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Where Past and Future Gather
Published in The Words Faire
Ghosts walk this land with me. My ghosts are not spectres nor apparitions, but tender confluences of memories and gratitude for loved ones I have lost. Through Stillpoint’s tranquil meadows and untamed forest, they accompany me, their absence a gentle yet profound presence that has taken on their shape, and I feel them with me.
My ghosts are intertwined with the birdsong of this land, with the soft ripple that stirs inside me when I hear it. They are present in the supple motion of tall grasses swaying with the breeze, and in the majestic spruce and fir, the sturdy ponderosa, all reminding me of the strength and courage I witnessed when they encountered challenges in their lives. All I’ve learned from them continues to live in me. My sister Susan most of all, and especially at Stillpoint.
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House of Mirrors
HOUSE OF MIRRORS
Published in The Awakenings Review, Spring 2024
Nominated for The Pushcart Prize
The Awakenings Review publishes poets, writers and artists experiencing mental illnesses, and related writers. It is a print-only journal, but you can see a sample in this PDF file.
Throughout psychiatry’s history, its view of delusions has centered on their imperviousness to contrary evidence. In Kraepelin’s influential (1899) textbook Psychiatry, he writes that a delusion is a belief that is not open to doubt. (K. Arnold & J. Vakhrusheva, 2015)
It was mid-October 2008 and our last evening in Italy after spending several weeks in the Chianti countryside.
With an overnight stay in the fishing village of Fiumicino near the Rome airport, we slept unaware of what was happening at home in Colorado. Back in Boulder, through the fog of jet lag, I checked my email messages, something I hadn’t been able to do consistently in Italy. And there on my screen was a message from Vandy, a friend who had been restoring a small building at Stillpoint, our beloved property in the mountains. She had written it October 6, more than a week earlier.
Hi Carol,
I want you to know that we did not end up camping at Stillpoint last weekend. We arrived at the property and encountered a man who said he was the owner. He was not familiar with your name. After a short conversation with him we left. I felt as though the person we met did not belong there and thought you should know. He said that he planned to stay until November or so.
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“Trust”
Published in HerStry
When I was eight years old, many decades ago now, I learned there were different kinds of dirty. We were new to the mountains, my family and I, renting a cabin at a small, rustic resort where the ghost town of Bakerville usedto be, near Loveland Pass. Down the creek a ways, lived an old man we called Pops. At least we thought of him as old, with his pudgy frame, poorly shaved face, saggy skin, and well-worn clothes. Pops would come around to the picnic area and play his harmonica for my brother, sister, and me. He would also perform magic tricks and give us silly names. Stump-a-Doodle-and-Bunch was one. He made us laugh as he entertained and teased us. We liked and trusted him because he seemed to care about us.
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Just Like Your Father
“Just Like Your Father” – 2nd Place, Unlimited Literature Flash Nonfiction Contest
“How’s Little Bob today?” the principal asked as he swung tiny five-year-old me up in the air, bringing us face-to-face. I liked that he called me Little Bob because it connected me to my dad, whom I adored. It meant that I was part of him, that I was like him. 
Years later this connection to my dad acquired a different hue. On the cusp of my teens, I began questioning and trying to understand my world, my mother in particular.“Don’t argue with me. Your father is always arguing with me. And you’re just like him!”I was trying to explain something I did, something my mother didn’t like, something I don’t even remember. What I do remember is standing by a spigot in our back yard, washing out a galvanized steel pail. I remember the warm day, the earlier breeze on recess, drops of sweat trickling down my back. I remember her fury, the churning in my stomach, anger and dismay at feeling unjustly accused. And I remember vowing never to bring a child into this world to suffer its cruelty and injustice, a vow I was to keep.
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Interview by Sandra Squire Fluck
Published in bookscover2cover
For over forty years, you have been a teacher, high school principal, assistant principal, university instructor/visiting professor, and a consultant. What have you learned about the public school system in the U.S.?Our system of compulsory schooling grew from the recognition that a healthy democracy depends on an educated public. An educated public is laudable and essential, and we still have work to do toward that end. What has struck me over the years is the unevenness of quality in schools across the country and, not uncommonly, within some school districts.
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Parts of Me: Reflections on Reviewing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Follow up to the book review published in bookscover2cover
Recently, listening to a talk by poet David Whyte, I heard him speak of “the parts of ourselves we have yet to meet.” I thought of those mystery rooms, and something clicked, finally. The rooms are parts of myself I have yet to meet, to know, parts of a bigger me to be discovered and explored.Please check out bookscover2cover for reviews, essays, interviews, and reading lists: https://bookscover2cover.com
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Live Oaks
Nonfiction essay published in The Wrath-Bearing Tree
June 1991. I’m half-way up a seventy-foot rock facing at Camp Hale, Colorado, my body pressed against the hard, cool granite. My fingers search for purchase on what feels like a polished surface. I’m ascending one of the rock towers the Tenth Mountain Division, a unit of 15,000 men, scaled when preparing for mountain and winter warfare during World War II. CIA secret operatives trained here, too, including Tibetan freedom fighters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Inside me, my own war rages. I took the lead instructor, David’s, suggestion that I climb blindfolded, because I trust him. But under normal circumstances, even trusting an experienced instructor, I wouldn’t climb this giant slab for love or money.Please check out The Wrath-Bearing Tree for essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry on military, economic, and social violence: https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com
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Review: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Invited review published in bookscover2cover
“Even dawn begins before its beginning . . .” writes poet Claudia Rankine in “The White Lion.” It is a fitting early line in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a book comprising poetry, essays, fiction, photography, and a timeline that leads the reader through four hundred years of history, much of it rarely, if ever, told and through voices that seldom pierce the citadel of popular historical certainty.This dawn features a ship, the White Lion, arriving at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the customary chronicling of the 1620 pilgrims’ landing at Jamestown. The timeline entry preceding the poem tells of the ship’s chained cargo of twenty to thirty captive Africans, who are traded to the colonists for supplies, “making them the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that will become the United States.”
Please check out bookscover2cover for reviews, essays, interviews, and reading lists: https://bookscover2cover.com
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Why I Write
Unpublished essay
Carol reading
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Antidote to Truth
Creative nonfiction published in The Write Launch
Standing in Tiananmen Square that autumn day in 1998, I marveled at its vastness. The few people populating its more than fifty-three acres seemed like ants on an enormous sidewalk. The square could hold many, many more. Multitudes. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine multitudes there, specifically the million protesters packed into those 4,736,121 square feet at the height of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.Conjuring the protests, images of the movement’s final hours flooded my mind— tanks, heavily armed soldiers, protestors desperate and defiant, their fervor steadfast despite the overwhelming threat of being shot or crushed, their inevitable fear. Read more…
Please check out the whole issue for compelling short stories, long short stories, poetry, novel excerpts, and other creative nonfiction: https://thewritelaunch.com
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Glass Houses
Creative nonfiction published in The Write Launch
I first saw Hong Kong from the air, late into the night. It was February 6, 1997. As our plane descended into the vast constellation of varicolored lights, it seemed as if we were landing in a box of sparkling jewels, layers and layers of them. The contrast of dark night and myriad lights further heightened my sense of adventure, adding to the city’s already bold allure. Read more…
Please check out the whole issue for compelling short stories, long short stories, poetry, novel excerpts, and other creative nonfiction: https://thewritelaunch.com
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Fireworks in Hong Kong
Creative nonfiction published in The Write Launch
Carol reading an excerpt
How can I forget the press of the crowd, the feeling of being swept up in history that lunar New Year in Hong Kong? Throngs packed the walkway by the city’s harbor, and we were snugly pressed in the midst of them. We had stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on our way to Shanghai for research on a book I was writing. And those few days coincided not only with the Chinese New Year, but also Hong Kong’s last New Year celebration under British rule. Read more…Please check out the whole issue for compelling short stories, long short stories, poetry, novel excerpts, and other creative nonfiction: https://thewritelaunch.com
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The Girl from Coke
A faded color photograph is my sole relic from the days I spent in Meridian, Mississippi. Creases span the worn surface, and smudges stain the yellowing border, hinting at its age. Creases span the worn surface, and smudges stain the yellowing border, hinting at its age. The date printed on the top border, May ’67, confirms it. In the photograph, my twenty-two-year-old self leans against a red Camaro, smiling. I’m wearing an outfit I made on my Singer sewing machine: a short-sleeved, white blouse and a straight, red skirt that hits just above the knee. A red ribbon ties my then-dark hair up and back, and white three-inch heels encase my feet, one foot slightly ahead of the other in a kind of fashion-model pose.
The cherry red of the Camaro almost matches that of my skirt. A sign atop the car shouts, “The Girl from Coca-Cola is Here! Hundreds of chances to win $10-$35!” Looking at that old photo of myself, I see a version of me, a version that can’t know all that experience has taught me these many years since. The 1960s in the Deep South held almost unimaginable turmoil—hate, fear, violence. Yet possibility somehow lay in the mix. The possibility that the country really could do better in fulfilling its founding promise of equal opportunity for all its citizens. But who was I then? And how did that person find her way to being the current me?
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Cookin’ Wild – Margaret’s Way
During the time I was researching and writing [Because We Wanted To], Clara mentioned the cookbook Margaret had been working on, with my sister, Susan, playing scribe and cheerleader in the process. Susan died in 1991, but Margaret went on to complete the manuscript, dedicating it to Susan. Margaret died in 2007, and Clara had much to attend to. The manuscript naturally went on the back burner. But Clara knew it was around somewhere, and thanks to her persistent searching, she found it about a year after Because came out. It had been hiding in her root cellar in an old briefcase. (from the Foreword, Cookin’ Wild, p.11)For those of you who knew Margaret, you’ll remember she was always stirring the pot, one way or the other. For all of you, we hope you enjoy the recipes herein, but most of all, we hope you enjoy the spirit and good humor in which Margaret wrote them. (from the Foreword, Cookin’ Wild, p. 13)
Available from:
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Because We Wanted To!
“Why would two girls come out here to a rugged part of Colorado, buy an old dilapidated ranch, and raise horses?”
This question came to Margaret Locarnini and Clara Reida more than once, and their response forms the heart of this story. Meeting at Girl Scout Camp while working as horse guides, Margaret from Oakland, California and Clara from Rago, Kansas, they discovered they both held the dream of raising horses in the Colorado Rockies. By joining forces they believed they could make their dream come true. Undaunted by the many barriers women faced as recently as 1965—simply acquiring loans without husbands signing for them as one shocking example—they moved forward, dotting the “i” and crossing the “t” on “irrelevant” as far as convention was concerned. Naming their ranch Singing Acres to honor their deep love of singing and the way the land sang to them, they faced numerous hardships with courage and humor; they cultivated friendships, raised beautiful horses, helped countless others; and became the heart of a community.
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Still Point of the Turning World
Still Point of the Turning World Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in Biography (2010)
and
Finalist: Indie 2010 New Generation Award
and
Finalist: Colorado Authors’ League Top Hand AwardStill Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng interweaves the life of translator, teacher, Taoist rogue Gia-fu Feng with the tumultuous historical tapestry of 20th century China and the United States. From Chinese warlords, Japanese occupation, and World War II to 1950s disillusionment, the Beats, Esalen and beyond, the story traces major events and personalities on opposite sides of the world. In the mix is Gia-fu and the Stillpoint community’s best-selling translation of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese classic that is the most translated book in the world, next to the Bible.
Still Point of the Turning World tracks a life that began with external privilege but culminated in the gradual discovery of the still point within.
Published by: Amber Lotus Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-60237-296-2
ISBN: 1-60237-296-9
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About Earline
The Florida panhandle, the rural South. 1942. On a day that seemed like any other, a nineteen-year-old girl goes for an ordinary walk only to find herself on an extraordinary hitchhiking trek across the country—a trek that creates a geographic and emotional blueprint for her life. Spanning almost nine decades and much of the U.S., About Earline traces Earline’s life as she joins a carnival and becomes Electra, returns home to face her memories, then moves forward in an essentially unconventional life filled with challenges and heartbreak as well as discovery and adventure. Author Carol Ann Wilson relates the difficult life circumstances confronting her mother, Earline, the often humorous and outrageous responses she devises, and the courageous and determined spirit in which she does it all.In About Earline Carol Wilson writes of her mother with such love that she can show us Earline as she is, neither sugar-coating the story nor humbling her subject. And her subject is really something! Earline proves once again that extraordinary lives can spring — vault! — from ordinary circumstances. All it takes is enough daring, determination, and resilience for six people and an enormous capacity for friendship and you too might create a life of amazing adventures, misadventures, and narrow escapes.
Gary Holthaus, author of Wide Skies: Finding a Home in the West
About Earline is now available
www.createspace.com/3574289
www.amazon.com
& many local booksellers.
Author of BECAUSE WE WANTED TO! • ABOUT EARLINE • STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD
How can I forget the press of the crowd, the feeling of being swept up in history that lunar New Year in Hong Kong? Throngs packed the walkway by the city’s harbor, and we were snugly pressed in the midst of them. We had stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on our way to Shanghai for research on a book I was writing. And those few days coincided not only with the Chinese New Year, but also Hong Kong’s last New Year celebration under British rule. 
