Sylvia Wendel

Sylvia Weiser Wendel was born in Staten Island, New York. She received her BA in English and American Literature from Brandeis University. After working in Boston for a while, including a stint at pioneer progressive rock station WBCN, she found herself writing short stories. An MA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Boston University followed, and in the early 1970s she decamped to Iowa City, where she earned her MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A few years later, she fled the snowstorms altogether and settled in Los Angeles County, where she has lived ever since. She is retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she taught high school English and ESL. She is married and the mother of an adult son.

In 1982, her essay, “LA Dreaming: An Essay in Three Cars,” won second place in a contest sponsored by the Los Angeles Reader. Her short stories have appeared in “little” magazines. The Beverly Hills Short Fiction Series presented a live reading of her work in 2003. In 2004, her novel 1989 won an Editors Choice award from its publisher, iUniverse Press. Her travel book, North Dakota Curious: A New Guide to the State, was published on Amazon in 2013. A lifelong blues fan, she traveled to Mississippi in 2017, and the result was her novel Groundwater, available on Amazon since 2022.

Since 2015, she has written book reviews for “Joseph Conrad Today,” the newsletter of the Joseph Conrad Society of America. In 2021 her first work of Conrad fan fiction, “The Rescued: A Sequel,” appeared in JCT, followed in 2022 by the first installment in her Adrian Carr, Assistant Commissioner series, entitled, “After Verloc.” The second installment, “After Egeria,” is slated to be published in 2024.

“Conrad left some of his best creations unnamed and adrift,” she says. “I couldn’t resist the temptation to pick them up and take them on further adventures. Of course I don’t pretend to Conrad’s style and subtlety - no one could - but the idea of placing his characters in the frame of Edwardian detective fiction was too compelling to resist.”