About

Wendy Patrice Williams is a writer intent on getting the message out about the fact that before 1987 in America and in many parts of the world, anesthesia and pain control were largely withheld from use on infants needing invasive medical procedures. As a result, their suffering is lifelong due to PTSD and other mental and physical disturbances.

She has blogged about this issue from 2009-present on HealingInfantTrauma.org (formerly ReStoryYourLife.com), side by side with blogger Fred Vanderbom, survivinginfantsurgery.com. Do watch this documentary film CUTDOWN: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, created by filmmaker and survivor Roey Shmool, here, which features Wendy, Fred, Roey’s mother, Jolene and Hiram Philo, and Dr. Linda Gantt. That babies were operated on without anesthesia and pain control, or with inadequate levels of these, has been medicine’s secret, if you will, for many years. But after the work of Drs. K. J. S. Anand and P. R. Hickey and the mother of Jeffrey Lawson, Jill Lawson, whose premature son died of a traumatic medical procedure done without anesthesia, medicine could not ignore the findings and began in 1987 administering anesthesia and pain control to infants undergoing invasive medical procedures. In many ways though, this issue is still medicine’s secret, for few people know about the history of this practice.

Wendy currently lives with her wife of fourteen years and companion of forty-two years in their rural Klamath Falls, Oregon home. The skies here are ever-changing and the nearby mountains, majestic and inspiring. Retired from teaching, she enjoys hiking, swimming in the public geothermal pool, reading, spending time at the local indie bookstore Canvasback Books, practicing Buddhism with her Thich Nhat Hanh Sangha, hanging out with friends, and travelling with her wife.

Wendy earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California and taught composition, critical thinking, literature, and creative writing at the College of Alameda in California for almost twenty years. She then moved to the Sacramento area and taught English for five years at Folsom Lake Community College in Folsom, California.

As a poet, she was a twelve-year member of Red Fox Poets Underground of the Sierra Foothills, Placerville, California and a board member for five years at the Sacramento Poetry Center.

 

AUTHOR’S PUBLISHED POEMS, STORIES and BLOG POSTS

 

Stories – Fiction and Memoir

• “Carrie,” Under the Gum Tree: Tell Stories without Shame, Issue 13, October 2014, underthegumtree.com.

• “The Coca-Cola Lady,” Writing that Risks, New Work from Beyond the Mainstream, RedBridge Press, SF, redbridgepress.com.

• “The Autobiography of a Sea Creature” excerpt, The Healing Art of Writing I, University of California Medical Humanities 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 XV, State University of New York at Albany, New York.

• “My Mother’s Ears,” The Healing Art of Writing II, University of California Medical Humanities Press, San Francisco, California.

• “Of Rivers and Renewal,” Earth in Here Blog, earthinhere.com.

• “Findings: Surgery and the Emotional Life of a Child,” The Awakenings Review, Volume 8, Number 1, Fall 2019.

 

Poetry Collection

• In Chaparral: Life on the Georgetown Divide, California

 

Poetry Chapbooks

• Some New Forgetting, Rattlesnake Press.

• Bayley House Bard, Friends of Bayley House.

 

Poems

• “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

• “This Ritual—Living with Mom Enid,” “Shark Lady Eugenie Clark (1922-2015),” “My Sheep, My Magnolia Tree,” and “If I Knew,” Sacramento Voices, Cold River Press, 2018

• “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, Cold River Press, 2013

• “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, Cold River Press, 2014

• “Women of Starlight,” Common Ground Review, Western New England University

• “Dweller of Green,” “Owl,” “The Land of Mountain Ash,” “Robins in Klamath,” and “Celebrating Favell Museum Sculpture,” Basin Bards; Poems by 44 Klamath Poets, 2021.

• “Shadowed,” “Pavlov’s Dogs,” “Carnivores at Heart,” and “Women of Starlight,” Sacramento Voices, Cold River Press, 2015.

 

Blog Posts (2009-present)

HealingInfantTrauma.org features over 300 blog posts (formerly ReStoryYourLife.com and 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”

• “Cancer as Cure?”