About
Wendy Dinwiddie
Wendy Dinwiddie is a queer Appalachian writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama, where she served as the managing editor of the Black Warrior Review.
Originally from East Tennessee, she currently lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where she is working on her novel in progress, The World Without Edge, the story of a young girl whose mother tells her on her 13th birthday, by way of explaining her father’s absence, that he is sometimes a catfish. The unfolding story braids together the tale of an above-average catfish and the mystery of a woman whose body was discovered in the lake. Wendy likes to think of it as Big Fish meets Fried Green Tomatoes.
As children, my sister and I would carve cave drawings in the antique green paint above the tub, tall trees and mountains, our own names forged out of a swirl of steam and women who came before. At my grandparents, we lived always in the space of people that came before. The cloistered heat of the bathroom, unvented, weakened the sheetrock until it peeled like bark beneath our fingernails. Outside the window, irises bloomed in spring, dozens of bulbs in a field my great-granddaddy’d planted, and in the winter, through the bare branches of the azalea bush, you could see the overturned tombstones stacked against the side of the house and the heavy lead pipes used to outline the gravel driveway, lifted from my granddaddy’s job at the Y-12 nuclear plant, where he measured the width of machined parts in coveralls that failed against the slow seep of uranium that permeated the air, walls, soil.
From The New Caretakers (WIP)
Community Centered Projects
Southern Festival of Books panel, hosted by Wendy Dinwiddie.
Oct 10, 2020
Thomas G. Burton, Sarah Smarsh and Wayne Winkler come together for a discussion about their latest books Voices Worth the Listening: Three Women of Appalachia (Burton), She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (Smarsh) and Beyond the Sunset: The Melungeon Outdoor Drama, 1969-1976 (Winkler).
Letters to Elspeth: Collaborative project with Olivia Townsend
October 29, 2018
Short hybrid piece modeled after a Gothic “found” manuscript. An epistolary story about a forbidden queer romance and an antique clock. 100% sincere. Readers are encouraged to leave a review and continue the story. Written for a class at UA’s MFA program. All proceeds from Perpetual Indulgence Press books and zines are donated to Lost and Found Youth of Atlanta.
Local Spotlight interview with Dr. Hilary N. Green at Black Warrior Review
May 31, 2018
Wendy sat down with Dr. Hilary N. Green, the creator of the “Hallowed Grounds: Race, Slavery, and the University of Alabama,” tour, as well as other commemorative walking tours across the Southeast that “seek to shed light onto the lives, experiences, and legacy of the many enslaved men, women, and children who lived, worked, and even died” at these sites. Find out more about Green’s research here: http://hgreen.people.ua.edu/
