Phyllis Tickle Behind the Scenes

Monday through Wednesday find me buried in classes and teaching, so I didn’t receive word of Phyllis Tickle’s death until this afternoon. I did not know Phyllis personally—face to face—but, as many no doubt will tell you, I felt like I knew her personally. So I do what many of the authors Phyllis Tickle championed behind the scenes do: I write. I write to honor her.

I called Phyllis one Friday evening a few years back to talk about some meditations I had written on the Holy Spirit. I expected a phone message, of course, then months of silence while I waited for a response that would never come. Instead, Phyllis answered herself. She had never before heard my voice, but she was warm. Genuinely warm. We talked for a while. She told me she’d like to look at the meditations so I should send them along. She was heading out of town that weekend, she explained, but would read them as soon as she was able.

Turns out she was able early that next week! She wrote to me almost immediately and asked if she could send the meditations to Paraclete Press. (She said some other lovely things—a habit familiar to those who knew her—but they are not germane just now.) When Paraclete Press opted to publish my next book, Phyllis wrote to me again to say that she had absented herself from the decision-making process. She wanted me to know that the board had made the decision without her so that I could believe that Paraclete Press wanted to publish the book—and not just Phyllis.

I have told this story dispassionately. The stockpiling of superlatives would obscure Phyllis’ practical advocacy. She was herself effusive, I found, but she was practical to the core as well. She got the job done with grace and—I speak from personal experience—professionalism. Care counts, but competence counts, too.

Phyllis and I kept in touch over the years. She endorsed one book and plotted about how to put me in touch with other endorsers of the next book; she ended up doing this directly. Phyllis never recoiled from working on my behalf, though we had never shaken hands or hugged one another. That’s why I wrote to her once: “I know in-demand authors like you are extremely busy, and it is difficult for me to write without feeling like I’m imposing. You, somehow, give the impression that there is no imposition at all.”

I suppose the business of publishing books was a pretext, of sorts, for simply being in touch. I loved writing to Phyllis just to be able to hear back from her, because her emails sizzled. It is a measure of her ability to bring words to life that her emails vibrated with vitality. No. That’s not quite right. It is a measure of her life that her words vibrated with vitality.

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