Only Great Changes

by Meredith Sue Willis

Blair Morgan leaves college to fight poverty following a charismatic, but unconventional religious leader. The familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation, focusing 1960's youth and political culture through finely cut lenses of race. Moments of personal anguish are at the heart of this novel, and they add up to a complex and convincing portrait of a young woman coming to grips with change. First published by Charles Scribner's Sons to critical acclaim in 1985, this middle book of the Blair Morgan trilogy takes Blair out of West Virginia to do anti-poverty work as a VISTA volunteer in urban Tidewater, Virginia.

325 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

A well-known speaker and writer about the teaching of writing, her own novels include A Space Apart, Higher Ground, Only Great Changes, Trespassers, and Oradell at Sea. Her short story collections are In the Mountains of America and Dwight's House and Other Stories. Her work has been praised in periodicals like The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many other periodicals.

She has won major awards including literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the arts, and her fiction has won prizes like the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and the West Virginia Library Association Award (1980)[2], as well as the Chaffin Award for fiction.

An early writer-in-the-schools with Teachers and Writers Collaborative, she has turned many of her experiences teaching writing into three books for teachers and writers (Personal Fiction Writing, Deep Revision, and Blazing Pencils) and three novels for children (The Secret Super Powers of Marco, Marco's Monster, and Billie of Fish House Lane). She is a past Distinguished Teaching Artist of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts."