Wendy Call

Artist Statement

My residency at Marble House will be devoted to finishing my essay collection, Grief Ephemeral, a dozen personal, lyric, and collage essays about navigating grief in our death-denying culture. The collection has three strands. The first is a family memoir of the six months between my mother’s diagnosis and death from pancreatic cancer. I describe our family’s experience with illness, the medical-industrial complex, and end of life. I also delve into our society's end-of-life rituals, from “get well soon” cards to “celebrations of life.” The second and third strands explore material I collected during residencies at Harborview Medical Center (Seattle’s public hospital) and the American Antiquarian Society (the largest pre-1820 historical archive in the US). Grief Ephemeral explores how I grieved, how my family grieved, how our society grieved long ago, and how our society grieves now. As we grieve.

This is the cover of my 2022 book of poetry in translation, In the Belly of Night and Other Poems.

Bio

Wendy Call (she/ella) is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide (Penguin, 2007) and Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and author of the award-winning No Word for Welcome (Nebraska, 2011). She has translated two poetry collections by Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, with whom she won the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize in Translation from the Poetry Foundation. She co-translated How to be Good Savage and Other Poems (Milkweed, 2024), by Mexican-Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez. Wendy has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities. She serves on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the Fall 2023 Distinguished Writer in Residence at Cornell College and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa. She lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.

www.wendycall.com