Caroline Patterson
Fiction
Missoula, MT
Caroline Patterson has published a story collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, a literary anthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, two children’s books on the natural world, and her work has appeared in anthologies including One Million Acres, Montana Noir, Bright Bones, and The New Montana Story. She was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, Joseph Henry Jackson Prize from the San Francisco Foundation, a Vogelstein Foundation Award, and a Montana Arts Council Fellowship. She has enjoyed residencies at the VCCA and UCross.
Patterson is the executive director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, which places professional writers in schools to teach students poetry. She lives with her husband, writer Fred Haefele, in the Missoula home her great-grandfather built in 1906, with the fireplace on the inside rather than the outside wall, because her great-grandmother said, "she could never spend a night in a house with a mortgage." Her two college-aged children visit Sundays to do laundry.
At Ragdale, Patterson is excited to begin a serious revision of her draft of Summer of Flowers, a novel about a young women smokejumper set in 1988, when fire policy was changing and women smoke jumpers were new to the Forest Service.
Featured Work
Excerpt from First Chapter of The Stone Sister, unpublished
Novel by Caroline Patterson
Louise Gustafson liked to think her life began when a screen door banged shut in Blue Earth, Minnesota. Banged shut as she snuck out the back door of the brown Lutheran church blessed by wind and sun and land stretching from horizon to horizon, where her fiancé, the dirt farmer stood at the altar, stood waiting with his father and his father’s father for her to walk up the aisle to join him in growing into the earth, getting smaller and more furrowed each year until they joined the rest of his ancestors buried in dirt, with only their children to cough up their names.