Little Altars Everywhere is the New York Times bestselling companion to Rebecca Wells' celebrated novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Told in the alternating voices of Vivi and her husband, Big Shep, along with Sidda, her siblings Little Shep, Lulu, Baylor, as well as the almost-but-not-quite family Cheney and Willetta, Wells embraces nearly thirty years of life on their plantation in Thornton, Louisiana, where the cloying air of the bayou and a web of family secrets at once shelters, traps, and defines an utterly original community of souls.
Little Altars Everywhere is an insightful, piercing, and unflinching evocation of childhood, a loving tribute to the transforming power of faith, and a thoroughly fresh chronicle of a family which is as haunted as it is blessed. Performed by Judith Ivey
Rebecca Wells, actress, playwright, and New York Times bestselling author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Little Altars Everywhere, Ya-Yas in Bloom, and The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder was born in Louisiana.
After college, Wells later moved to New York City to pursue her acting career and began studying the Stanislavski method of acting, as well as a depth approach that integrates spirituality and performance with Maurine Holbert. "I live in an actor's body, in which the cultivation of sense memory, active listening, and the belief that the sublime can arise out of the most common character, word, or gesture is somewhat of a religion for me," she says.
Wells's commitment was not only to the stage, but to peace and social justice as well. In 1982 she went to Seattle, Washington, where she performed at numerous professional theaters. She also founded a chapter of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament. Charmed by the beauty and grace of The Great Northwest, she decided to make it her home.
Her writing, however, resides in the heart of Louisiana. While many fans assume her work is autobiographical, Wells maintains that her stories are just that—stories. "I grew up in the fertile world of storytelling, filled with flamboyance, flirting, futility, and fear. My work, though, is a result of my imagination dancing a kind of psycho-spiritual tango with my own history, and the final harvest is fiction, not memoir." Little Altars Everywhere, which won the Western States Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a no. 1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the 1999 Adult Trade ABBY Award, have given Wells a dominant place in American literature.
She lives on an island near Seattle with her husband and her King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, who is named Mercy. As Wells is fond of saying, "Dogs always remind me why the word God is dog spelled backwards."
