Patricia Wild’s full-time writing career began in 1998 when her novel, Swimming In It, was published by Flower Valley Press, Gaithersburg, Maryland. For several years she taught in greater Boston homeless shelters; Swimming In It, set in a fictitious shelter in Somerville, Massachusetts run by Quaker women, is based on the experiences of childhood sexual abuse her women students shared.
A former bi-monthly columnist for The Somerville Journal, she created this website in 2006.
In 2000, Patricia began to wonder what happened to the two African American students, Reverend Owen Cardwell, Jr. and Dr. Lynda Woodruff, who desegregated E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1962, where she’d been a “tacky Yankee” senior. Her curiosity became a quest; Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey, published in 2008 by Warwick Press, Lynchburg, Virginia, tracks that quest.
Wanting to share her novel Welling Up online as a non-linear, self-directed experience, in 2017 she created WellingUp.net (https://wellingup.net/home). Ten audio book episodes tell Welling Up’s essential story of the emergent love and trust between a former member of Somerville’s notorious Winter Hill Gang and his homecare worker—and Swimming In It’s main character. This experimental site offers readers a variety of possibilities to more fully experience this love story, its characters, their backstories, and its Somerville and Cambridge setting.
Her memoir, Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, which looks at trans-generational trauma, anger masking sadness, Wholeness versus binary, and soul work, has just been published by Barclay Press, Newberg, Oregon.
Patricia lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.