This post is part of an interview series featuring the authors of Family Stories from the Attic, an anthology of essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry inspired by family letters, objects, and archives. Monday posts are featured on the Hidden Timber Books website, and Wednesday posts are featured here. Learn more about Family Stories from the Attic at the bottom of this post. Without further ado, let’s meet Carolou Nelsen, author of “I Had a Brother.”
Carolou Nelsen
Q: Did you write “I Had a Brother” with a particular person/reader in mind?
Carolou: The discovery of a letter written by my brother in 1945 during World War II brought back so many memories of our growing up years together. I decided to represent the letter in this piece, alternating his written voice with my thoughts
Q: How has the publication of your piece influenced the work you are writing today or your writing in general?
Carolou: This look into my past reminded me that my adult children and my grandchildren know little about my youth and the world I lived in eight decades ago. At my daughter’s request, I would now like to write about my experiences in times that they cannot imagine.
Q: What is a fun, interesting, or unusual fact to share with your readers?
Carolou: I fell into writing quite by accident when a friend asked me to illustrate a children’s book that she had written. I joined her writing group and became enchanted with my fellow senior friend’s written works. Now I try to work with both brush and pen.
Connect with Carolou
If you’d like to connect with Carolou, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way–face to face or snail mail, because as Carolou says, “I am not involved with social media nor do I intend to find the extra time to do so. Life is full as it is!”
Pictured above left, Carolou (17) and Bob (24) before he went overseas, and pictured above right, Carolou’s son, Robert, at Bob’s gravestone.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Family Stories from the Attic features nearly two dozen works of prose and poetry inspired by letters, diaries, photographs, and other family papers and artifacts. Editors Christi Craig and Lisa Rivero bring together both experienced and new writers who share their stories in ways that reflect universal themes of time, history, family, love, and change.
Available now from Boswell Book Company, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers.
Nancy: When I wrote “The Teetotaler” I was really thinking of two people– my daddy, the teetotaler in the story and my son. My son’s full name is Wayne Arthur Martin, named for both of his grandfathers. Wayne the younger, grew up visiting with Wayne the older (my father-in-law) and reading his stories as we worked on Patton’s Lucky Scout, a book of the older Wayne’s stories from his time in WWII. However, Wayne the younger doesn’t know as much about his other namesake, my dad Arthur Brown. My son was only two years old when my father died.
Margaret: I like this question, because its optimism assumes the author will write. After I graduated from the Solstice program at the age of 70, I hardly wrote, probably closer to the truth, I didn’t write at all. When I started working on my piece for Family Stories from the Attic, I welcomed Christi’s thoughtful editing, but even more valuable to me was the ensuing dialogue. The dialogue with Christi nurtured and gave me confidence in what I knew and what I could do. In fact so much so that post publication, I set a writing goal for myself for the year: to complete two additional personal essays, both about my mother, whose reluctance to engage the past kept her walking a tight rope of guardedness, keeping her distant from me. One of these essays revolves around silence and obedience, and the unexpressed need to speak and to engage, which, then as a child and still as an adult, I seek in order to be and to write.
All in all, I experience the world the old fashioned way: I prefer listening to a story on radio to watching it on TV. I prefer telephone to Twitter, though in my book, in person is best. I admire crafts and artistic endeavors, things made by hand, though I wish my hands would flex more to give some a try — but I must admit, even when they could, my nature is to become impatient with dropped and tiny stitches. I love theatre and chamber music, and at one time I was a pretty decent pianist. I still have my piano, and on days I receive good news, I play.