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Harkening is the winner of three awards including Word Thunder's Excellence in Writing award.

 

Tip for Readers Reading creative nonfiction is a little like reading historical fiction. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is fiction and what is fact. If the author has been true to the spirit of creative nonfiction, you can trust the basics to be true though she'll color the writing with dialogue and detail only as accurately as possible. The writer's brain, after all, is not a tape recorder. Find at least one tip on writing, promotion or tech on every page of this website.  .

 “Carolyn Howard-Johnson is going to be one of the greats.” ~ Kristie Leigh Maguire, author of Desert Heat and Emails from the Edge

 “…A fine piece of writing…” ~Paul Lappen, Dead Trees Review

 Harkening: You Won't Know It's Nonfiction Even as It Explores the Similarities and Differences!

Click here for an excerpt (really a full story) from Harkening.

Click here for reviews of Harkening.

Click here for Carolyn's first person essay, "Beating Time at Its Own Game." 

Click Here for another published short story, "A Not-So-Stupid- Crook Story," at Life in the USA.  Editor Elliot Essman created a stories section just to accommodate it.

Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered                         

ISBN: 1591295505     AmErica House

Harkening explores the little white lies and solemn truths that one charming, idiosyncratic family loves to repeat. Each story is stitched to the next to become a saga of their sojourn from Michigan through a vanishing railroad town in New Mexico, then into Utah and finally (and happily), to a place where individuality can thrive. "Harkening" has won three awards including Word Thunder's Excellence in Writing award.

What Is Harkening All About?

Introduction Reprinted from Harkening

(c)2001Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Just when I think I’ve heard all the family stories—many times—another is remembered and told. That its truth was revealed years after the event is matter of concern, for authenticity is certain to have been colored by my mother’s imagination and my own.

My mother always loved to read. Her voice echoes that of many great authors—which I hardly notice—and many super-market romances as well, which I do. She describes people she has met or only observed from across the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Her words paint a picture down to the last detail like a paragraph carefully wrought.

            “Her hair is as thick as a mane,” she says. She details a woman’s beauty from the shape of her eyelids to the way the tilt of her nose changes as she ages. And when she tells a story she repeats it back in dialogue, even when it happened years ago -- as if her mind were a tape recorder and has stored every nuance. She is a walking, talking example of the “new” creative nonfiction.

This book is made from my own memories and the harkenings of others. I liken the process of recording them to a child who listens to adult conversation with nuances that she doesn’t quite understand so she must fill out the meaning with her own experiences. It is a bit like a child who tries to stand upright after twirling herself into oblivion; the pictures blend into a blur like a pinwheel and then—with time -- reassemble themselves in the living world.

I admit that sometimes I stop listening because I’ve heard so many times the story about how Gram Lucretia set the table with sterling or because the language of the tale being told is so Homerian that I am tempted to snooze. The “rosey-fingered dawns” become boring when repeated too many times, no matter how poetic they may have been in the original.

Then there is the affect of mood. The mood I was in when I heard it or when I was writing it can color it as surely as a box of Crayolas, bright or faded.

I must not forget the deliberate. There are certain exigencies required to mold a tale into something, you, my reader, will want to read. So I might change the order of an event or the color of a dress to fit the need of the story. The writing of it might require me to imagine another’s point of view in order to capture the story’s full truth.

I often wonder, am I writing fact or fiction? Is any truth more true that the way the writer sees it? In some sense, isn’t a writer’s truth more truthful than fact?

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Copyright ©2006 Carolyn Howard-Johnson