Carolyn has taught fiction writing at Harvard Extension and at Harvard Summer School, and has been on the faculty of Vermont College and Hamline University in their MFA Programs in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She currently offers Whole Novel Workshops for the Highlights Foundation. I have been writing books for children and teaching for thirty years.
Aside from my own writing, the primary influences on my teaching have been my years on the faculty of the Vermont College MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and my current work teaching The Whole Novel Workshop through the Highlights Foundation.
Carolyn Coman is the author of Tell Me Everything, What Jamie Saw (a National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honor book), Bee and Jacky, Many Stones (a National Book Award finalist and Printz Honor book), and, for younger readers, The Big House and Sneaking Suspicions, both illustrated by Rob Shepperson. Most recently, Carolyn and Rob collaborated on The Memory Bank. She is also the author of Body and Soul, an adult book of interviews, in collaboration with photographer Judy Dater.
Carolyn graduated from Hampshire College and has worked as a hand bookbinder, an acquisitions editor for Heinemann (an educational publisher), and a teacher. Most recently she was editor-at-large for Front Street, Inc.
Carolyn resides in South Hampton, New Hampshire.
My experience at Vermont— exchanging five packets of work with graduate students over the course of a semester, responding with edited manuscripts and editorial letters—taught me to value the process of working with writers over a period of time, developing a project and watching it unfold. I witnessed over and over again the extraordinary leaps emerging writers can make. I’m happy to be able to set up a similar arrangement with writers through namelos, one which can be fine-tuned to fit an individual’s specific schedule and project.
I conceived The Whole Novel Workshop, which I currently teach and is offered through Highlights Foundation, in order to address the need I saw for critiques of complete manuscripts. While many organizations and conferences offer critiques of opening chapters or up to 50 pages, it’s very rare to find in-depth readings and critiques of entire novels, and yet that overall response is essential in the development of a novel. I’m pleased to offer that service through namelos as well.
I try to look at whatever story is given me with an eye to seeing what is at its core—what is essential to it— and to work with the writer to illuminate that core through careful attention to craft, structure, character development and the balance between character and plot that is appropriate to that story. I love quiet stories, have come around to wild and adventurous ones, too, and welcome historical fiction. I don’t understand fantasy enough to be of much help. I always say what I think. I try to get writers to let themselves off hooks they may not know they’ve been hanging themselves on, even as I relentlessly ask them to get to the heart of their stories and find all the best words to render them. I respond as a writer, with deep respect for both the process and the story only that writer can tell.