Carolyn Locke, the author of Always This Falling and Not One Thing: Following Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, The Place We Become, and The Riddle of Yes, grew up in Hudson, New Hampshire where she spent many hours roaming the woods and fields, and taking her favorite books to her treetop retreat where she read and daydreamed about traveling. She began writing poetry at a young age, and it has remained a constant in her life.
Carolyn attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she majored in English literature. The highlight of her college career was her junior year abroad at Manchester College, Oxford University, in Oxford, England, where she studied Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, and T.S. Eliot. She completed her senior thesis on T.S. Eliot, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Bates in 1971.
Carolyn married Gerry Locke, and in the fall of 1974, they moved to Troy, Maine, where they raised two children, Jeffrey and Alison. Family life, camping trips, hiking, and summer vacations on the coast of Maine, as well as gardening, cross country skiing, snow-shoeing, traveling, reading, and writing poetry are the passions that have shaped her life.
Carolyn began her teaching career at Orono Junior High School in Orono, Maine, where she taught language arts. Later, she was hired at Mount View High School, in Thorndike, Maine, where she developed the ninth grade English curriculum as well as electives in Creative Writing and a seminar class in the humanities. Highlights of her career include being a semi-finalist for Maine Teacher of the Year, a three-week Fulbright Memorial Fund trip to Japan, a six-week Fulbright-Hays Seminar in Morocco, two three-week Primary Source trips to China, and a four-week Fulbright-Hays Special Projects trip to Japan. During this last trip she followed in the footsteps of the famous haiku poet Basho on his journey through northern Japan, inspiring her to keep a travel journal and compose haiku, which eventually became the haibun, Not One Thing: Following Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior.
Carolyn began to pursue her writing career once her children were teenagers, receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She has published poems in a variety of places such as Puckerbrush Review, Off the Coast, Anthology of the Live Poets Society, the Bangor Daily News, Kyoto Journal, Clockworks, The Aurorean, A Parallel Uni-Verse, and The Cafe Review. Her poem “Regeneration” was selected for Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry, edited by Wesley McNair, and two of her poems were cited in writing contests sponsored by Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the Live Poets Society for several years and has done readings in various venues in midcoast Maine. She has twice participated in the Belfast Poetry Festival, paired with artist Kathy Pollard in 2011 and with artists Diane Green Hebert and Victoria Pittman in 2014 (You-tube video can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9F3uVGCbN0IIc9ZQcyg67g). She has published four books: tthree full length poetry collections—Always This Falling (2010) and The Place We Become (2015) and The Riddle of Yes (2019)—and Not One Thing: Following Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior (2013), a haibun that weaves prose, haiku, and photography.
Contact Carolyn at carolynlocke66@gmail.com