Books were as ever-present through her teens as they were during that 1970’s childhood, and it was sometime during high school that she began to secretly entertain the notion of writing one herself. Wearing black turtlenecks and drinking even blacker coffee, she and some friends formed a quasi literary club—mostly an excuse to carry around copies of The Sound and the Fury or anything by Sylvia Plath, separate themselves from the jocks and the cheerleaders and the weird ROTC guys, and get together once a week to see who could be the most profound. Sometimes they wrote poetry. Sometimes it was good. But usually it was sophomoric (which was fine: they were sophomores).
Following high school and college and a series of odd jobs (messenger, newsstand clerk, art gallery receptionist, lingerie salesgirl), a love for all things psychiatric pulled Wendy into her current profession—chemical dependency counseling. She has worked with every hue of addiction, from the down-and-out to the rich-and-famous. She has worked with adolescents, adults, men, women; in hospitals, schools, residential facilities, outpatient clinics; in California and Washington.
For years she was a counselor, and as such, she counseled. But frequently, when she was helping someone through a crisis or a psychotic break, or while listening to all the wild and wonderful trauma and drama her clients had experienced, the words this would make a great story would play through her mind. It’s not that she thought of their lives as material, but that love of The Story, of language, of libraries and book stores, the smell of old books and the feel of new ones, of reading, of getting lost in sentences and paragraphs, of metaphors and imagery—that never went away. And, still, secretly, the desire to create a book of her very own grew stronger. So she listened, she watched, she pondered, she ruminated…and once she was out of Los Angeles and living in Seattle (she had never wanted to say “I’m a writer” in a town where everyone claims they’re a writer), she began to write. Really write. And she couldn’t stop.
While on a brief hiatus from her career following the birth of her first daughter, she took a part time job as an online news editor and wrote in the wee hours of the night when the little one was asleep and the AP wire was downloading news stories onto her laptop. She joined a writing group. She attended classes, events, and workshops at the Richard Hugo House [www.hugohouse.org], and before long, she had a manuscript. A really, really thick one. That her writing group thought was good—like good enough to submit. But it needed some work first, and Marti Kanna [www.newleafediting.com] agreed to edit it. She got it ready to show, and Wendy began sending queries out to literary agents. Within weeks, one Charlotte Gusay [www.mediastudio.com/gusay/]responded—she wanted to see an excerpt. Then she wanted to see the whole thing. Charlotte fell in love with it, but it was much too long still, and had a few kinks to iron out. So she steered Wendy toward Debra Ginsberg [www.debraginsberg.com], who did one last fabulous edit and assured Charlotte it was ready to fly to NY; where Diane Reverand [www.stmartinspress.com] also fell in love with it—enough to play tug-of-war with another publishing house, win, offer a contract, and bring the book to its final destination. This debut novel, Beachglass, will be out in hardcover in May 2006.
Wendy still works as a counselor in the field of chemical dependency. Currently she is part of the inpatient team at Residence XII, the northwest’s premier women’s-only treatment center [www.residencexii.org]. Her daughters—a 3rd grader and a new baby—are the frequent (constant) recipients of bedtime stories, rainy-day stories, out-loud stories. The elder is as insatiable a reader as mom and a budding essayist in her own right; the younger has been known to chew on a board book or two. This is to say: there are a lot of very full bookshelves in their tiny home in the boonies of Seattle. Wendy remains a voracious reader and continues to write in sporadic, stolen moments at the keyboard. Beachglass might be her only-child of a novel, or another one might eventually come out of those moments; she tends to space such great undertakings as children and manuscripts farther apart than the average mother and author. Stay tuned. |
