T.E. WILDERSON: LITERARY ACTION FIGURE

Hello. Welcome to my website.
My pen name is T.E. Wilderson, in a nod to one of my favorite authors, T.C. Boyle. But you can just call me Troy.

I am also an editor. I spent over a decade working on developmental edits, substantive edits, line edits, and proofreading as a freelancer.
I am now an editorial & administrative assistant with a publishing house that had quite a heavy hand in shaping my voice as an author.
If you want to know more about my life and career path, hop on over to my blog page.
(Fair warning: It’s long and quite rambling, because I thought absolutely no one was paying attention. It was more or less my journal, but online. Journallng is decidedly not my thing. Until it was. At least, for a while…)
I have entries going back to 2008. And as I update this site to include my blog posts from blogspot,
I was really tripped out by the things that I said I wanted and the winding path that brought me to this current place in my life.

I am also a creative writing teaching artist. You will not find mention of this part of my career anywhere in my blog posts
for the very simple fact that teaching was not ever on my radar as something I might want to do. Which is wild, given how
incredibly fulfilling teaching is for me. Nourishing is actually a better word. And the community that has stemmed from my teaching
was this unforeseen bit of serendipity that I couldn’t have ever imagined.

And, if I’m being honest, my life right now is incredibly wild to me. I have always written. But for myself. It was not anything that I ever shared
or saw as something to pursue with any seriousness. Then, as I was leaving a client meeting one day in Los Angeles, I noticed that PEN had an office in the complex. I knew PEN had something to do with the literary world, but what exactly? So, I stopped in and a very kind PEN staffer gave me a quick primer. And just as I was about to leave, the staffer asked if I’d heard of their Emerging Voices fellowship. I, indeed, had not. They encouraged me to apply. Now, at this point I had not published a single creative word. But, I had this story I’d been working on that I really felt was my best piece yet. I thought, “Why not?” It doesn’t cost anything to apply. I didn’t have any expectations whatsoever.
When I was named a finalist, that was actually the beginning of everything for T.E. Wilderson, author.

Now you know my story, more or less. At least the salient points as it relates to me and my writing. Thanks for stopping by.
If you feel like reaching out, I am always open to meeting new writers. I tell my students that they should consider my inbox a Waffle House—
always open. And I mean it.