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Re-Visions: Stories from Stories
Re-visions: Stories from Stories is a collection of spin-offs from myth, fiction, and the Bible. From a new look at Adam and Eve and why they left the Garden to a grown-up Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the confessions of Saint Augustine's concubine- each story offers a gloss on the original as well as insights into how we can live today.
- GenresShort Stories
122 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2010
317 people want to read
About the author
Meredith Sue Willis
28 books31 followersA 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."
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."
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 6, 2011
On the one hand, there’s the much vaunted Harold Bloomian “anxiety of influence” that every writer confronts. Then there’s the deep pleasure of influence, the latter very much in evidence in Meredith Sue Willis’s charming Re-visions, Stories from Stories, recently published by Hamilton Stone Editions.
Willis, who for decades has created moving fictions out of lives of women from her native Appalachia most recently in her Out of the Mountains, this time has brought together a collection that rescues half a dozen women from marginal roles they played in the Bible, mythology, and other literature and brought them front and center. There’s Miss Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the brave Scheherezade, and St. Augustine’s concubine, whom Willis has brought to life as Monica.
My favorites are Lazarus’s spunky sister Martha from the New Testament and Baucis, that arboreal spouse from Ovid and Greek mythology. In Willis’s re-telling, Martha remains rooted in her Biblical world, but has a modern ironic personality that makes her totally impatient with all the “new-law” Jews, who, like Lazarus are flocking to Jesus and giving away everything in the house. Who’s going to be left to earn a living? She asks.
In the case of Baucis and Philemon, the happy tale of a marriage so solid and long lasting, the couple become intertwining trees, Willis basically says: Are you kidding! She transports that story to a bench in a New York City Park, likely Queens. There our young narrator stops to stretch in her jog and becomes absorbed in the tale of an elderly shopping bag lady and her idealistic, lost husband. Yup, retirement hasn’t quite worked out and in fact has turned hubby into a cranky, insufferable old bastard who has estranged their two children. He stays out at night, risks pneumonia and, yes, he’s decided to become a tree. “Why don’t you divorce him or just leave?” the young narrator asks. Baucis replies, “Oh I don’t know. I’m going to be a tree with him for a while,” she responds.
Willis’s graceful talent and deep empathy makes this decision not only natural and understandable, but beautiful.
Willis, who for decades has created moving fictions out of lives of women from her native Appalachia most recently in her Out of the Mountains, this time has brought together a collection that rescues half a dozen women from marginal roles they played in the Bible, mythology, and other literature and brought them front and center. There’s Miss Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the brave Scheherezade, and St. Augustine’s concubine, whom Willis has brought to life as Monica.
My favorites are Lazarus’s spunky sister Martha from the New Testament and Baucis, that arboreal spouse from Ovid and Greek mythology. In Willis’s re-telling, Martha remains rooted in her Biblical world, but has a modern ironic personality that makes her totally impatient with all the “new-law” Jews, who, like Lazarus are flocking to Jesus and giving away everything in the house. Who’s going to be left to earn a living? She asks.
In the case of Baucis and Philemon, the happy tale of a marriage so solid and long lasting, the couple become intertwining trees, Willis basically says: Are you kidding! She transports that story to a bench in a New York City Park, likely Queens. There our young narrator stops to stretch in her jog and becomes absorbed in the tale of an elderly shopping bag lady and her idealistic, lost husband. Yup, retirement hasn’t quite worked out and in fact has turned hubby into a cranky, insufferable old bastard who has estranged their two children. He stays out at night, risks pneumonia and, yes, he’s decided to become a tree. “Why don’t you divorce him or just leave?” the young narrator asks. Baucis replies, “Oh I don’t know. I’m going to be a tree with him for a while,” she responds.
Willis’s graceful talent and deep empathy makes this decision not only natural and understandable, but beautiful.
January 22, 2012
The Bible, Shakespeare, Arabian Nights: it takes a lot of chutzpah to reinvent stories we think we already know. That’s what Meredith Sue Willis has done in this collection. Re-visions brings to life a group of strong women, some rescued from myth, others imagined from brief allusions. In freeing them from their secondary roles, Meredith Sue Willis has created a fresh new cast of mythic women.
“The Great Wolf” begins with an argument between Adam and Eve over whether the One is a man or a woman. “What else could She be but a mother?” Eve asks. “She who brought forth everything.”
“Our Father,” Adam retorts, “He displays the sky and the land before us as the peacock displays his feathers. He plants his seed throughout the earth.”
“The male has nothing to do with it,” Eve says. Eve is pregnant and feisty; being full of creation makes her feel powerful. The couple is new to procreation, and not fully informed of how it works, so Eve enjoys teasing Adam.
From this irreverent beginning, the story progresses to the snake and the tree of knowledge. Although we know how it will turn out, we’re surprised at unexpected twists. The knowledge that comes from the forbidden fruit is far more gruesome and graphic in its horror than what we remember from the Old Testament.
This is just one example of how Willis is not afraid to challenge the canon. In tale after subversive tale, she transforms women from obedient daughters, helpmeets and handmaidens, to fully free, lively, sexual beings with stories of their own.
“The Great Wolf” begins with an argument between Adam and Eve over whether the One is a man or a woman. “What else could She be but a mother?” Eve asks. “She who brought forth everything.”
“Our Father,” Adam retorts, “He displays the sky and the land before us as the peacock displays his feathers. He plants his seed throughout the earth.”
“The male has nothing to do with it,” Eve says. Eve is pregnant and feisty; being full of creation makes her feel powerful. The couple is new to procreation, and not fully informed of how it works, so Eve enjoys teasing Adam.
From this irreverent beginning, the story progresses to the snake and the tree of knowledge. Although we know how it will turn out, we’re surprised at unexpected twists. The knowledge that comes from the forbidden fruit is far more gruesome and graphic in its horror than what we remember from the Old Testament.
This is just one example of how Willis is not afraid to challenge the canon. In tale after subversive tale, she transforms women from obedient daughters, helpmeets and handmaidens, to fully free, lively, sexual beings with stories of their own.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews