Meredith Sue Willis: Writing Her Own Dispatch

FEATURED AUTHOR—MEREDITH SUE WILLIS Meredith Sue Willis: Writing Her Own Dispatch Phyllis Wilson Moore Meredith Sue Willis—editor, teacher, community activist, wife and mother—is first and foremost a writer. She is the author of five novels for adults, two collections of short stories, three children's books, a young adult science fiction novel, essays, three books on writing and more. South Orange, New Jersey, population 16,000 plus, is her residence. It is a loved place, as is nearby New York. However, Shinnston, West Virginia, population less than 2,500, is the place she calls home and the place she returns to in person as well as in her imagination. Located 35 miles below the Mason Dixon line and an equal distance from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Sago, West Virginia, it is a bustling town straddling the West Fork River. A town where folks still plant gardens out back and a nearby electricity power station generates plumes of smoke, its tall gray towers as much a part of the environment as the river or surrounding hills. The town has changed since Willis's birth on May 31, 1946. Shinnston High School, her beloved alma mater, is no more. School consolidation resulted in the new Lincoln High School, where she has served as a consultant in creative writing. Blazing Pencils: a Guide to Writing Fiction and Essays (Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1990) incorporates Lincoln students' examples of how to write from life's experiences. Shinnston High School played a significant role in Willis's life. An honor student, Willis completed two years of French and Latin, three years of higher level math, attended journalism camp at West Virginia University, published a story in a national publication, The Student Writer, and earned the Bausch & Lomb Science Award. She was sophomore Homecoming Princess, and the class of 1964 voted her Most Likely to Succeed and Best Leader. It might surprise classmates to learn she, too, experienced angst and was not all that comfortable trying to fit in. 10 Reared with her younger sister, Christine, in a modesthome on East Avenue, she was keenly aware of the town's religious, ethnic and socioeconomic mix and polyglot of languages. The town's early residents were of English/Welsh/Scotch-Irish parentage or German farmers and cattle ranchers, with a few Irish railroad workers and descendants of slaves in the lot. Shinnston experienced an influx of European immigrants from early 1900 to 1930. The new arrivals reacted to derogatory nicknames by retaliating with their own version of an ethnic-epithet, perhaps unique to Shinnston, and called their antagonists "Snuffies." It is likely this name came from Snuffy Smith, a do-less moonshine-making mountain man in a syndicated comic strip that is still in print. The Shinnston Snuffies and the immigrants labored together in the oil fields, zinc plants, coal mines and glass industries of the county while their children developed friendships and romances. It was a town of problems and promises. "My Father's Stories: An Essay," introduces Willis's short story collection, In the Mountains of America (Mercury House, 1994) and illustrates the point: "To my father, Shinnston, West Virginia, represented grand new vistas. This was the great world to him in a way city people can hardly imagine. Shinnston had folks from Syria and Spain and Yugoslavia. Shinnston had a mansion on a hill built by an Italian immigrant and a dark little shop in town where an elderly Jew repaired shoes. My father says the first day he was in Shinnston he met Dave Hardesty, who told him: "We have a real tall man here in town named Short, and we have a little short man named Long. There's a black man named White and a white man named Black.' A town of wonder: everything was possible." Her father, Glenn Willis, earned an undergraduate degree from nearby Fairmont State College (now a university) and a Master of Arts from West Virginia University by working in the mines between semesters. He managed a Shinnston Dairy King during the summer with Meredith Sue as his helper. According to Meredith Sue, "he was my teacher and my boss and my dad." He was the...