Paste a Video URL With 17 hours to go, we have reached our goal for the animal art project. There's still time to donate! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/artofstorytelling/beauty-of-the-beast

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:28:30 +0000Kickstarter Beauty of the Beast reached its goalA loving thank you to all the backers that helped Beauty of the Beast reach its goal. What a blessing. There's 17 hours left if you'd like to join the fun! 

Paste a Video URL As writers, we hold on too tightly to our favorite words or scenes or chapters. What if you had the courage to, as Faulkner writes, kill your darlings, to delete your favorite lines to better serve the story. I am a visual artist, as well as a writer, and in this video I have to destroy one painting in the hopes that the next one will be…

Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:57:44 +0000http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thCFoucrGNo Faulkner coined the phrase Kill Your Darlings about cutting much-loved scenes or paragraphs from your writing if it doesn't serve the overall story. This is one of the most difficult situations I come across when coaching writers. Here as a visual artist, I Kill the Darling -- my first painting of a horse -- in hopes that the second painting will turn out better, as…

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:15:04 +0000 I had an interesting conversation with a friend while camping in Maine over the weekend. Lisa is an art conservator (www.mehlinconservation.com) and she has to write reports for her work. We got into a discussion on correct grammar. I'd never talked to her about my belief that writers must make all sorts of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, typos and punctuation gaffs. Not that writers…

2010-01-30 13:05:14Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:05:14 +0000 Shattered Face. Art restorers gathered pieces of a saint's face as part of clean up efforts after a series of earthquakes hit Umbria in 1997 and broke frescoes on the walls of the St. Francis Basilica in Assisi, Italy. Courtesy of The Independent Newspaper, London. Oh, the artistic deaths I have known. My first death was around giving up full-time work to become a…

2010-02-05 13:02:41Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:02:41 +0000 As a coach, I come across a lot of writers who go through strong on and off phases with writing. They write for years, are passionate about taking classes, begin a novel, almost finish several short stories, then they shut down and do no writing for years. Not months, years! If you're a former student reading this and you think I'm talking about you,…

2010-02-05 14:38:20Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:38:20 +0000 Fruit, www.carolineallen.com I'm in my shrink's office in Lowell, MA talking about parental jealousy. Lowell is an old factory town north of Boston, full of smoke stacks and abandoned brick mills with the windows blown out. Over the past decade it has seen in influx of Asian immigrants. What this translates to are gangs of hip-hop teens on the sidewalk as I maneuver my…

2010-03-23 16:35:12Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:35:12 +0000 Detail from a new painting The French Circus, www.carolineallen.com Over the past couple of years, a client and I worked together to write the rough draft of her memoir. When it came time to revise the book, she was too busy at her job to give the book the attention it needed. She came up with a fabulous idea for revision that I'd like…

2010-05-08 16:10:14Sat, 08 May 2010 16:10:14 +0000[slideshow] Stream of Consciousness Series, from acrylic base to "rough draft", a new unfinished triptych called "Neptune". www.carolineallen.com As part of ongoing healing work I do around my visual art, I have been repeatedly advised to think of my doodles as valid to my voice, as relevant to my voice as an artist as the more "professional" pieces I create. I've been doodling since I…