Jacqueline Gay Walley Searches for 'The Waw'

Writing coach, editor, and author, Jacqueline Gay Walley, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her intriguing new novel, The Waw. The book tells the story of an American woman who, in the hopes of escaping her life, journeys abroad after envisioning a small, lovely English town by the sea. In her voyage of self discovery, she meets several interesting people along the way, including 100-year-old Sir Leo, who bring wisdom, insight, and joy as she embarks on this new chapter in her life. Regarding the unusual title, Walley explained, “What it is is, and you’ll see when it’s mentioned in the first chapter, what it is is the… what the Sub-Saharan nomads call the ultimate oasis, and they kind of know it doesn’t exist out there, but it exists in here and the book is the main character off looking for the… she finds the Waw.” Although she finds solace in this new town, it does feel confining as compared to her life in New York. “She goes back to New York… she suffers from fear of claustrophobia. She doesn’t want to be caught either by a man or caught by… so she goes back, but then she finds… that she’s drawn back to that and a little bit, I think, when it takes from in the end that she’s going to live both lives. I mean, I don’t say what the future is, but she’s very drawn to what is in the small town and the beauties of the small town, which is not the 10,000 distractions and… you get the feeling she’s going to be going back and forth because her work is in another place, and it’s… an unrealistic story in a way, but it’s a realistic person going into an unrealistic story…”

While we do find out the protagonist’s name, it’s rarely mentioned throughout the book. Walley shared that this was done intentionally. “I’m always straddling with, ‘Is it real or is it not? Is it in her mind?’ because it has many magical things going on, unrealistic things. Like, when she meets that man who gives her a heart, you know, glass heart…. her mind is the real thing, but… I wanted to keep it in the imagination.” As far as similarities, Walley does share some commonalities with the heroine. “Well, what is similar to me is she’s a writer in New York and she seems to be editing and writing stuff for other people, as I do, and she… I wrote it during Covid so basically I had a desire to leave, but I couldn’t, so I decided to imagine it all. She’s like me in temperament, and she’s like me in imagination, I guess, obviously, but I have never run off to the coast of England and I’ve never met the characters that I meet there…. unfortunately, I quite like them, and so that part is not true. Some of the stuff that she internally wrestles with, obviously, is a bit true… I think we pick subjects that we like to wrestle with.”