We recently connected with Caroline Allen and have shared our conversation below.

Caroline, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I was in my 20s after graduating with a journalism degree. All I wanted was to land a newsroom job, fight the good fight, give voice to the voiceless. I’d come from a hard-scrabble childhood of working the land, hunting and butchering, and my parents hadn’t finished high school, let alone gone to college.

I knew I wanted out of the U.S. Midwest. So, with my degree under my belt, I left for Tokyo with no job. After months, I landed my first newsroom job at an English daily, and quickly became a features editor. After a few years, I went on to become a travel writer through Asia, and ultimately ended up as a newsroom journalist in London.

By all accounts, I’d made it.

But something wasn’t right. I wasn’t happy. I knew in my soul I was meant for some greater purpose, and covering the news wasn’t cutting it.

I was 30 and felt a strong call to give up journalism and find my “bliss”. Such calls always begin as depression. What was working in my life was no longer working. I didn’t want to give up my jet-setting life. Following this call meant giving up my work visa, and going back to the States, a country I no longer even knew after nearly a decade abroad.

The call was too strong to ignore, Kicking and screaming, I moved back to the U.S., to Seattle and plunged further into a funk. What was I on this planet to do? What was this incessant call? Ultimately, I went on what I now call a “walkabout”. I delved into spiritual work to help move the energy and find my spirit again — Reiki, shamanism, tarot, and past-life regression. Anything to ease the funk I was in, to find my way, and thrive.

What emerged from this chaos was first a regular fiction-writing discipline. I knew I was being called to seek truth in a different way than I had as a journalist — to begin to write MY truth. I committed to write from 8 a.m. until noon five days a week (a schedule I still adhere to three decades later). Still, there was more. I write about all of this in my most recent novel “Water” — how a psychic told me I was a visual artist. I was so enraged. An artist? Me? What a racket! Sure I’d won awards with my art in school, but that was years ago.

My soul on some level heard the message. Slowly, painstakingly, I started to pick up a paintbrush. I went on another “walkabout”, this time a creative walkabout, to study writing and art — poetry, short-story writing, abstract art, mask-making, life drawing, novel-writing courses. It was like pasta — I was throwing things against the wall of my soul to see what would stick.

Today, 30 years later, I have four award-winning novels published, with a middle grade novel (“Blue”) launching through a London publisher in 2025. I’m currently working on a memoir, “Ether, Diary of a Mystic”.

As a visual artist, I found that I loved acrylics, watercolors, and mixed media on paper and canvas. I’ve been part of art studios and cooperatives for years, and have had art shows on both U.S. coasts. Today, I’m working on a few art series.

“Dissolve: Finding Beauty in Disintegration” — using solvents and mixed media to dissolve images into abstract forms.

“Be:Longing” — mixed media that explores the longing to belong in a fractured world.

“Bruised Goddess” — mixed media that elevates even the most bruised feminine.

“Mystic Circus” — a tarot deck I’m creating.

I’m also a book coach, and coach other writers on novels, memoir, and self-help books.

I now work as an artist/writer out of a yurt art studio in the woods in Oregon, where daily I commune with deer, rabbits, coyotes, bobcats, and even an occasional mountain lion and bear.

All those years ago as a journalist, I was trying to help give voice to the voiceless. The call to pursue a creative path was my call to find MY voice. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been rich, dimensional, complex, and soulful.

Caroline, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

As a book coach, novelist, and visual artist my passion is excavating authentic creative voice.

As a book coach, I help new authors find their literary voices. This is an innate way of storytelling have in childhood, something that is educated out of us. Working sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page with a client, I highlight for them their authentic style. I support and promote their natural gifts for storytelling. Ultimately, many of us just need “permission” to be our organic wildly creative selves. Meanwhile, I’m also showing clients the professional elements of good writing — setting, characterization, plot, and theme. I’ve worked with PhDs and high school dropouts, with CEOs and prostitutes, with inmates and chaplains. I’ve worked with people in 20 different countries around the world. Whoever we are, wherever we are, we each have the right to express our deepest feelings and beliefs.

As a novelist and visual artist, I’m in the throes of a year-long art course where I’m starting to see that my four published novels, and one in progress — they’re all one big “selfie”. My novels are an exploration of my journey around the world in search of self, and my middle grade book is a look at the childhood of a mystic girl. As for my visual art, it centers around where I am as a woman seeking empowerment in a fractured world.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I grew up in the deeply conservative Midwest. The goal of any young girl was to marry the boy nextdoor and have children.

Even at age 5, I knew I didn’t want this. I was standing by my mother at the stove, and she was frying eggs for our family of 9. I remember her holding up a spatula. I remember thinking how this was her life, this constant caring for a family of 9. I made a commitment then that I wouldn’t get married and have children. This life plan was solidified again at age 12. My sisters were getting “hope chests” for their tween birthdays — cedar chests full of crockery to begin their married lives once they were of age. I went outside. I looked up and down our small rural road, at all the neighbors with all of the children, all living such a mainstream conservative life. This was NOT the sort of “hope” I had in my “chest”. I knew that I would leave the country and not go this heteronormative direction.

I succeeded. I left. I fulfilled every dream.

But I still had to unlearn — wait, I’m still unlearning it today — how to stop being such a caretaker as a woman. I was trained as a child in all of the womenly caretaking arts, childcare, cooking, cleaning, sewing.

I had to learn it’s OK to be a woman and an artist. It’s OK to take all of that energy that goes to children and husbands and use it to express myself creatively, to write and paint every day.

I know as a coach to fledgling women writers around the world that breaking this gender expectation is not my lesson and my lesson alone — it’s a journey that many women are on. How do I break the cycle of woman as caregiver to pivot into woman as artist.

It takes time. We’re up against a mighty mainstream. The greatest advice I can give is to go out, seek, and find like-minded women. We need all of the support we can get.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I believe we’re put onto this planet to fully realize our creative souls. When people talk about “god”, I think of the term Creator.

I believe the divinity inside of us is the Creator. I believe we’re put here to create something from nothing, and to fully grow into our most dimensional creative selves.

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist and novelist is watching the divine flourish through me.

As we move as a planet into greater climate change and the resulting social chaos, we’re going to need all the creative solutions we can get. Switching from a linear mindset to a more elastic, dimensional, expanded way of approaching life is more important than ever.

This rewarding feeling of expansion that we get as artists and novelists also can bring great rewards to a changing world.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://carolineallen.com
• Instagram: @carolineallenartist
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/empoweredcreative
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolineallencoach/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@121063carrie