Meredith Sue Willis, Author

The Ethical Culture Society of Essex County, 516 Prospect St, Maplewood, NJ | Get Directions »
FREE

January 21, Saturday, 7:30 – 9:30PM THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE SNOW! It has been rescheduled for the 3rd Saturday in February, on the 18th. If you have any questions, please call Gus Lindquist at (973) 738 -2496

Meredith Sue Willis, Author,discusses her life as a writer and her latest book, Re-visions: Stories from Stories, in the informal ambiance of a salon setting at Ethical Culture Society of Essex County, 516 Prospect Street Maplewood, NJ 07040, (973) 763-1905, essex@essexethical.org. This event is free; however donations are accepted and the author will be selling her books.

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 Saint Augustine's concubine- each story offers a gloss on the original as well as insights into how we can live today.

Imaginative work inspired by earlier works is a genre as old as the hills. Think Shakespeare mining Plutarch's lives, or Jean Rhys drawing on Jane Eyre for The Wide Sargasso Sea. Meredith Sue Willis as conceived nine short stories in this vein, which are collected in the retrospective Re-Visions. Many are first-person narratives flowing from the mouths of secondary players from myths, Biblical stories, legends, and classic fiction. Here are the testimonies of the sisters of Scheherazade and Lazarus, and Claribel, fleetlingly mentioned in The Tempest. Here, too, a contemporary enactment of Baucis and Philoment, bothe the Ovid and Swift versions. All are highly original and rendered in Willis's signature Appalachian-inflected cadences.
– The Mind and the Muse, Bucknell Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 4, Fall 2011

A person's story doesn't end after one episode, so why do you expect [it] out of characters of myth and legend? "Re-visions" is a collection of short stories from Meredith Sue Willis as she speaks on many twists and turns on stories surrounding Adam and Eve to countless others as she tries to lay more reason behind the protagonists' actions and their ultimate future. "Re-visions" is an excellent pick of short fiction, an ideal addition to any general community library collection.             -- Mid West Book Review, Small Press Bookwatch: November 2011

Meredith Sue Willis was raised in Shinnston, West Virginia. Her father's family came to West Virginia following jobs with Consolidation Coal, and her mother's father witnessed the Monongah, West Virginia, mine disaster of 1907. She now lives in South Orange, New Jersey and teaches novel writing at New York University's School of Continuing and Professional studies as well as visiting schools and giving workshops around New Jersey.

Her novels and short fiction have been published by Scribners', HarperCollins, West Virginia University Press, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, and others. Her first book of literary short stories, In the Mountains of America, was praised in the New York Times Book Review as providing "a[n]...important lesson on the nature and function of literature itself."

See http://www.meredithsuewillis.com