Williams, Theresa 1956-

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WILLIAMS, Theresa 1956-

PERSONAL: Born January 24, 1956, in CA; married Charles Allen Williams, 1974; children: three sons. Education: East Carolina University, B.A. (studio art and English), M.A. (English); Bowling Green State University, M.F.A. (creative writing).

ADDRESSES: Home—Bradner, OH. Office—419 East Hall, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, educator, and lecturer. Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, lecturer of literature and writing.

AWARDS, HONORS: Devine Award for Fiction, 1989; Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, 1996; Paterson Ficton Prize finalist; Bowling Green State University Master Teacher Award nominee.

WRITINGS:

The Secret of Hurricanes, MacAdam/Cage (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including Sulphur River Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, Visions International, Chattahoochee Review, Hunger Mountain, and Sun.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Blue Velvis, a short-story collection focusing on the life changes that occur during middle age.

SIDELIGHTS: Theresa Williams is a novelist and lecturer in writing and literature at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Born the youngest of three children, Williams spent most of her childhood in Jacksonville, North Carolina near the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from East Carolina University, where she studied fiction under William Halberg. Her master's thesis was titled From X to I: The Evolution of Salinger's Narrative Method and focused on the short fiction of J. D. Salinger. Williams next attended Bowling Green State University, where she earned her M.F.A., as well as a Devine Award for fiction. Her M.F.A. thesis, titled The Gift of Healing, reflects Williams's concern with tragedy, healing, and survival.

Williams's first novel, The Secret of Hurricanes, is a "solid debut—slow moving but undeniably lyrical," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer. The narrator, Pearl Starling, is an iconoclastic, forty-five-year-old hermit who makes her living weaving rugs. Pregnant, her condition is the gossip of her small North Carolina town. Despite the curiosity of the townspeople, the Pentecostal missionaries who make daily 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 Williams's first novel as a middle aged woman attempts to explain her traumatic youth to her soon-to-be-born daughter," wrote a Kirkus Reviews critic. Others have commented on the influence of the southern setting. Julie Haught, in a review for Mid-American Review, wrote that Pearl is similar to female characters in other southern novels, including Bastard out of Carolina, The Color Purple, and Crimes of the Heart. Even so, Pearl is not "a mere amalgam of familiar characters," Haught remarked. She is "a complex human being" struggling to tell her unborn daughter how to survive.

Pearl's life story is not a pleasant one. She still lives in the trailer where she grew up and where she remembers hiding from the violent outbursts of her father, a drill sergeant at the nearby marine base. Leaving home at thirteen to escape the abuse, Pearl drifted from house to house and bed to bed, but she reconsiders her lifestyle when she meets Zeke Bell and becomes friends with Nan, the youngest daughter of the prosperous Hunnycutt family. But the wealth and prestige of the Hunnycutt family hides abuses even worse than those suffered by Pearl, and her infatuation with Nan's father Floyd takes a dark turn, involving Pearl in a murder and eventually landing her in the Hollingsworth reform school by the age of seventeen.

Reviewer Elsa Gaztambide, writing in Booklist, called the story in The Secret of Hurricanes "an emotional hurricane," and the book itself a "melancholy but very well written novel." In spite of the things she's done and the trauma she's witnessed, "Pearl remains a credible innocent," the Kirkus Reviews critic observed, "with a complexity of character that lifts the story and guides it to higher ground."