Contact me at wendy@restoryyourlife.com. I am a member of Red Fox Poets Underground of the Sierra Foothills and a board member of the Sacramento Poetry Center. My poems appear in The Acorn, Rattlesnake Review, Song of the San Joaquin Quarterly, Manzanita, and others and in my chapbooks of poetry, Bayley House Bard and Some New Forgetting. My short stories are published in 13th Moon; Shore Stories: An Anthology of the Jersey Shore; the anthologies Whatever It Takes: Women on Women’s Sport and Writing that Risks.
With regard to creative non-fiction, “Carrie” was published in 2014 in micro-magazine Under the Gum Tree: Tell Stories without Shame and “My Mother’s Ears” in UC Press’s The Healing Art of Writing, Volume Two. My memoir manuscript, entitled Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Coming Home to My Body after Infant Surgery, is newly rewritten and looking for a publisher. An earlier excerpt of the memoir appears in The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One, University of California Press. The blog at this website www.restoryyourlife.com, formerly my incision.wordpress.com, features words of healing, highlighted with original artwork and poetry and posts that speak to coping with early trauma and post-traumatic stress.
I earned my Master of Fine Arts in Creative from Mills College and taught composition, critical thinking, literature, and creative writing at the College of Alameda in California for almost 20 years. Currently, I speak on ReStorying Your Life – Freedom after Trauma, covering such topics as PTSD, preverbal trauma, healing from trauma, writing as a healing art, and the resilience of the human spirit. I also teach English composition at Folsom Lake College, Folsom, California.
AUTHOR’S PUBLISHED POEMS AND STORIES
Stories – Fiction and Memoir
“Carrie,” Under the Gum Tree: Tell Stories without Shame, Issue 13, October 2014, <www.underthegumtree.com>.
“The Coca-Cola Lady,” Writing that Risks, New Work from Beyond the Mainstream, RedBridge Press, SF, <http://www.redbridgepress.com>.
“The Autobiography of a Sea Creature” excerpt, The Healing Art of Writing I, University of California Press, San Francisco, California.
“Baseball is About Playing,” Whatever It Takes: Women Writing Women’s Sport, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York.
“Scheinman’s Deck,” Shore Stories: Tales of the Jersey Shore, Down the Shore Publishing, New Jersey.
“Abby,” Thirteenth Moon, A Feminist Literary Magazine, Volume XVI, State University of New York at Albany, New York.
“My Mother’s Ears,” The Healing Art of Writing II, University of California Press, San Francisco, California.
“Of Rivers and Renewal,” Earth in Here Blog, <http://earthinhere.com>.
Poetry Chapbooks
Some New Forgetting, Rattlesnake Press.
Bayley House Bard, Friends of Bayley House.
Poetry
- “Rondeau for Blue Jays” Late Peaches: Anthology of Sacramento Poets
- “No Repair,” The Light in Ordinary Things, Fearless Press
- “These Final Years,” Touching: Poems of Love, Longing and Desire, Fearless Press
- “Migrations,” “Bait,” “The Snake,” “Better Buried,” “freshly fallen,” “Prophesy,” “An Arithmetic of Ants,” “Directions to the Pearly Gates,” “Dementia,” “Remembering Lunch at Sweetie Pie’s,” “Her Secret,” Rattlesnake Review
- “Now,” Women’s Writing Salon Online
- “Not Yet Prey,” Manzanita: Poetry & Prose of the Mother Lode & Sierra
- “City Vision,” Poetry Depth Quarterly
- “Shapeshifters,” “Verbatim,” and “The New Gold,” Song of the San Joaquin Quarterly
- “The Call,” “I Brake for Wildflowers,” Acorn: A Journal of the Western Sierra
- “Turn Off Your TV” and “A Distant Orbit,” Little Town USA
- “The Red-tailed Hawk,” Peralta Literary & Arts Journal
- “The Forgotten White Working Class,” Thirteenth Moon
- “Portrait,” Plexus, West Coast Women’s News
- “Winged Victory,” Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis
- “Have you seen?” Homeward Street Journal
- “Aerialists” and “Eros Dockside,” Sacramento Voices 2013, Cold River Press
- “Options,” Poetic Matrix
- “Old Birds,” Connections
- “Have You Seen,” Homeward Street Journal
- “Bush in Suburbia,” Peace & Justice Newsletter, El Dorado County
- “Apricots and Blue Beetles” and “Sandhill Season,” Sacramento Voices 2014, Cold River Press
- “Women of Starlight,” Common Ground Review, Western New England University
Blog Posts
ReStory Your Life – Freedom after Trauma, www.restoryyourlife.com features poems of healing, original artwork, and over 250 blog posts that discuss how cope with early trauma and post-traumatic stress, February 2009 – present (formerly <http://myincision.wordpress.com>).
Sample Posts:
- “A Poem to Uplift”
- “We Are Not Our PTSD”
- “In the Land of Hypervigilance”
- “A Great Article about Infant Surgery”
- “Curing and Healing”
- “When Medical Professions Wound”
- “English 1A Students at the College of Alameda Read myincision”
- “Know Thy Triggers”
- “Bessel van der Kolk: A Must-Hear Interview”
- “EMDR is not Hocus-pocus”