One word at a time
Caroline Wampole started writing when she was nine years old, after her fourth-grade teacher at her hippie school in Cambridge gave her an old typewriter to type stories and plays. She went on to edit school newspapers and literary magazines, and write songs, poems, and blogs (one song in particular; see last paragraph). But it wasn’t until she had amassed several decades’ of life experience (and hundreds of journals and notebooks of material) that she was ready to call herself a writer.
Since 2012, she has read and performed her work at literary events and cultural venues on both the West and East Coast. During that time she has had the delight and honor to work with amazing teachers and fellow students from the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, the Belize Writers Conference, Grub Street in Boston, and Writers in Progress in Western Massachusetts.
Her first essay was published in 2021 at the age of 58, in the Forge Literary Magazine. She has since published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, and the Carolina Quarterly. Her advice to other writers (and to creative souls in general) is always: Never give up!
She is currently writing a memoir about playing bass in a rock band that became unexpectedly famous in France in the 1990s because of a song she wrote in French—and how she walked away from it all to find her true home of art.
photo by Carl Slotnick (Caroline’s stepfather), circa 1973