Wendy Fontaine is a writer, teacher and mother in Los Angeles.
Her nonfiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers and literary journals, from the Huffington Post and Readers Digest to Literary Mama, Passages North, River Teeth, Mud Season Review and many others. Her fiction has appeared in Angels Flight Literary West. She’s won prizes from Tiferet Journal, Hunger Mountain Review and Identity Theory, and has been nominated for Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. Current projects include a memoir, a novel and a TV screenplay.
She also teaches writing workshops on the intersection between the neuroscience of memory and the crafting of memoir at conferences and studios across the country.
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Wendy grew up in rural western Maine, the daughter of shoe factory workers. After graduating from the University of Maine in 1996, she worked as a newspaper reporter for ten years, covering all manner of news. When her daughter was born in 2006, she retired from the news biz to be a stay-at-home mom. However, life had other plans for her.
After a devastating divorce, she juggled two jobs, cared for a growing toddler and began to write first-person stories about the adventures and struggles of single parenthood.
Two years later, she and her daughter, Angela, sold their belongings and moved from Maine to Los Angeles, where Wendy went back to school to earn her masters degree in creative writing, thanks in large part to a generous scholarship from the Guy P. Gannett Foundation.
Today, she is a freelance writer, journalism teacher, writing workshop leader, essayist, aspiring novelist, screenplay writer, designated cookie baker, and imperfect yogini. That sweet toddler is about to be a senior in high school.
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
~Mary Oliver