“House of Mirrors”
Published in The Awakenings Review, Spring 2024
Nominated for The Pushcart Prize
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.
“Trust”
Published in HerStry, April 24, 2024
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.
“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.
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.
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
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
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
Why I Write
Unpublished essay
Carol reading
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
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
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
The Girl from Coke
Essay published in Under the Gum Tree
Carol reading an excerpt
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. The date printed on the top border, May ’67, confirms it.
In the photo, 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 the 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 our 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?
Because We Wanted To!
Finalist: Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Women’s Studies)
and
Finalist: Colorado Authors’ League Award (Creative Nonfiction)
Get a glimpse of the unconventional lives of Clara Reida and Margaret Locarnini, and the rich stew of adventure, courage, and friendship that surrounds them. Writer Carolyn Servid says, “One cannot help but feel the vibrant resonance that emanates from these two visionaries and the singular place called Singing Acres Ranch.”
Cookin’ Wild – Margaret’s Way
Cookin’ Wild takes you on an enjoyable tour of the late Margaret Locarnini’s kitchen at Singing Acres Ranch, high in the Colorado Rockies. And it does more than that. You’ll not only be engaged in her recipes and perspectives on preparing wild game, you’ll also find yourself happily getting to know the feisty, creative personality of Margaret herself. Reading her book about cooking is much like sitting down for a visit over a steaming cup of coffee with the author. A woman of many talents, Margaret hunted, built, taught, painted, created, and more. Producing interesting, delicious meals was one of her favorite things to do. Many people attest to Margaret’s culinary skills, and ranch partner Clara Reida is one. Clara says, “My weight is a testimony to Margaret’s good cooking.”
Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng
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 Award
Teacher, translator and Tai Ji master, Gia Fu-Feng is remembered for his colorful life in which he learned and taught alongside some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers, including Jack Kerouac and Alan Watts. Through his life and work, he sought to bring the ancient wisdom of the Tao into the modern world. His translation of the Tao Te Ching has sold over 1,250,000 copes and is widely considered to be one of the most readable and influential translations of our time. Carol Ann Wilson, sister to Gia-fu’s heir, used Gia-fu’s biographical notes and numerous outside sources to write the extraordinary story of a rogue Taoist sage.
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.
After almost forty years as an educator—teacher, high school principal, assistant superintendent, university instructor/visiting professor, school-university partnership director, and consultant—Carol Ann Wilson has turned her attention to writing. Her favored genre is creative nonfiction.