Jon Sweeney, who has been authorized by Phyllis Tickle’s literary trust to write her biography, seeks financial assistance for the project:
Phyllis Tickle will be an exhaustive, critical, authorized Life, focusing on every aspect of Phyllis’s life and career, including detailed discussion of her written work over fifty years (poetry, plays, literary, spiritual, and historical/theological), a close look at her marriage (they literally met in the nursery), seven children (one died in infancy), and life on the Farm in Lucy. Then there’s her work as an academic and as a book publisher, her impact during the great growth of spiritual writing and interfaith understanding that was the 1990s because of her role at Publishers Weekly; pivotal relationships with people like John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and Brian McLaren; and the great impact she had on the communities where all of her writing, scholarship, and advocacy has seen the greatest impact: the hundreds of thousands who took on fixed-hour prayer due to her; the Episcopal Church USA writ large; and the Emerging church, for which she served as historian, forecaster, and champion, and which, I suspect, by the time I am done writing the book, will have transformed into something else with a different name.
Image of Phyllis Tickle by Courtney Perry (own work). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons • http://is.gd/v3BQL2