Writer, editor, teacher, and translator

Barbara Sjoholm was born in Long Beach, California, but has spent most of her adult life in the Pacific Northwest and Europe. She now lives in Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

As a novelist, memoirist, translator, and mystery writer, Barbara Sjoholm has been both prolific and innovative. Many readers know her as Barbara Wilson, author of two successful, offbeat mystery series: one with Pam Nilsen, a printer in Seattle, and a second with Cassandra Reilly, an American translator of Spanish, based in London. These mysteries have sold over 100,000 copies and are translated into five languages. They cross boundaries in making feminist and social issues part of the plot. Gaudi Afternoon, set in Barcelona, was awarded a British Crime Writers' award and a Lambda Literary Award. In 2001, a film of Gaudi Afternoon was released, with Judy Davis in the title role of Cassandra Reilly and Marcia Gay Harden as Frankie. Barbara has also published several collections of short stories and three novels.

In 1997, Barbara published the memoir Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood to critical acclaim. She followed that up with The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, about her journeys around the maritime countries of the European North Atlantic. Both Blue Windows and The Pirate Queen were nominated for the PEN USA Award in Creative Nonfiction. Other travel memoirs include Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer, about her years in Europe in the early seventies, and The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland. After changing her name in 2000 [see Becoming Sjoholm, below] she began to focus on creative nonfiction, and published a number of personal and travel essays in the Harvard Review, the American Scholar, and the Antioch Review, as well as the New York Times, Slate, and Smithsonian.

Her years in Europe made her interested in translation, and Barbara began to translate from Norwegian in the mid-eighties. She won a Columbia Translation Prize for Cora Sandel: Selected Short Stories. She has since published three translations from Norwegian, and is currently working on a translation from the Danish of With the Lapps in the High Mountains, by the painter and ethnologist Emilie Demant Hatt.

Barbara has always been drawn to printing and the book arts, and in 1976 she started Seal Press with Rachel da Silva, as a letterpress publishing house. As the years went by, Seal Press grew to become one of the best-known and respected presses in the independent and women's publishing movement. Barbara also co-founded Women in Translation, a non-profit press dedicated to women's fiction from around the world. Barbara worked intensively with writers for many years at Seal Press and brought her knowledge of translation to good use when editing works in English from Czech, Korean, and Dutch. She left Seal Press in 1994, and Women in Translation ceased publishing in 2006.

Barbara has taught writing in the Pacific Northwest at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and at conferences such as the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, Haystack (in Oregon), and the Whidbey Island Writers' Conference. She often works as a mentor to other freelance editors and as an editor to other writers, through the Author-Editor Clinic and Sjoholm Editorial.

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Becoming Sjoholm:

When I first began to talk about changing my name in 2000, most people were taken aback. After fifty years of being called Barbara Wilson and twenty-five years of publishing under that name, how could I suddenly announce I wanted to be called something else—especially something that seemed unpronounceable?

My father was an orphan with a Swedish mother, who died in childbirth. He was adopted by tenant farmers in Wisconsin named Wilson. He always told me and my brother that Wilson wasn't his real name; he had been badly treated by his adoptive father and left home early. Consequently I always had the sense that Wilson wasn't my real name either. But I hadn't thought of anything better by the time I had my first story published when I was twenty-five, and after that it seemed too late to find a name of my own.

Years later, while traveling around the North Atlantic in search of lost stories of women and the sea, I began to think of taking a new name that had more resonance. Perhaps it was the prospect of turning fifty—wondering if I was going to go through the rest of my life with a name that meant nothing to me. Perhaps the maritime journeys of that trip had something to do with it; I kept seeing small islands along the coastlines of Ireland and Scandinavia called "holms," washed by the waves. I wanted a name that was my own, that created an image when I said it, that reflected my heritage. I liked the notion of land sometimes covered by water; the appearance and disappearance of the islands seemed to suggest how I kept losing and finding things that were important to me. Forgetting and remembering who I was.

Sjoholm, or "sea island" in Swedish, came to me on that trip. A year later I held a renaming ceremony with twelve women friends on my fiftieth birthday. Since then I've connected more strongly with my Swedish background—even though Norwegian is the language I speak better. I've also had a number of interesting conversations with people about why and how they change their names. Recently I read that Japanese artists once had the tradition of adopting different names, called "art-names," at various times in their careers, when their lives changed significantly or when they felt they had reached a new stage as an artist. This reminded me that when I renamed myself, I also began to write more boldly in a new form, that of the personal narrative.

As for pronunciation, I say "Shoe-holm;" in Swedish or Norwegian it would be Sjöholm or Sjøholm, respectively. "Sj" makes a "Sh" sound in English.