All of Us Wildflowers
A memoir of art, intimacy, and taking care
Tria Wen’s intergenerational memoir endeavors to break the cycle of women living for others before themselves, examining how roles like “wife,” “mother,” and “daughter” can keep us from pursuing what makes us feel most alive.
Following the death of her mother, Tria Wen breaks apart the careful life she’s built and explodes her seemingly perfect marriage with a love affair. Torn between two lives, she seeks guidance in her mother’s journals and letters going back thirty years. There, she meets versions of her mother she never knew: a girl who left behind an entire self after immigration, an artist in the role of housewife, and a woman who wanted more time.
This new perspective allows Wen to see her mother not only as her mother, but as a woman with many lives and dreams unfulfilled. As Wen grapples with the legacy of these unrealized dreams and how they have shaped her own life, her grieving transforms into a sweeping and compassionate study of a woman’s relationship between art, intimacy, and caregiving.
Drawing from some of the most intimate pieces of Wen and her mother’s journals, All of Us Wildflowers moves back and forth in time, weaving together a rich tapestry of love, longing, and loss that asks: Where does a mother’s story end and a daughter’s begin? With tender, lyrical prose and unflinching honesty, Wen’s memoir is a deeply felt meditation on sacrifice, faith, and personal fulfillment.
Advance Praise
“All of Us Wildflowers is a breathtakingly honest story, told in mesmerizing, interwoven spirals through time. A testament to the power of journaling, of writing unfiltered to one’s self and loved ones, Tria Wen probes what it means, through her own writing and through her late mother’s journals, to be a woman with dreams of being more than a wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law. This book is an intimate, vulnerable and profoundly generous read. It grabbed at my heart.”
— Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere
“Tria Wen’s All of Us Wildflowers asks the reader to look again at the life we hold closely against the lives we couldn’t live.”
— E.J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others
About
Photo by Andria Lo
Tria Wen is an artist and mother whose writing has been featured in The Washington Post, the NYT Now app, Narratively, The Rumpus, The Seventh Wave, Slant’d Media, Reader’s Digest, SELF, and the Editor’s Picks of Medium, among other places. Her debut memoir, All of Us Wildflowers, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in March 2027. It was a finalist for the Sue William Silverman Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Chautauqua Janus Prize, and the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is represented by Annie Hwang at Renegade Literary.
In all she writes, Tria speaks as an Asian American but does not presume to speak for Asian Americans, the population hailing from too many unique combinations of circumstances to be made monolith. When she sends her words out, she doesn’t think of a name, face, body, or demographic, but hopes to invite in anyone who feels on the edges. If literature is to be a representative record of our human existence, her goal as a writer and editor is to steward more stories from the margins to the page.
A lifelong student of writing, she aims to push her abilities, grow ever more intimate with language, and dig into that which is beyond understanding. Her obsessions include mortality, deep and complex human attachments, and love in every form.
For Tria, writing is an exercise in asking questions, recognizing patterns, and selecting threads of different heft and color to make these patterns visible. She looks to writers who bend toward compassion, who weave absorbing narratives with societal constructs and tender truths — writers like Jesmyn Ward, T Kira Madden, Leslie Jamison, and E.J. Koh.
Her work has received support from Hedgebrook, VONA, Tin House, and Rooted & Written. She is the co-creator of Make America Dinner Again, founding editor of the Black Allyship column at Mochi Magazine, and has appeared on NPR, BBC, at SXSW, and more to discuss how to build understanding across differences.
Distinctions & Awards
Selected Writing
The room was dimly lit. Wedding guests were seated on the floor, eyes closed, some crying.
Narratively Featured in the NYT Now appIt is probably best not to attend weddings when you are freshly separated from your spouse.
The Seventh WaveThe first time I remember hearing the term anti-vaxxer was in 2014 while hosting dinner for new friends.
Slant’d MagazineMy grandmother’s name was Harris. When she took this name, she was a young nursing student in China just shy of five feet tall.
The RumpusIn Focal Point, Qi allows the grief from her mother’s early passing to seep between each poem, to recede and return.
Black Fox Literary MagazineThe next day, she still seems far away, opening parched lips for ice chips through an oxygen mask.
Connect
The All of Us Wildflowers newsletter provides writing updates, insight, resources, and encouragement for writers, creatives, and caregivers
Literary RepresentationAnnie Hwang at Renegade Literary
PublicityAmina Washington · amina.washington@catapult.co