For  many years,  Jackie Woolley tried to get away from her Texas background. What she wanted was to do was leave the world of survival behind her. While living in Fargo, North Dakota, she began to remember her Texas roots and the lessons she had learned from her parents. She started writing sketches about her parents and the cotton farm where she was born. When she moved to Houston and enrolled at University of Houston/Clear Lake, she  became good friends with her major professor, Dr. John Gorman. "I will forever love that man for not laughing when I first said I wanted to write a novel and explore my Texas roots," she says. The story that followed was called What Death Can Touch which became the book that served as her master’s project for her Master of Arts degree in Literature & Writing from the University of Houston/Clear Lake in 1978. The Sound of Windmills is the novel that resulted.

When asked about the autobiographical material in the book, The Sound of Windmills, she admits to being nostalgic about her early beginnings. Some of the incidents in the story are those she would have liked to have lived. "I’ve been re-writing pieces of this tale for the past thirty or forty years, and I’m going to keep writing this story until I get it right" she says.

Jackie considers her work to be literary mainstream, and the gender pain expressed in all of her writing makes them of special interest to women. Her works ponder the theme of the individual’s relationship to power, surviving personal crises, and the female’s struggle in a male world. Her characters learn to survive by reconciling themselves to the violence in the world or within themselves and to carry on. And she says, "I insist on hopeful endings."

Writing stories has not been just a hobby to fill the spaces in her hours. These are her life stories. "They belong to me and no one else. I tell them over and over to find some meaning in my life and to make sense of the disorder therein. When my life is over, the past, present, and projected future must hang together. And I want it to be a good read." She also hopes that the finished product of her life story will have something of beauty in it. "It is lonesome work," she says, "and she doesn't really know what she's doing. After all, we’re all amateurs at living. "

©2017  Jackie Woolley.  All rights reserved.  

Last revised:January 2, 2017