About Carolyn

Carolyn has been taking care of children her entire adult life. First, as a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit, the burn unit and the newborn nursery. Then, as a mother, raising two sons, now grown and on their own. Later, as a pediatrician in a small private practice, she took in two of her patients as foster daughters, opening her empty nest and never looking back.

Through it all she wrote, delving deeply for meaning through narrative. Trying to make sense of issues and obstacles by writing about them. Not wanting to merely survive ordeals, but to come out on the other side with some degree of wisdom or clarity. Was there some truth in catastrophe? Some secret upside to trauma?  

Several years ago, a fellow presenter at the University of Iowa’s Examined Life Conference, when asked why she wrote, answered, “We write to exert power over something we can never control—the past.” Those words have become a valuable precept for Carolyn, informing her work daily.

Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her husband and foster daughters. When she isn’t writing, doctoring or mothering, she is competing in (and sometimes even winning) triathlons.