One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life

Pat Carr spent her childhood next door to a Japanese relocation camp in Wyoming in the 1940's, grew up to pass for black in 1950's Texas, started teaching college in the Jim Crow South of the 1960's, and crossed paths with scores of other authors over half a century's journey as a professional writer.

Her memoir illuminates the path for others who have chosen the writing life. Pacing her revealing story as a series of single-page episodes, she offers distilled glimpses of the people, places, and moments that made a lasting impression and provided the fabric and fuel of her writing. At the same time Carr's pages reveal relationships with family, friends, lovers, fellow writers, struggles with racial and gender discrimination; and above all her writing identity.

Pat Carr has taught creative writing and literature in universities across the South. She is the author of fifteen books, including The Women in the Mirror, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and more than a hundred short stories in the Southern Review, the Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, and other publications. She lives in northwest Arkansas.