I'm at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival in Harrogate, Tennessee! Beautiful mountains and terrific people!
An excellent site listing many other sites of interest to writers, students, and many other folks.
MSW is teaching a special one month Novel Tune-up at NYU 6/24/2013 – 7/15/2013. A few spaces still available. Click here for more information.
Latest Writing Exercise
Joel's Graduation from Berkeley
"Meredith Sue Willis '69 Interviewed in West Virginia Living" on Barnard Alumnae. (Printable Version here)."Conversations with Meredith Sue Willis" by Laura Treacy Bentley, WV Living Spring 2013
Books for Readers # 161 -- Duff Brenna, Nora Olsen,
Wilkie Collins & More!
Recent MSW NewsMSW received the Davis-Jackson award as an alumna of the Harrison County, WV, Schools on April 22, 2013. Read the article in the Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram.
The latest post on Politerature has a review of Montecore-The Silence of the Tiger by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and MSW's response in the comment section.
Just out from Montemayor Press- A New Edition of Blazing Pencils: Writing Stories and Essays. Read a Sample Chapter.
Upcoming Events and Appearances
Latest e-book (See all MSW e-books here):
Dwight's House and Other Stories
"Imaginative literature … does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience."
-- Chinua Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction" in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor/Random House, NY, 1988).
Future of Book Publishing article from Wired
A Visual Artist on Writing Her First Novel
Essay in Glimmer Train on Revising by William Luvaas
Foreverland Press
has re-Published A Space Apart
as an e-book(First Published by Charles Scribner's Sons)
all E-Book Formats!
With an Afterword By the Author
Said Ann Tyler: “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.”
“An important new talent,” said The Kirkus Reviews
A noteworthy first novel,” said Publisher’s Weekly
Library Journal said, "Narratively skilled and disciplined, this is an impressive debut."
$4.99 for Kindle, for Nook, for All E-Reader formats
New Writing Tip
Book club discusson of Oradell at Sea!!
Neil Gaiman's video'd commencement address about being an artist: "Make good art."
MSW's review of A Summer Ago, a novel by George Scarbrough is in the current issue of Appalachian Journal.
MSW's review of Lee Maynard's The Scummers is in Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine, Winter 2013.
Abebooks.com sells books, but also provides interesting lists. Here is their 2012 wrap-up.
MSW article "7 Layers to Revising Your Novel" is in the current issue of The Writer Magazine!
For New Jersey Residents: Lovely folks will take away your old books and get them to people who need them!
Terry Gross quoted MSW on NPR's Fresh Air. She was interviewing Lee Maynard. For the whole piece as an MP3, click here.
Latest Issue of The Hamilton Stone Review
MSW's Personal Blog
5-22-13
Just back from a beautiful week-end in San Francisco. My son Joel "walked," i.e., got his Ph.D. ceremonially in computer science from Berkeley. He already received it officially, and is working for Google in San Francsisco. We had a terrific time....
See more at Blogger
Check out my e-books!
(To buy any of these books as e-books, click on the image. They are also available at the Kindle Store and at the Nook Store as well as other e-book stores.)
Praise for The City Built of Starships
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.
–Marc Kaminsky, author of The Road from Hiroshima and Daily Bread
As soon as I finished this book, I started looking for another science fiction book by Willis. She's one of my favorite writers of Appalachian fiction, but I didn't know she wrote science fiction, too. Along with Bradbury-esque science fiction, there's a little of the "jack tale" in this journey-quest, with characters like "Big Cook," "Tiny," and, best of all, "Brash," who changes
sides so often that he could be a weather vane for gauging who's winningthe battle. I got a kick out of the "yeagers"--huge, flying creatures (a salute to Willis' fellow West Virginian, Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound). The links aren't as direct as in the "hunger games" series, but Willis' Appalachian links are there. I really like that this fable--in which the innocent young Seeker, Espera, manages to outmaneuver evil in the "second world"--holds mountains as places of refuge and glowworms as magically healing.
-- Edwina Pendarvis, Professor of Education, Marshall University
Now an ebook. Click here for Kindle and here for Nook.
Praise for Re-Visions
Review of Re-Visions by Diane Simmons on Women Writers, Women's Books
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 MistressT.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
Praise for Out of the Mountains:
Review of Out of the Mountains by Diane Simmons at Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review (Volume 39, Numbers 1-2, Fall 2011/Winter 2012), p. 179. Read whole review here .
Lovely review of Out of the Mountains on Good Reads by Valerie Nieman
Praise in Appalachian Journal and Good Reads!
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."
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