For many years,
I tried to get away from my Texas background. What I wanted was to do was get out and see the world and leave the world of survival behind me. While living in Fargo, North Dakota, I began to remember my Texas roots and the lessons I had learned from my parents. I started writing sketches about my parents and the cotton farm where I was born. When I moved to Houston and enrolled at University of Houston/Clear Lake, I became good friends with my 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. The story that followed was called What Death Can Touch which became the book that served as my master’s project for my 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, I admit to being nostalgic about my early beginnings. Some of the incidents in the story are those I’d 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. I consider my work to be literary mainstream, and the gender pain expressed in all of my writing makes them of special interest to women. My works ponder the theme of the individual’s relationship to power, surviving personal crises, and the female’s struggle in a male world. My characters arrive at the moments in their lives when they have to choose between Box A and Box B, and then have to live with what happens next. My characters learn to survive by reconciling themselves to the violence in the world or within themselves and to carry on. And I insist on hopeful endings. Writing stories has not been just a hobby to fill the spaces in my hours. These are my 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. I want it to be a good read. I hope that the finished product of my life story will have something of beauty in it. It is lonesome work, and I don’t really know what I’m doing. We’re all amateurs at living. Last revised: February 14, 2012 |
