This is the story of Blair Ellen Morgan, the daughter of West Virginia schoolteachers, and her struggle to find her way in a place where she feels she must choose between the raw energy of her hill-country friends and the "niceness" of small town life.
Meredith Sue Willis grew up in West Virginia where her parents were both teachers. She has degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, and her fiction has been published by Scribners', HarperCollins, West Virginia University Press, Mercury House, Ohio University Press, and others. Her book of literary short stories, In the Mountains of America, was praised in the New York Times Book Review as "a[n]...important lesson on the nature and function of literature itself." Her novels for children are Billie of Fish House Lane, The Secret Super Powers of Marco and Marco's Monster.
Her latest books are Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel, and a new collection of Appalachian short stories, Out of the Mountains.
She lives in South Orange, New Jersey where she keeps a four season organic garden and is active in local racial integration politics as well as teaching writing in the schools and at New York University.
