Carol Clarke – Writing Assistant ‘extraordinaire’
Image development through the printed word. Group leader, adult educator and communications consultant, Carol offers twenty-five years of expertise in developing, delivering and assessing training programs with a focus on creative writing and self-editing. She is well acquainted with editing and writing manuscripts, workshop, keynote and seminar materials, proposals, biographical copy, dialogue and descriptive narrative.
 
About Co-Authoring Susan Armstrong’s Invisible Prison memoir

At first, it’s culture shock…
One might ask how a straight-arrow, nonsmoking, tea-drinking, one-man woman who lives in the suburbs could have related to Susan Armstrong’s past. What could I, Carol Clarke, know about presenting a story that, oh, starts out nicely enough in an ordinary family setting, but then rapidly accelerates into wild random acts of antisocial behavior in a locale that features big scary bikers, strip joints and motorcycles casually parked in the kitchen?
 
As I see it, the instinctive human connection here is about survival. After all, we acquire interest in other people’s lives to try to understand their endurance: their struggles and strategies to get to some special goal. Who cares about someone else’s stress-free, perfectly staged and unflawed existence? Give us the rough road on film and in books and show us how other folks handle crisis. We learn by example. (And given the nature of Susan’s book, it’s safer that way.)
 
The other natural connection has to do with admiration. Susan’s recovery story reveals much about her personality: she’s plucky and she carries a solid sense of objectivity about life. For me, scripting her words was a simple task of sentence structure; for Susan, it meant re-visiting dark corners of trauma – still vivid enough to induce recall of an associated sense of smell – and yet she never whined or expected sympathy. I like that.
 
When Susan first recounted the tale over lunch, my mouth kept falling wide and snapping shut while I considered the challenge. When the narration concluded, I think I was left twitching. “Well, what do you think?” Susan asked. “Piece of cake,” I said, as worldly-sounding as I could manage. And so, given the ending, I accepted her writing invitation because I wanted to help refine a basic truth, and it’s this: we all make a mess from time to time; the real issue is how we handle the cleanup.