Literary agent: a profile of Phyllis Tickle

Christian Century, May 18, 2004 by Wendy Murray Zoba

IN 1987 PHYLLIS TICKLE, then the religion editor at Publisher's Weekly, foresaw a rising demand for religious books. Books, she wrote, were about to become "portable pastors." Her prediction proved true. Beginning in the early 1990s, sales of religious books began a steady increase. In fiscal 1997, when Tyndale's Left Behind series hit bookstores, growth in the market surged again (especially for Tyndale) and has remained robust.

The market for religious books continues to expand. Lynn Garrett, who took over Tickle's post at PW when Tickle retired in 1996, said recently that despite predictions of a decline in religion sales in 2003, the Association of American Publishers was seeing an increase. "The latest figures we published (February 9) showed a 36.6 percent gain in December over the previous December."

Tickle has been in the middle of the religious publishing explosion. "Phyllis revolutionized the religious coverage in PW," said Garrett. And coverage in PW reverberated in the bookstores. Garrett adds that even today, in a less demanding role as a contributing editor at PW, Tickle continues "to play a key role in our religious coverage--a consultative role, in putting together the editorial calendar and alerting us to trends."

In addition to her "midwifing of book ideas" at PW (the term is from Books & Culture editor John Wilson), Tickle has produced many books of her own. She is also a frequent speaker on spirituality and has earned the May's Award for lifetime achievement in writing and publishing.

Tickle has perceived strong spiritual appetites in the culture, and her platform in the publishing world has 'allowed her to respond to them. She has also rallied a devoted readership for her own books, especially for her popular three-part series called The Divine Hours.

The first volume of this literary and liturgical reworking of the sixth-century Benedictine Rule of fixed-hour prayer, Prayer for Summertime, sold out its first print run in a month and reached number 200 on Amazon.com on the second day it was offered. (It was followed by Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime and Prayer for Springtime. The series has sold approximately 50,000 copies.) The books, made up of selected readings from the psalms, Gospels and other sources, are neither didactic, narrative nor "how to," and could be called repetitious. But they have tapped into a spiritual yearning that reaches across denominational allegiances.

The series has had special appeal for people who come from what Tickle calls "liturgically challenged" churches. Once Tickle got over her aversion to signing The Divine Hours ("On what authority would you sign a prayer book?"), she noticed that she was encountering people, mostly women and many of them young, who find liturgical traditions new and exciting.

Tickle's brand of spirituality is intuitive and liturgical. Sacred readings in the context of simple faith is her poetry, which, in part, is why she wrote The Divine Hours. The prayer offices as fashioned in the series include a morning and a midday office, and vespers (early evening). (Compline--an optional office to be done before sleep--has its own section.)

She has kept the hours for almost 40 years, though she is shy about saying so. Behind this practice lies a manifold commitment to exercising praise as the work of God: it embraces the concept of a cascade of prayer being lifted ceaselessly by Christians worldwide; recognizes every observant as a part of the communion of saints across time and space; upholds the centrality of the psalms as the informing text of all the offices (since Jesus used the psalms for his devotions); keeps fixed components, such as the Lord's Prayer; and sees the repetition of prayers, creeds and sacred texts as integral to spiritual growth.

Tickle says that The Hours appeals to people because "we are post-Enlightenment, living in a kind of neomedievalism.... The last time we believed in the mysterium--things we cannot see and what we cannot hear--was in the medieval times."

"Her sense of timing was perfect," says Wilson, who himself uses The Hours for devotional reading. "Many Christians who grew up in traditions in which set prayers were alien have a spiritual home in these volumes."

After The Hours came out, Doubleday approached Tickle about writing a memoir. That idea, she says, sent her into a "six-moth tailspin." "I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I'd ever done that was worth reading about. My life as cocktail party conversation? Yes. To sit down and read about it? I don't think so."

Doubleday prevailed. The result was The Shaping of a Life (2001), which examines her first 30 years ("the shaping phase," as she calls it). The sequel, The Sharing of a Life, is due out in 2005.

TICKLE LIVES on a farm in Lucy, Tennessee, 20 miles north of Memphis and at one time separated from the city "by at least a hundred years," as she writes in her book Wisdom in Waiting (Loyola), also just out. Lucy is part of a bucolic landscape of dry grasses and low growing cotton, oaks and elms and flowering hollyhocks not far from the Loosahatchy River. A country church near Freddie May's Restaurant displays a marquee that reads, "Tint Way of the Lord Is Upright."