Higher Ground

by Meredith Sue Willis

This is the story of Blair Ellen Morgan, the daughter of West Virginia schoolteachers, and her struggle to find her way in a place where she feels she must choose between the raw energy of her hill-country friends and the "niceness" of small town life.

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1981

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

[TT]

the story captures the anxiety and insecurity of a teeneager from a mostly stable, loving home, which hints at how tough high school can be for those without similar surroundings.