Pam Wilson is a writer, photographer, and keen observer of the world around her. In addition to fiction, she writes essays, memoirs, historical articles, academic articles, and professional content writing for businesses.

Her fiction writing explores the geographies of the human soul, expressing a deep empathy for the hearts and minds of her characters as well as the senses of place that shape and comfort them. Wilson is currently working on a series of stories grouped into novels that will feature characters and plots interwoven across time, through family bonds and through connections to place. Dancing on Broken Glass is the first in the series, while its sequel, Etched Upon the Land, is in progress. Interested readers may find excerpts on this site. They are also invited to follow her Facebook page.

Dancing on Broken Glass

Wilson’s first novel in the series, Dancing on Broken Glass, introduces an adventurous, gutsy heroine, Meg Chandler, a college professor in a small Tennessee town. Meg has arrived at a crossroads in her life and finds herself poised to make some life-changing decisions. As a single mother, her son perches at the edge of the nest ready to fly away, opening up possibilities for Meg to envision a new chapter in her own life. Her parents are beginning to need her attention as age-related illnesses loom, while her devoted mid-life companion, Peter, encourages Meg to settle down with him. However, Meg balks at sacrificing her independence and autonomy unless she can reconcile her current self with the raw, energized passion of her young adulthood.

So as Meg initiates an archaeological dig into the mementos of her past life, surrounded by boxes of photographs and old letters, her memory returns to several dramatic relationships from her twenties that still haunt her and beckon for resolution. Both occurred when she lived in Austin, Texas, in the 1980s: the heart-rending and unresolved love she felt for a fellow graduate student, Daniel, and the traumatic death of her best friend and housemate, Kata, at age 28.

Encouraged by confidantes Sallie, a teaching colleague, and Tim, a spiritual man with HIV she meets at a conference, Meg becomes determined to confront these ghosts from her past.  She initiates a process of uncovering, reconnecting and investigating that leads her to search out Kata’s father, famed philosopher Dr. Gunnar Raske, with whom she reconnoiters in an intense and revelatory visit to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Next, Meg embarks upon a pilgrimage back to Texas, with Peter, to retrace the footprints and emotional landmarks of her earlier life. There, in addition to revisiting the former geography of her heart–the places and cultures she so dearly loved–Meg finds her old lover Daniel after 25 years and, through still-smoldering chemistry, begins to resolve her feelings for him in a poignant reunion.

After Meg returns home, through an uneasy correspondence on Facebook with Kata’s former boyfriend, she uncovers the final shocking secrets and missing puzzle pieces about Kata. As the stories and memories of her life begin to fall into place, Meg begins to achieve peace with her past self and its relation to her current identity, reconciling aspects of the younger Meg, especially her connections to Daniel and Kata, with her current self in order to weave the fabric of her new life.

Dancing on Broken Glass is a story of a woman at midlife reconciling her past with her future. It focuses on cultural and personal geographies, the intensity and timelessness of extraordinary interpersonal connections, and the enduring strength of family.

Wilson is currently seeking a publisher for this novel. It is the first in a planned series of books that will comprise an interconnected, multigenerational family saga.

An excerpt, Where Do Their Souls Dwell, tells the story of Meg’s reunion, of sorts–more of a reckoning, perhaps–in Edinburgh, Scotland with Gunnar Raske, the father of her late housemate and friend Kata, twenty-five years after Kata’s death.

Etched Upon the Land

Etched Upon the Land is both a sequel and prequel to Dancing on Broken Glass, as it interweaves Meg’s continuing story in the present day with a richly-textured portrait of America in 1937 as it was experienced by Meg’s grandparents, Nell and Ike Arledge, on a bold cross-country road trip from North Carolina to California during the Great Depression. A chapter from this historical storyline, “The Great Flood,” is featured here. It tells the story of Joe Monahan, an Irish-American auto mechanic living with his wife and young children along the mighty Ohio River in Warsaw, Kentucky, in January of 1937, when the Ohio River Valley experienced unprecedented amounts of rainfall. The resulting flood raised the river an average of 20 feet above flood levels from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, displacing a million people and causing about 400 deaths. Monahan, a flood survivor who has lost everything, encounters travelers Nell and Ike as he begins to work his way to the Southwest to begin a new life.

AUTHOR’S BIO

Born in western North Carolina and raised in and around the mountains of west-central Virginia, Pam Wilson studied cultural anthropology and fine arts at Bryn Mawr College in the 1970s. The next decade found her in Austin, Texas, where she discovered her love for photography while in grad school, exploring the back roads of the Hill Country with her camera in her spare time. A new job brought her to the mountains of western North Carolina for a few years, then to Chapel Hill where she completed a second Masters degree.

In Madison, Wisconsin, she became a mother and earned her Ph.D. in cultural studies of media, finishing off the decade teaching in Pittsburgh before moving to the Atlanta area at the end of the millennium.

Always an adventurous traveler and avid explorer of the roads less traveled, Wilson’s addiction to international travel was initiated and fed by the opportunity to lead study abroad programs. A semester teaching in France in 1997 paved the way for many return trips to Europe, sometimes with students and sometimes alone.

Prague tops her list of most beloved and most-visited cities. A week in Russia and month in China were probably her most unforgettable cultural experiences, though her recent adventures in Croatia, Catalonia and western France are still whetting her appetite for her next visit there and possibly a move.

Wilson makes her home in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains with her husband, her Bernedoodle Maggie, and a house full of cats. A retired professor at a local university, she has published a book and many academic articles based upon scholarship in her field.

Fiction writers whose works have most influenced Wilson’s style are Louise Erdrich, Denise Giardina, Diana Gabaldon and Eudora Welty. Her fiction writing can be classified as literary fiction and women’s fiction. Although many story elements and settings in the book have been based upon her own life experiences, Dancing on Broken Glass is fictionalized and is not an autobiography.

Wilson is now CEO of her own freelance writing, editing, proofreading and research service, Culture Quest Services. Her photography gallery is available at culture-quest-photography.org. She also writes a blog on Medium called Culture Quest.

Wilson can be reached at Culture.Quest.Services@gmail.com