Mary Elene Wood writes short stories, memoir, and personal essays, as well as scholarly essays and books. She recently completed a novel that is now out and about looking for a publisher.
Currently a Professor of English at the University of Oregon.
Mary lives in Oregon with
her partner Grace and assorted animals.
Writer
Mary has published short fiction and memoir in The Missouri Review, Catamaran, The Capra Review, Club Plum Journal, and Midway Journal. She has recently finished a novel and is looking for a publisher. Her new project is a collection of short stories related to music and the ways it touches people’s lives.
She's also published personal essays in British Journal of Medical Ethics (under pseudonym Mary E. Ladd--her grandmother's name), and as a chapter in her otherwise academic book Life Writing and Schizophrenia: Encounters at the Edge of Meaning (Brill, 2013). Her first scholarly book, The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Writing and the Asylum (University of Illinois, 1994), continues to draw both academic and non-academic readers and is often cited as a seminal work in scholarship on autobiographies related to mental illness, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, and neurological differences.
Teacher
Mary teaches American literature, autobiography, and health humanities at the University of Oregon. She also teaches literature courses at the OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute.
Scholar
Mary Elene Wood has researched and written about American literature from the 19th century to the present (short story, novel, essay, and memoir), including work by Zelda Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Margaret Fuller. She has also worked in the fields of archival studies and health humanities, writing about such diverse topics as New Zealand author Janet Frame, American asylum autobiographers Jane Hillyer and Elizabeth Packard, the history and rhetoric of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and Sigmund Freud as biographer and literary critic.
Her work, which reaches across disciplines and addresses both academic and popular audiences, can be found in scholarly journals, including American Literature, American Literary Realism, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, and Narrative.