Only Great Changes - Hardcover

Willis, Meredith Sue

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684182408 ISBN 13: 9780684182407

Publisher: Scribner, 1985

Synopsis

Small-town West Virginian Blair Morgan follows an inner calling to help people by joining VISTA and traveling to South Jenkin, where her romantic view of life confronts reality

About this title

From the Publisher

Appearing for the first time in a trade paperback edition, the second novel of Meredith Sue Willis' Blair Morgan trilogy takes Blair into the tensions and excitement of an inner city neighborhood during the years of the War on Poverty. Critically well-received when first published by Charles Scribner's Sons, Hamilton Stone is delighted to make this novel available again in a matched set with its two companion novels.

About the Author

Born and raised in north central West Virginia in a family of teachers, Meredith Sue Willis has lived for 30 years in New York and New Jersey and is the author of ten published books. A recent collection of short stories, In the Mountains of America, was praised by the New York Times Book Review as providing "a[n]...important lesson on the nature and function of literature itself." Of past novels, the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Willis makes a familiar story fresh and engaging with her wise perceptions and unusual language," and the New York Newsday writer commented, "Take a half dozen of the novelists who routinely show up as repeaters on the best-seller lists, ask them to put their talents into one collaboration, and the chances are they couldn't write a page which Meredith Sue Willis couldn't do better." A veteran teacher of writing, she has given keynote addresses and workshops from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to Texas and California. Her three books on the teaching of writing are widely used by creative teachers around the country. She also teaches three courses she created at New York University's School of Continuing Education, "Beginning Your Novel," "Structuring Your Novel," and "Making Your Novel Happen." In November, 1995, her fiction was the subject of the Fourteenth Annual Emory & Henry College Literary Festival. Willis was educated in the public schools of Shinnston, West Virginia, where her own father was her science teacher. She attended Bucknell University for two years, then dropped out of college to become a VISTA volunteer in Norfolk, Virginia the subject of her novel, Only Great Changes. After the year in VISTA, she returned to Barnard College in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude. She was intensely interested in her literary studies, but equally intense in anti-war work. She continues to be active in grass roots political organizations. After working as a recreation therapist for a year at Bellevue Hospital, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. Since then, she has worked for many years in schools and colleges in the New York and New Jersey region. Some of her work with children in the South Bronx and Brooklyn gave her material for two novels for children, The Secret Super Powers of Marco (HarperCollins, 1994) and Marco's Monster (HarperCollins, 1996). Teachers & Writers Press publishes her books about creative writing: Personal Fiction Writing, Blazing Pencils, and Deep Revision. Her fiction for adults includes In the Mountains of America (Mercury House, 1994), A Space Apart (Scribner's, 1979), Higher Ground (Scribner's, 1981), Only Great Changes (Scribner's, 1985), and Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions, 1997).

Willis now lives in South Orange, New Jersey, with her husband, Andrew B. Weinberger, a rheumatologist, and their son Joel, a student at South Orange Middle School. Along with her writing and teaching, she is also an amateur political activist and an avid backyard organic gardener.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1985
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684182408
• ISBN 13: 9780684182407
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 305