Saving Tyler Hake

by Meredith Sue Willis

At the only high school in a small southern West Virginia county, there is an uproar over the death of tenth grader Tyler Hake's father—and Tyler's troubling reaction at school—he brings in his father’s blood-soaked shirt. The teachers, many of whom were students at this same high school, attend the funeral of Tyler’s father, a classmate. To everyone’s surprise, another classmate Geneva Burden, also shows up after being gone for decades. Geneva seems interested in Tyler, too, perhaps more than a woman her age should be. The teachers turn their thoughts to the past, hoping to find explanations and perhaps clues for helping Tyler.

87 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 27, 2025

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."

Reviews

[Rachel King · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of tenth-grader Tyler Hake, whose father has died, and the effect of this tragedy on him, on the teaching community, and the community as a whole. The novella is told from the perspective of Robin Smith, one of Tyler's teachers. I liked the narrator's tough voice and no-nonsense approach as well as her sympathy toward Tyler--she allows him to carry his dead father's T-shirt around with him at school--and her ambivalence toward her own former classmate Geneva, who has suddenly moved back into the area after over two decades away. The novella includes flashbacks of Robin and Geneva's interactions as well as present scenes with Tyler, until the two threads overlap in the present, when Geneva decides to help out Tyler in her own way. Who saved Tyler? The novella asks. His teachers, including Robin, who forced him through his classes, or Geneva, an outsider who had come back home? There are no easy answers in this novella, only a conversational, easy-to-read tone, lucid descriptions, and an exploration of moral ambiguity in a small town.