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Willis fleshes out with warmth and tenderness the complexities of family love, which not only defines commitment but deepens the need. An important new talent. -The Kirkus Reviews 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. -The Philadelphia Inquirer Willis views the Scarlin family ties and loyalties, limits and tensions, with realism, sensitivity and precision. A noteworthy first novel. -Publisher's Weekly
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities. Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.
Suggesting that all phases of writing, including revision, have a great deal in common across age groups and levels of accomplishment, this book presents 196 specific revision exercises, as well as numerous examples from students and from literature. The first part of the book looks at how the ability to revise develops, and at how people can use one another's responses to improve their writing. The second part of the book offers techniques for adding more material and deepening existing material. The third part of the book is about form, structure, and finishing. Chapters in the book are: (1) A Look at Some Revised Pieces; (2) Revision as a Natural Process; (3) Learning to Revise by Editing Other People's Writing; (4) Learning to Revise by Using Other People's Comments on Your Writing; (5) Going Deeper by Adding; (6) Changing Media for Deep Revision; (7) Deep Revision and Fiction; (8) Revising Nonfiction with Techniques of Fiction; (9) Revising as a Response to Literature; (10) Beginning and Polishing; and (11) Structuring the Longer Work. Examples from literature, a 19-item annotated bibliography, and an index of authors is attached. (RS)
Willis treats the writing of fiction as a natural process that anyone can do with pleasure. The book includes over 400 helpful writing assignments for all age levels. In addition, teachers will appreciate the appendixes on writing ideas according to age level, other books on writing, and magazines that publish student writing. "A terrific resource for the classroom as well as the novice writer."-Harvard Educational Review.
Introduces methods and ideas for writing fiction and non-fiction.
For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion. With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the St...
Tired of her upscale private academy in New York City, fifteen-year-old Meli Rossi transfers to Ciudad City School of the Future, which provides an individualized curriculum, an opportunity to make real friends, and insights into her mother's unconventional background in the 1960s.
Fourth-grader Marco has his hands full when his best friend is chosen to be star of the class play and his little sister is accused of killing a gerbil in her kindergarten class.
Mountains Piled upon Mountains features nearly fifty writers from across Appalachia sharing their place-based fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Moving beyond the tradition of transcendental nature writing, much of the work collected here engages current issues facing the region and the planet (such as hydraulic fracturing, water contamination, mountaintop removal, and deforestation), and provides readers with insights on the human-nature relationship in an era of rapid environmental change. This book includes a mix of new and recent creative work by established and emerging authors. The contributors write about experiences from northern Georgia to upstate New York, invite parallels between a watershed in West Virginia and one in North Carolina, and often emphasize connections between Appalachia and more distant locations. In the pages of Mountains Piled upon Mountains are celebration, mourning, confusion, loneliness, admiration, and other emotions and experiences rooted in place but transcending Appalachia's boundaries.
Appalachia Now hops on the back of a motorcycle for a wild ride through the hills we know best�Vicco, Hazard, branches, mine access roads. Fiddle tunes and black lung and the photoelectric gleam of stars. But these haunting stories take us way beyond the familiar. They are as skillfully wrought with the visible world as they are with the luminous being in the hollow of a cupped hand. I couldn�t put this book down and when I did, my heart ached to step back inside the pages. Karen McElmurray