Friday night was jumpin' in Maplewood Village, and a full moon lit the way to Words Bookstore, where local author Meredith Sue Willis discussed her latest book of non-fiction, Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel, and read from her new collection of Appalachian stories, Out of the Mountains.

Willis, who grew up in West Virginia, raised her family in South Orange while maintaining an active life as a writer and teacher in the New York metropolitan area. Willis was an early member of Teachers and Writers Collaborative, which sends writers into New York City public schools.

The workshop strategies employed by T&W were picked up years later by pedagogues, such as Lucy Calkins, whose writing program is used in the South Orange-Maplewood School District. Willis penned some of the most popular writing books to come out of T&W, like Blazing Pencils and Deep Revision. She teaches a popular fiction writing class at New York University and offers on-line instruction at her website (meredithsuewillis.com)

Willis has authored nine works of fiction for adults, three children's books, and four books about writing. She explained that some of the characters in Out of the Mountains, have lived in and out of Appalachia, as she has. Setting the mood, she encouraged the audience to imagine that, instead of being in a beautiful bookstore in New Jersey, they were sitting on a porch in a mist, listening to someone telling a story.

"On the Road with C.T. Savage" is a short story about a wild motorcycle-riding ex-husband, who walked out on his wife and two young children in Cooper County, West Virginia twenty years prior to the story's beginning. The wife, who has worked her way up from being a nurse's aide, to an LPN, to an RN, is telling the story. C.T. Savage is now a gray pony-tailed wheezer who takes his ex-wife on one final ride. 

The audience was enraptured as Willis caught the cadence of the woman's voice, filled with mixed emotions. After the reading, Willis talked about how her father was an expert storyteller, making the events of his day both fascinating and real. She hopes that her stories show that Appalachia has many faces and much to say to the world.

As Willis segued to questions about writing fiction, she referred to separating the writing process from the product that you are writing. Such practical advice,  distilled from decades of being a writer and teaching writing, is contained in Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel.

At the end of the reading, Willis signed books, while audience members engaged her in a little storytelling of their own.