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, Owen Cardwell, Jr. and 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.
Currently she seeks a home for Missing Reels, set in Los Angeles in October of 2017. This meta novel begins with a nasty car crash at the corner of Washington and Lincoln Boulevards and chronicles, over the next two weeks, how each character involved in that collision irrevocably changes. Sometimes, like nesting dolls, Missing Reels delves deeper and deeper into its characters’ stories. And sometimes, by purposeful omission, Missing Reels asks: What do we really know—and who’s telling this story, anyway?
Her memoir, Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, which looks at trans-generational trauma, anger masking sadness, Wholeness versus binary, and soul work, will be published by Barclay Press, Newberg, Oregon, later this year.
Patricia lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.