Wednesday Sisters (Clayton)

Author Bio 
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in the USA: Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago,  
  Los Angeles, and New Jersey  
• Education—J.D., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Palo Alto, California

Meg Waite Clayton is the author of The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Runner’s World, Writer’s Digest, and literary magazines. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their two sons. (From the publisher.)

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Her own words:

I didn't start out being a novelist, I started out as someone who wanted to be a novelist but had no idea how one went about that—much less any faith in my own talent. I went off to the University of Michigan thinking I would become a doctor, one of the few educational and career paths I understood. I emerged after seven years as a corporate lawyer in a tidy blue suit, and it was years later—and only at my husband's gentle reminder that I wasn't getting younger—that I got up the nerve to give writing a serious try. I was thirty-two by then, and pregnant with my second son, who was eleven when my first novel was published. Writing, I've discovered, is a lot harder than it looks.

Along the way, I wrote short stories and essays, and more than a few pages that are in the proverbial drawer. I had great luck on the first piece I ever published, an essay called "What the Medal Means" which sold quickly to the only publication I could imagine it in, Runner's World. The other short nonfiction I've published also placed relatively easily: another short essay in Runner's World, as well as pieces that appeared in Writer's Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, and an anthology titled Searching For Mary Poppins.

My fiction, though, was slower going. I sent stories out again and again before they began to sell, revising each time before I mailed them until they did finally start appearing in publications that include Shenandoah, Other Voices, and Literary Review.

I've also been raising children all the years I've been writing, as the Wednesday Sisters do, developing the ability to write anywhere and anytime. I moved a few times in the interim as well, from Los Angeles to Baltimore to Nashville and now to Palo Alto, California. I'm used to moving, though; I'd lived in ten different houses in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Jersey before I went off to college. Despite all those moves, though, like Frankie in the opening scene of The Wednesday Sisters, I get nervous every time I move away from old friends.

Although my fiction is not closely autobiographical, I do draw heavily from my own emotions and experiences as I write. If you're interested in more information on how I do that, please visit the links on the right or the Writers page." (From the author's website.)