Who is Wendy Teller?
Before I was a writer I was a systems engineer and software engineer. When I retired from engineering, I thought I would write history. That was a challenge, especially when you consider I was “writing impaired.” I didn’t learn to read until I was in the third grade, a real embarrassment for a member of an intellectual family. And once I did learn, I couldn’t spell or punctuate. In short, English was my worst subject.
But I loved to read, especially history that reads like a novel, for example, books by Barbara Tuckman and Dava Sobel. I loved Galileo’s Daughter and The Distant Mirror. So, with the help of spell checker and my husband, I gave writing history a try.
I quickly discovered writing interesting, readable history is not easy. I was so worried about being fair to historical figures that my stories read more like my high school history texts than The Guns of August.
But I realized I could write fiction that was historically accurate, allowing me to tell the stories of past times. My novel, Becoming Mia, which takes place in the turbulent 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, was published in 2018.
My novel, Hungarian Rhapsody is loosely based on my grandmother’s life. Ella was born in Hungary around 1885 and rebelled against her parents’ expectations: that she marry a wealthy older man, bear her husband’s children and obey his demands.
Hungarian Elegy, the sequel to Hungarian Rhapsody will be released May 17th. Ella and her husband arrive in Budapest determined to remake the country into a land where women have the same rights as men. They are swept into the colorful and powerful progressive circle, inhabited by liberals, socialists, communists, and bourgeois gentlemen.
As soon as Hungarian Elegy is out, I will start work on the final novel in my Hungarian Trilogy, currently titled Hungarian Legacy. This book will find Ella working to rescue her dreams even in the midst of World War I and its cataclysmic aftermath.
Stay tuned.
Short Bio
Wendy Teller was a systems and software engineer in the process control and telecommunications industries. Now that she is retired, she writes fiction, memoir, and history. Her stories have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Naperville Sun, and Rivulets. Her story Dusting the Towels received the Richard Eastman Prose Award.
Wendy’s books include Becoming Mia, a story of coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, and Hungarian Rhapsody, about a young woman who wants to follow her own dreams in the repressive culture of 1905 Hungary. Hungarian Elegy, the Hungarian Rhapsody‘s sequel, follows our heroine as she works for women’s rights in Budapest.
Wendy and her husband, science fiction and fantasy author Richard F. Weyand, live on a cliff in the woods near Bloomington, Indiana.
Wendy Teller 