Our guest this week is Carol Dunbar (The Net Beneath Us, Forge, September 2022). A successful actor in Minneapolis, Carol realized she was a storyteller working in the wrong art form so she switched from the world of the stage to the world of the page and moved off the grid with her family to rural Wisconsin. Her debut is the story of a woman who must deal with grief and open herself up to community when a tragic accident cleaves her world in two. Carol shares how an unexpected gift led to her perfect title and how investing in a writing conference changed her life. And if your dream is to be published by the Big Five, listen to her journey of finding the perfect agent to being on sub for four years to landing a two-book deal with an imprint of McMillan and working with a talented in-house editor whose probing questions taught her to be a better writer.

CAROL DUNBAR is a working writer and former actor who left her life in the city to live off the grid. She is the author of two novels, The Net Beneath Us, winner of the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, and A Winter’s Rime, releasing in the fall of 2023. She writes from a solar-powered office on the second floor of a water tower in northern Wisconsin, where she lives in a house in the woods with her husband, two kids, and a Great Pyrenes Mountain Dog.

To learn more about Carol, click here.