Theresa Williams-Author Archives

O Child, Do Not Fear the Dark and Sleep's Dark Possession

 Above: 

A collage done during my summer residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, 2008.

To see more of my artwork and other things, just click on the category links on the right. 

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I keep a blog here:  Theresa Williams, Author [Exile Edition].  The Exile Edition blog serves as my writing laboratory.  It’s a messy, iconoclastic space, and much of the content here is culled from that source. 

This space, hopefully, is more thoughtfully arranged.  It’s an archive of many of my creative efforts:  writing, taking photographs, writing letters, and making art. 

I also edit The Letter Project, a respository for letters about literature, writing, and creativity. 

You can contact me at Theresarrt7@aol.com. 

BIOGRAPHY

I’m a novelist and senior lecturer in writing and literature at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.  I’m also a core faculty member in the creative writing program at BGSU.

I was born on January 24, 1956, the youngest of three children, to Waldo J. (1914-1994) and Thelma V. (1925-1999) Aleshire. I spent most of my childhood in Jacksonville, North Carolina near Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base.

I have degrees from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where I took two fiction writing classes with William Hallberg. My Master’s thesis, which focuses on the short fiction of J.D. Salinger and is titled From X to I: The Evolution of Salinger’s Narrative Method, was directed by Bill and advised by Luke Whisnant.

After graduating from ECU, I went to Bowling Green State University (BGSU), where I studied with Philip F. O’Connor and Al Young. At BGSU, I won the Devine Award for Fiction, a fellowship named after Richard Devine, a promising M.F.A. candidate tragically killed in a motorcycle accident in 1970; the judge for the Devine that year was Allen Wier.

 I earned the M.F.A. in 1989. The short stories that make up my M.F.A. thesis, titled The Gift of Healing, foreshadow my concern with tragedy, healing, and survival.  

My first novel, The Secret of Hurricanes, was published in 2002 by MacAdam/Cage.  It was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize.

The novel is about Pearl Starling, a pregnant hermit and weaver, living in the fictional town of Waterville, NC.  Despite the curiosity of the townspeople, the Pentecostal missionaries who make frequent visits to try to bring her back into the fold, and the shadow of her own harrowing past, Pearl lovingly, patiently, waits for her child to appear, all the while studiously guarding the identity of the child’s father.

“Hope and catastrophe surge through the novel,” writes a Kirkus Reviews critic, adding that Pearl has “a complexity of character that lifts the story and guides it to higher ground.” Additional critics have commented about the influence of the southern setting in the novel. For example, Julie Haught, in her review of The Secret of Hurricanes in MAR (Mid-American Review), writes that Pearl is similar to female characters in other Southern novels, such as Bastard Out of Carolina, The Color Purple, and Crimes of the Heart. However, writes Julie, Pearl is not “a mere amalgam of familiar characters,” but rather “a complex human being” struggling to tell her unborn daughter how to survive.

June Pulliam also comments on the importance of the southern setting, calling The Secret of Hurricanes a “modern day Southern gothic” novel. Yet June adds that my novel “is no typical work in the genre” because the characters are less tragic victims and more “everyday individuals trying to weather the storms meted out to them.”

Of The Secret of Hurricanes, Elsa Gaztambide comments in Booklist that “[d]ysfunctional families” and “excruciating loneliness are at the core of this melancholy but very well written novel.” And while Gaztambide’s observation regarding the melancholy nature of my first novel may be true, The Secret of Hurricanes also touches on the feasibility of physical and spiritual survival. Accordingly, the novel begins with an epigraph from Rumi: “…My story gets told in various ways: a romance, a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.” As Julie Haught points out, “Pearl rejects the romance and the dirty joke and instead tells her life story as a warrior who has found the value of life in the battles for sheer survival.” Thus, although my novel may seem melancholy to some readers, the novel is also hopeful.

It may be the hopeful mood of my novel that prompted a reviewer at Publishers Weekly to comment, “It’s a pity that Oprah has shuttered her book club, since this first novel about a woman overcoming a fractured past might have found a home with her.” Finally, regarding the narrative style of the novel, while a Publishers Weekly reviewer complained that my “main stylistic flaw is an overreliance on fragments for dramatic effect,” Debbie Bogenschutz, a reviewer for Library Journal, in contrast, wrote that The Secret of Hurricanes “shows a poet’s attention to language and subtext.”

I’ve published short fiction in a number of print and online sources, including Chattahoochee Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, JMWW Journal, and The Sun and poetry in several journals, including Paterson Literary Review, Segue, and Visions International. My poem, “Late September” was chosen as a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award in 1996. Many of my short stories, like The Secret of Hurricanes, are concerned with the inner lives of my female narrators.

When asked by Pam Kingsbury, “What’s the best day of your life?” I replied, “The day I was born.”  I told her, “Everyone’s existence is a miracle.”

I live with my husband and many animals on a 12-acre sanctuary in Bradner, Ohio.