Jacqueline Gay Walley
“Gay dares to write for me, for women – things we can never say."
Born in London, raised in Montreal, honed in New York City, Jacqueline Gay Walley https://linktr.ee/gaywalley has been publishing short stories since 1988 and published her debut novel, Strings Attached, with University Press of Mississippi (1999), which was a Finalist for the Pirates Alley/Faulkner Award and earned a Writer’s Voice Capricorn Award and the Paris Book Festival Award. The erotic fire of the unattainable: aphorisms on love, art and the vicissitudes of life was published by IML Publications, in 2007 and was reissued by Skyhorse Publishing 2015. This book, the erotic fire of the unattainable was a finalist for the Paris Book Festival Award and from this, she wrote a screenplay for the film, The Unattainable Story (2016) with actor, Harry Hamlin, which premiered at the Mostra Film Festival in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Walley also wrote a screenplay for director Frank Vitale’s docufiction feature film, Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Longing to be Found (2020), which was featured in Brooklyn Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival in San Jose, ReadingFilmFest, American Fringe in Paris (2020). Her novel, Lost in Montreal (2013) was published by Incanto Press, along with the novel, Duet, which was written with Kurt Haber. In 2013, her play Love, Genius and a Walk opened in the Midtown Festival, New York, and was nominated for 6 awards including best playwright, in 2018, it also played in London at The Etcetera Theatre above The Oxford Arms pub as well as at three other pub theatres. It is scheduled to open in 2021 in Theatro Techni in London. Learn More at GayWalley.com
The Latest Collection of 6 Novels by Jacqueline Gay Walley
“I recently reread Gay Walley’s brilliant novel The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable, which is composed entirely of aphorisms that are quietly insightful and incredibly honest. She’s a writer that takes risks, and I admire that, enormously.”
The Erotic Fire Of The Unattainable: Aphorisms
On Love, Art, & The Vicissitudes Of Life
By Jacqueline Gay Walley
A most unusual “guide,” The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable reveals what women never really say-- what they feel, what they know, about men, their futures, fame, hunches, talent, the ocean, sex, and aging.
What they want to articulate about their own feelings but perhaps never had the courage to admit, even to themselves – and what men have always wanted to grasp. The narrator travels, rebels, has made mistakes, and delves into all the vicissitudes of life intently and intensely.
Written in short aphorisms, the style is poetic in that each pensée is short and provocative, although not oblique or metaphoric as in poetry. Each aphorism flows into the next and enters the soul, rather like a piece of music made of thoughts and feelings, building in one’s head. Gay Walley follows the inner life of a woman through the narrative of outside events: getting past a divorce to a man she loved, and still loves. A marriage that didn’t last because they were too on fire from their own pasts. Meanwhile, she is involved with another man and not quite sure how he fits inside the puzzle. She writes about these relationships, her artistic expression: where art is within this commercial culture, and what one must give up and therefore give to make one’s art for it to remain alive. All this is juxtaposed with the vicissitudes of the everyday necessity of making money, existing in the corporate world.
A modern day Margarite Duras, Gay Walley touches on the inner feelings of a woman who loves lightly, writes deeply, and is affected by place, desire, knows the importance of rebellion, inner spirituality and more. The title springs from the concept that eroticism is tied to living one’s innate truth, not to the person one loves, and that the erotic fire is often in the seeking, the imagination, not in having. In 2007, IML Publications decided to publish this gem of a book when the her mother, who has lived a conventional life in Osawatomie, Kansas, declared: “Gay dares to writes for me, for women – things we can never say."
Beginning with “Why Women Fight Pirates” and ending with the narrator’s thoughts on her “Deathbed,” this volume can be reread as a companion to life’s challenges while deepening the geography of one’s soul. The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable is a rare journey into the heart and mind of a fearless woman who chooses to live in and through the edge.
Republished in 2015 by SkyHorse Publishing.
