RIP Paulette Jiles

 Remembering My Friend Paulette Jiles

The News of the World author was brilliant and driven and, sometimes, prickly. She leaves behind a beloved body of work.

Texas Monthly

By Naomi Shihab Nye

July 10, 2025

 

In her poem “Driving at Night to Uvalde,” Paulette Jiles wrote of seeing a freight train’s lights through a windshield and being caught up in the moment when “everything is radiant, electrified / The tangled bush and the highway are lit up in black and gold.” In the next line, she transformed this moment of sensory experience into a sense of her own mission: “A poet’s job is to see things like this / We wait for a message of hope and courage.”

Paulette felt shining messages everywhere, roaring through landscapes, tugging us backward in time, deeper into everything that surrounds us. With profound originality and grace, she shaped the messages and voices she heard into whole worlds.

For many years, she lived simply in a cabin in the small Hill Country town of Utopia, with dogs, cats, and horses on a high hill surrounded by more than thirty acres and a giant sky. After the worst weekend Texas can remember for a long time, when the Guadalupe River and other bodies of water overflowed their banks and too many stories and lives were cut short, she left us. In a hospital in San Antonio, my dear friend died of gastric complications at the age of 82.

Her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction had long transported readers into other realms—whether far-north Ontario or nineteenth-century Texas. She was a writer’s writer, embodying gifts of intense curiosity and imagination with the power of intricate research and the solid rhythm of discipline. She was no frills, no fancy—just focused, exquisitely beautiful writing.

Born in 1943 in rural Salem, Missouri, she majored in Spanish literature at the University of Illinois and then moved to Canada in her twenties. Working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she helped organize local FM radio stations in small Indigenous communities and learned to speak Ojibwe. And she wrote constantly, in 1984 winning one of Canada’s Governor General’s Awards for Celestial Navigation, a book of poetry. One of her great admirers was the Canadian writer and icon Margaret Atwood.

Paulette’s 1992 memoir, Cousins, tracked her own Ozarkian family, which by then had spun out into different regions of the country. Oral interviews and the adventure of traveling with her future husband, Jim Johnson, created a rich tapestry of family perspectives. But she told me she was so disoriented by the publisher giving the book an embarrassing subtitle that she didn’t come out of her room for a week.

She and Jim married, lived in Mexico, bought an old stone house in San Antonio’s King William neighborhood, renovated it, and later divorced. Though she often claimed to have quit writing poetry, every one of her novels held poetry stitched throughout every character, every scene. These books—Enemy Women, Simon the Fiddler, The Color of Lightning, Chenneville, Stormy Weather, Lighthouse Island, and, especially, 2016’s News of the World—that brought her a large and devoted international audience relatively late in life. News of the World was a finalist for a National Book Award, won the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was turned into a movie starring Tom Hanks, which Paulette liked. (And trust me—she always spoke her mind; if she said she liked it, she liked it.)

“Here is the truth and that is you

Are passing through the world like a freight

You have not been here always and someday

You will not be here at all.”   

We met in 1991 in San Antonio, when Paulette and Jim knocked on our door unannounced and asked if we knew anyplace in our neighborhood where they could house-sit for a while. Somehow, having never met or even heard of either of them before, we trusted them instantly and said, “Sure, come in, we’ll give you the keys—we’re going to Honolulu for six months.” They ended up nursing our beloved cat through a serious illness and, eventually, his death, and they mailed us elaborate letters about the neighborhood happenings in our absence. That bonds you with people.

Paulette was a lifetime horse lover and rodeo trail rider who said she had no desire to teach writing, only “riding.” Bluntly whimsical and honest in speech, occasionally prickly with interviewers, devoted to friends and family, profoundly compassionate in times of tragedy, she traveled regularly to Mexico to see close compadres and loved to play her penny whistle. “Don’t you get lonely up here?” I’d ask about her solo life in Utopia. “No!” she’d say. “I have the greatest community!” I’d stare out at the horizon in all directions and see—nobody. Above her one-room cabin, in a spare studio with a tablecloth under her computer, she typed away daily on her next book—diligent, meticulous. She had all those characters living up there with her.

“In a storm of light

In your solitude, your dog riding patiently in the back

Remember you hold your own life in your hands

Like a wheel.”

JILES, Paulette (Paulette Kay Jiles)

Born: 4/4/1943, Salem, Missouri,U.S.A.

Died: San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A.

Paulette Jiles’ westerns – writer:

News of the World – 2020

The Color of Lightning - 2025