris, author of The Chieu Hoi Saloon

 

 

 

MSW's Recent Books:

Out of the Mountains: This book is availble from the ususal online suspects plus directly from the publisher here. Sample story at "On the Road with C.T. Savage"
Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel: The book is available through your favorite book store, online from various stores like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com or directly from Montemayor Press, e-mail: montepress@aol.com P.O. Box 526   Millburn, NJ 07041. For a sample from the book, click here.
Re-Visions is Meredith Sue Willis's latest book. See special deal below!
 


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Book Deal!

[For all of MSW's books, click here.]

 

Special Price on Meredith Sue Willis's new book of stories from myths and other stories: Re-Visions. Regular Price $14.95 plus S&H now $13.00 plus S&H.


Click on the Book or here.

Re-visions: Stories from Stories is a collection of spin-offs from myth, fiction, and the Bible. From a new look at Adam and Eve and why they left the Garden to a grown-up Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the confessions of SaintAugustine's concubine- each story offers a gloss on the original as well as insights into how we canlive today.
 

 

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