Mary Elene Wood writes short stories, memoir, personal essays, and scholarly articles and books. She has 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 an assortment of animals.
Writer
Mary has published short fiction and memoir in Catamaran, The Potomoc Review, The Missouri Review, The Capra Review, Club Plum Journal, and Midway Journal.
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 scholarly book The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum (Univ. of Illinois 1994) continues to find both academic and non-academic audiences and is often cited as a seminal work in research on autobiography, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry, and neurological differences.
Teacher
Mary teaches American literature, autobiography, and health humanities at the University of Oregon, where she’s a Professor of English. She also teaches literature courses at the OSHER Lifelong Learning Center.
Scholar
As a scholar, Mary has long aimed to write across disciplines and to address both academic and popular reading audiences. Her scholarly articles have appeared in academic journals on literary studies as well as those related to mental health/illness, including America Literature, American Literary Realsim, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, Narrative, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies and Literature and Environment.
She also contributed chapters to the interdisciplinary collections Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett (Univ. Press of Florida, 2019) and Madness and Literature: What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness, edited by Lasse R. Gammelgaard (University of Exeter Press, 2022).