Featured Interview With Caroline H Allen
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Raised on a subsistence farm in middle America, I grew up fishing, and butchering both livestock and wild animals. We hunted, fished, and kept livestock, and grew our vegetables in a massive garden. We didn’t really have much store-bought food until I was about 12. I remember how proud my mother was to come home with Wonder Bread, and the three large colorful circles on the plastic package. My parents had very little education and urged their seven children to do well at school. I got a full-ride scholarship and went to journalism school at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I moved to Tokyo and worked as a journalist in a newsroom. I was an editor when Emperor Hirohito died. I was a travel writer for a year through S.E. Asia. I settled in London for years. I then lived in Boston and Seattle. Now, I’ve truly found home. I’ve come full circle and am back living in the woods, on 80 acres in Oregon. My dog’s name is Atlas!
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
There were few books in my house when I was little, only a King James Bible and a farmer’s almanac. Nobody told stories. Nobody was into reading. Voracious for story, I grabbed the bible and locked myself in the upstairs bathroom every night and read it page by page, the Old testament and the New, day after day, until I’d read the whole thing. I was 9 or 10. The bible was my first piece of literature. In sixth grade, the teacher asked me to stay after class. I thought I was in trouble. I was mischievous and was always getting into trouble.She took me to the teacher’s closet. I will always remember that closet door, the white slats, the golden doorknob. She said, “Only one at a time. Bring the one back before you take another. I expect you to take care of them.” I had NO idea what she was talking about. She opened the closet, and against the back wall were stacks of tattered paperbacks. I couldn’t breathe. I ran my hand along their spines, like their stories were in braille an I could read them with touch. Grabbing the first one on the top of the first pile, I ran outside and sat on the fire escape. It was about a girl who’d been in the concentration camps. She was free now. She stood on a hill beneath a tree, and starting running down the hill. My name is Rachel, she screamed. I am Rachel! This book changed my life. I wanted to shout my name running down a hill. I wanted to tell my story so that some day some girl would sit on a fire escape and read about my life and be inspired and moved to find her authentic self, too.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love fiction, love being pulled into a world that is not real, being moved by character who are made of pure imagination. It helps my soul to fly. Kazuo Ishiguro is my favorite novelist. He recently won the Nobel Prize for literature, but he’s been a favorite of mine for decades. A Pale View of Hills is filled with mysticism (my novels are mystical), and he plays with time in The Unconsoled (and I play with time in my novels, too). I’m a book coach (artofstorytellingonline.com), and my clients inspire me daily. I’m utterly fascinated with the creative process, and witnessing and guiding new writers is pure excitement for me. I’m inspired by how they work, about how ideas come to them, about where they get stuck and where they find the flow. I’m inspired by anyone who is doing the sacred work of finding their authentic voice.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I’m writing a series of five books, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Ether, all part of the Elemental Journey Series. Earth and Air came out in 2015 and 2016, respectively, and went on to win Independent Publishers’ awards. Fire was just published this March (2018). The series follows one protagonist as she comes of age over five books amidst a world beset by growing unrest and rocked by global climate change. Pearl Elizabeth Swinton, the protagonist, is seeking her purpose. Who is she? What is she meant to do with her life? Like many of us, she feels deep in her belly that she’s called to do something important, but she must figure out what that is. In Earth, Pearl grows up on a small farm, rooted to the earth, and to the customs of her ancestors. In Air, she flies abroad and lives floating about the culture, feeling the pain of disconnection, but also gaining perspective. In Fire, the most current book, she travels S.E. Asia and finds her old self must burn up, so that she can find her authentic self. All of the roles and expectations put upon her must go away, so she can find out what she’s really meant to do. All books are semi-autobiographical, but they are also fiction. They follow my path as a journalist and travel writer around the world, but the characters Pearl meets, and the things that happen are often very fictionalized. In Fire, Pearl meets an array of characters that inspire and inform her world view, a boat boy in the Philippines, a rickshaw driver in India, a Tibetan woman in a village high in the Himalayas. Earth took six years to write. Air took three. And Fire, two. I’m working on Water now. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a lot of rain. Pearl will go through personal healing to get to the core of who she really is. Ether, the final book, will see Pearl turning and giving back to the community. I’m seeing Ether, the final book, as a fairy tale.
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