Wendy Baker was the daughter of Pearl and Bill Clark. A loner as a child, she peopled her life with imaginary characters about whom she invented complicated stories, with her pet rabbit as audience. She began sending her writing to "Possum's Pages" in the Sunday Mail, where she won Dickens' novels as awards. In the 1960s, while she was working as a supervising typist/stenographer in the Commonwealth Public Service, she attended Ian Mudie's evening lectures in Creative Writing.
She married John Baker in 1971 and they took up a hobby-farm in the Adelaide Hills. She gave up the Public Service in favour of having their two children, and supplemented their income by typing manuscripts and theses, writing an occasional article, and caring for children under the Family Day Care scheme. After ten years and the depredations of two Ash Wednesday bushfires they moved to Victor Harbor, where they still keep the donkey, a dog and half a dozen chooks.
In 1983 she attended Madeleine Brunato's Creative Writing classes and after joining the fellowship of Australian Writers (SA) she completed a TAFE Certificate in Writing for the Media (1986) and began to be published. In 1987-8 she was Writer/Editor of the Children's Page of Donkey Digest. She took on a large junk-mail round, which gave lots of "thinking" time for her writing, and became a volunteer for the Victor Harbor Tourist Information Centre, a "people-job" in which she met hundreds of people from all over the world, on whom she drew for characters. She was in partnership with her husband in a manufacturing business 1994-9, and following that tutored in literacy at a local primary school. She enjoys travel and she and her husband have seen "a fair slice of Australia" as well as Japan and the UK. Wendy has also visited Greece and New Zealand.
Her work has been read on occasions including the Stirling Players Festival in the Adelaide Hills, at the Heritage Festival at Victor Harbor, and on EFM Community Radio. She has spoken to children at Goolwa and Pt Elliot Primary Schools. Her unpublished story for children "Moon Music", won First Prize in the Calambeen Literary Competition, 1998, and her poem "Portrait of a Bird" received a Special mention in the Hunter Regional FAW 1998 Denis Butler Competition section for free form poetry. In 1998 her equine story "The Secret" won 1st Prize at the Kelluca Publishing: 1997 Animalia Literary Awards.
