Nora Percival

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High Country Writers' Book of the Year

Weather of the Heart by Nora Percival

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Nora Lourie Percival emigrated from Russia at the end of the Revolution and finally arrived in the United States in 1922. She grew up in New York City and graduated from Barnard College during the troubled decade before World War II. Her first husband died before their son was born. A second marriage produced four daughters, and she is now the proud grandmother of eleven.

In her busy life of family and work the author's early writing aspirations languished, but in her later years a need grew to record her traumatic childhood, when she was a witness to history. After years of research and remembrance, and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the tale has now been told.

After her husband's death, she settled in the North Carolina mountains. A version of her first chapter won a prize in the Memoir contest of the Asheville Writers' Workshop.

Weather of the Heart by Nora Percival was selected as Memoir Book of the Year by the High Country Writers Organization

Life in the editing world led Nora to writing  

"In the twilight of my life, I've produced two memoirs of my youth. Both are set in very dramatic periods; through which I lived, and my hope is that they will speak for many others whose youth was traumatized by social upheavals that fractured their lives.

My first book, "Weather of the Heart." is about my childhood in Russia during the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. It tells the story, through a child's eyes, of how my family's pleasant life was destroyed and how we all lived together and sustained each other through those difficult years before my parents and I were reunited in America. This book has great appeal to people whose ancestry includes immigrants from Europe, or who came here themselves in their youth.

When I found what an act of resurrection I had performed by bringing my lost extended family back to life, I felt I had to do the same for my first love, a fellow student at Columbia University who died young and never got to write the books he dreamed of making. We were both budding writers during those troubled years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and in the years before we were able to marry we wrote hundreds of letters to bridge long absences.

These letters, which tell so much about the life of that time, form the basis for our story, Its name, "Silver Pages on the Lawn," is a line from one of his poems. People whose families lived through that period will find this account of great interest.

Now long retired, I am finally realizing my own dreams of authorship. I also tutor at the local community college, and do free lance editing. An only child myself, I enjoy numerous family of five children and eleven grandchildren.

    As an Editor
The highlights of my long career as editor and administrator include copy editing at Random House, periodicals editor at the American Mgmt Ass'n, and Director of Alumnae Affairs at Barnard College, as well as editor of the Alumnae Magazine there. So I understand the demands of business writing projects as well as more literary endeavors. I am at your service. "