Literary agent: a profile of Phyllis Tickle

Christian Century, May 18, 2004 by Wendy Murray Zoba

"They shattered my categories, just cracked 'em wide open," she says. "'Their devotion to God and the Christian way was uninformed by questions of canon and historicity." This experience, too, shaped Tickle's faith.

"There is a stage in which myth is the truth" (as in Pelzer) and a stage in which truth is "seen as myth" (echoes of her intellectual upbringing), "and then it comes back to being the truth, only then we call it poetry." The people in Pelzer helped her discover the poetry of faith.

"For the first time in my life I understood the kind of people whom our Lord moved among, addressed and co habited with. They were real. Up to that point I'd assumed he spent his time with refined people like me, in houses like mine, and with manners and intellectual override. It was an epiphany to understand that life in Pelzer was the kind of life lived by a Galilean peasant."

PRIOR TO JOINING PW in 1992 as its first religion editor Tickle worked for nearly two decades at St. Luke's Press, which was begun in the mid-1970s at the Memphis College of Art, where she was academic dean. She and others started the press because they had perceived literary talent in their students but knew of no outlet for their work. When this small publishing house faced extinction Tickle bought it, using money from her deceased father's estate. She took St. Luke's and other small imprints to a level of excellence that attracted the attention of Peachtree Publishers, which bought it in 1987, and which, two years later, was in turn bought out by the Wimmer Companies.

Tickle completed her three-year contract with the firm and then retired from publishing to write. Then PW called. Daisy Maryles along with with the late Bobin Mars had a vision for expanding religion coverage at PW. Tickle's experience as a publisher, writer, instructor and public speaker, as well as her personal devotion, made her the perfect candidate to launch PW's religion section in 1992.

Because she has been numbered among the gatekeepers of the religions book market, she's found more and more people from the mainstream and religious spheres turning to her as an authoritative commentator on religion.

"In an earlier culture, I would think of Phyllis Tickle as an imaginative, benign 'mother superior' to women and men who are finding a voice in devotional literature," says church historian Martin Marty. Today, he says, "Christians are listening less to formal philosophically attuned systematic theologians than to spiritual writers who use narrative and devotional forms,'" as Tickle does. "In a time when much 'spirituality' writing is of an air-heady sort," he says, "hers is heady, and yet anchored in the great traditions."

"Most Christians are really afraid of pietism, and the last thing I needed was the sense I was being pious. Religiosity gives me a stomachache," says Tickle. "We all have flaws and faults, and all the discipline in the world isn't going to get rid of them. That's why we have spiritual disciplines. These things teach us."