About Carolyn

Carolyn has always loved words.

The first book that she can remember was Harold and the Purple Crayon, which she loved because every time she opened it she made up another story about the story, until her mother told her that there was a story already in the book and read her that. Since Carolyn couldn’t read just at that point, she couldn’t figure out how her mother could tell her the same story again and again, but she thought it was wonderful.

Carolyn was the only person in second grade who could spell “yellow.”

Carolyn’s favorite word in elementary school was “discombobulated,” which she learned in fourth grade, possibly from a story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Carolyn spent most of her teen years wondering what the big deal was about “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Didn’t everyone think up different, uh, lives, for themselves?

She also spent her teen years alternating between giving everybody The Catcher in the Rye and giving everybody A Portrait as the Artist as a Young Man: “Just read it – it will change your life,” people remember her earnestly urging them.

The rest of her years have been spent discovering that she could tell stories other people wanted to hear, whether it was recounting the tale of the translator who arrived too early and spoke two sentences of English (“I from Tokyo. I come for Whorl Cup!”) or the time she organized a really really cheap weekend in New York City for herself and her adult female cousins that included accommodations at a hostel that “was like staying at a Romanian orphanage.”

She had the great and completely unexpected good fortune to get to live in Ireland for a time in her middle-ish to late-ish 20′s, where she learned what real story telling was about (and it doesn’t always involve a Guinness).

Carolyn has since added not-as-real stories to her repertoire, like plays and screenplays. She has published material on Kindle, and is adding audio versions of her work to iTunes.

So really, who knows what Carolyn is going to write about…