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FEATURED AUTHOR—MEREDITH SUE WILLIS From A Space Apart to Oradell at Sea Meredith Sue Willis I am writing these lines in my mother's house in Shinnston, West Virginia, a small town on a river, set among hills and bituminous coal mines. At one time the B&O Railroad came through, and there was a street car line to two county seats. During the years I was growing up, the main street of town was Route 19, a major two-lane highway that cut through West Virginia and went south. Today, the mines are still working, with fewer miners; Interstate 79 bypassed the town back in the nineteen-seventies; the high school consolidated; the Baptist church split in two. I come back to Shinnston for family and friends, of course, but also for the smell of dense greenery and—if you walk in the damp foggy morning—bacon. Someone out in East Shinnston still cooks bacon for breakfast. I mark the changes and what stays the same. Where I live now, people have meetings and parties, but in Shinnston, they still visit. People drop in of an afternoon and sit around the living room and talk, and this visiting is entertainment just as surely as a baseball game. In spite of air conditioning, the unspoken model is porch sitting on a summer evening and waiting for people to come over. This way of apprehending people is one of the mental attitudes I've carried into my life and writing. In Shinnston, if you see someone walking toward you, you usually have time to go over in your mind who they are, who their family is, where they came from. By the time the person is close enough to greet, you've already spent half a minute holding them in your mind. This, it seems to me, supports a deeply democratic attitude—not theoretical democracy but the practical experience of living in a place where people assume they'll be recognized and greeted. Whole human beings in context are, I suppose, the positive flip side of small town gossip and community pressure to conform. I left Shinnston at least partly to get away from that smallness, but I also took it with me. Even now, as I cross, say, Hudson Street in New York's Greenwich Village, I find myself regretting that I'll never know that interesting looking young person whose ethnic background and race 33 I can't guess. Part of what I do when I write is to make my own small town where I know the people and their pasts and even their secrets. Whenyouaresmall, ofcourse,homeis alwayssmall. Onlygradually do we separate the others from ourselves, and it is even longer before we realize that there are many places, too; there are other houses in East Shinnston, and there is East Shinnston and also the West Side and Clarksburg, and Fairmont is in Marion County and far off are Wise County, Virginia, and Mississippi and Pittsburgh. It is still longer before we have a sense ofhistory among our mental furniture. We hear the stories of the past, of course, but those stories are like myths: when Aunt Ninnie was a little girl, she always ran around with no shoes, and she jumped off a low wall in back of the house and landed barefoot on a little baby peeper chicken and squashed it to death! When Daddy and the otherboys took a goat up to the third floor of the Hardesty house for their circus. Satisfying stories, emotionally dense, but stories from the Age of Giants. This was what I discovered in my first published novel, A Space Apart, whenI reread it in preparation for a reprint edition. Its shape and imagery and characterizations pleased me, but I was struck by how the small town in the book seems to be a place of myth. There is very little cultural or historical background to West Virginia and the Appalachian region. I was in my late twenties when I wrote it, I'd been to college and graduate school, and I'd been active in anti- poverty social action and in political action against the war in Vietnam. I...

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