Fiction and creative nonfiction writer Pamela Woolford begins her literary career in the early 1990s, writing profiles and interviews detailing the lives of artists and newsmakers. Soon she writes human-interest stories as well for arts and cultural journals and The Baltimore Sun, where she writes a weekly bylined column as a community correspondent. Much of this past work can be categorized as literary journalism. Today she concentrates on memoir and fiction inspired by true-life stories.
“Pamela’s artistry opens a window to allow us to view ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors in those...people,” Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones writes about Pamela’s work.
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Pamela’s love of storytelling begins in childhood, listening to her mother’s stories of growing up in rural North Carolina in the '30s, '40s, and ‘50s. It is these tales, decades after she first hears them, that inspire Pamela to write her short story “Just After Supper” and create the character Mable as an homage to her mother.
She submits "Just After Supper" to various publications for years without finding it a home.
Then in late 2016 after submitting two pieces to Origins Journal, the editor, Dini Karasik, sends Pamela an email, rejecting her submissions while remarking about their "strength and merit" and asking her to submit something written in the first person. Pamela sends "Just After Supper."
Within the pages of Origins Journal, "Just After Supper" finds a home.
Later that year novelist and Pushcart Prize editor Mark Wisniewski nominates "Just After Supper" for a 2018 Pushcart Prize.
Opening Lines from "Just After Supper"
Soon Woolford makes the decision to use "Just After Supper" as the basis for the script of an experimental film she is creating. It inspires the storyline for her solo-screendance short Generation.
Generation Trailer
For more information about Generation, visit the website by clicking below.
In the year in which "Just After Supper" earns Pamela a Pushcart Prize nomination, she earns a second nomination for her story "Pleasant People," which is reprinted on the short-story website Alfie Dog Fiction from the anthology Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody. "Pleasant People" is reprinted again with a new introduction in Grace and Gravity in 2022.
"Pleasant People" explores facades of American society, walls between races, and a connection between two women stretching even beyond the grave.
Opening Lines from "Pleasant People"
Suffering from lifelong signs of a circadian rhythm disorder, Pamela writes "Pleasant People" after having worked for years on her conceived novel Sleep, a portrait of three interconnected people one fairly sleepless night.
Exploring each character's past, present, and future and predominately set in two bedrooms, Sleep is an exploration of the human spirit and connectivity found in ordinary lives. It takes place in an unnamed city, and certain characteristics of the protagonists go unlabeled, including age, race, and physical features.
Sleep examines subtle meaning in actions between people as well as symbolism and suspense in the everyday. It is also an exploration of the relationship between longing and peace and a celebration of beauty in the quotidian.
“Night,” a story from Sleep, is currently available for publication.
Opening Line from "Night"
UPDATE: Pamela Woolford's story "Threshold" has been selected by Bernice McFadden for publication in The Fire Inside, Volume 3, edited by McFadden and published by Zora's Den, a sisterhood of Black women writers. The anthology will also include a memoir essay by Pamela's mother, Rev. Sadie A. Woolford.
Even before publication, "Threshold" makes Pamela a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts in 2014. Then in 2015 it garners her acceptance into Life Stories, Real and Imagined, a weeklong workshop sponosored by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and led by then PEN/Faulkner Foundation president Richard McCann.
Opening Lines from "Threshold"
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Through the Richard McCann workshop, Pamela conceptualizes and begins her memoir collection Meditations on a Marriage about her tumultuous interracial relationship with her, by then, estranged husband, who was verbally and mentally abusive and showed signs of having a personality disorder.
“I hold [Pamela] and [her] work in strong regard, strong regard indeed, and I’m behind this book 150%,” writes Richard McCann, acclaimed author of Mother of Sorrows.
A “gifted writer…doing what [she was] born to do—mine a good story. …Meditations is broad in scope and emotions…[and] moving,” writes Dawn Davis, VP at Simon & Schuster and publisher of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae, The Butler by Wil Haygood, and The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner.
In 2015 and 2016 Pamela spends much of her time working on Meditations on a Marriage and submits two excerpts to Eunoia Review in Decemeber 2016, which are rejected.
Then in January she sends two more submissions to the publication, this time fiction, for which she receives a rejection email one morning at 3 a.m. (The editor, Ian Chung, is in Singapore). She rarely sleeps through the night, so after she receives the rejection she decides to send him six more pieces, again excerpts from Meditations on a Marriage, hoping he'll take one. By 8:30 that morning she gets a new message from Ian Chung accepting them all.
In early 2017, Pamela publishes "Coffee" and "Dog," two vignettes from Meditations on a Marriage, in Eunoia Review. She uses a pseudonym for her husband's name and changes one common noun.
Opening lines from "Coffee"
Opening Lines from "Dog"
Certain other vignettes from Meditations on a Marriage are available for publication, including "Stutter."
“Stutter" from Meditations on a Marriage "is written with a spare crystal clear beauty and has a definite cinematic quality," writes bestselling memoirist Marita Golden. "A moving commentary on missed connections and the deeper meaning of ‘recognitions.’”
Opening lines from "Stutter"
By now, Pamela is concentrating her writings on memoir and fiction inspired by true-life stories, but it wasn't until 2012 that she wrote her first memoir.
After witnessing an incident causing her father severe brain damage and leading to his death, Woolford suffers PTSD symptoms and finds she cannot write for about a year until she begins to write “This Is What Happened,” a sometimes tender, sometimes funny story of finding her way back from tragedy. She writes the memoir, unconventionally, in the third person, and in it explores topics as varied as mourning the loss of her father, online dating in her mid-40s, and an unexpected letter from United States Senator Barbara Mikulski—and how these things are intertwined.
"This Is What Happened" is "moving and very carefully calibrated,” writes senior editor at Smithsonian Magazine Arik Gabbai while on The New Yorker editorial staff.
Pamela publishes "This Is What Happened" in William Patterson University's Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art.
Opening lines from "This Is What Happened"
In the fall of 2017, Pamela reads a call for submissions. After the release of her NPR Best Book The Wide Circumference of Love, novelist Marita Golden is looking for nonfiction narratives for an anthology of stories about loved ones diagnosed with dementia—the topic of that latest book of hers—focusing on a bonding, healing, loving, or discovery experience.
Using a paragraph from "This Is What Happened" as a leaping off point, Pamela writes "My Father With This Illness" about her father's dementia diagnosis when in his 60s and his life with Sadie and Pamela in his remaining years. Marita Golden accepts "This Is What Happened" for the anthology, now scheduled for release in the fall of 2019 and entitled Love in a Silent Storm.
"My Father With This Illness" is available for publication elsewhere as well.
Opening Lines from "My Father With This Illness"
The year before writing "My Father With This Illness," in the summer of 2016, Pamela participates with a group of other women selected for an artistic experience organized by photographer Fabrice Monteiro then in residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, a center for research and experimentation in contemporary culture. She writes about the experience for Eunoia Review in her essay "Here I Am Looking," published and shared hundreds of times on social media the week of the Women's March on Washington.
Opening Lines from "Here I Am Looking"
Weeks later "Here I Am Looking" is translated into German for Briefe aus Amerika. Then it is selected for two upcoming anthologies, Fantasma: An Anthology of Whispers edited by Adura Ojo and David Ishaya Osu and The Trump Effect edited by Amy Roost and Mary McNaughton-Cassill.
Even before the Trump presidency and the protests that follow, Pamela contributes her voice to the fight against his election.
In September of 2016 bestselling author Julianna Baggott makes a post on social media using the hashtag "Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote" and a movement is born. The trending hashtag is quickly used by hundreds, including literary powerhouses and noted voices "as an act of hope, to reach beyond ourselves and honor someone else" in voting against Trump, as Julianna Baggott puts it in the website she soon establishes to publish many of the #DedicateYourNoTrumpVote essays, read by millions. She publishes Pamela's dedication alongside that of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult and award-winning poet Erin Belieu on Sept. 27, 2016.
Opening Lines from Pamela's "Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote" essay
[TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of child abuse] Sometime the next year, in 2017, Pamela is watching what is described as a sitcom. She is sickened when a casual remark is made about raping brown and Asian little boys. Disturbed by the show's scene, she is haunted for weeks and remembers a shocking Washington Post article she read decades before, about a western entertainment industry connection to paedophilia. She is driven to research, write, and publish her essay, "Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?'
Opening Lines of "Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?"
For more information about Pamela Woolford and her work as a writer, filmmaker, and performer, please visit her website by clicking below.
To solicit a writing submission from Pamela Woolford or arrange for a reading, a screening of her film Generation, or a media interview, use the Contact form on the site above or write us at GenerationTheMovie@gmail.com.