Carrie Classon

Carrie Classon is a performer and a nationally syndicated columnist with Andrews McMeel Universal. Born in Minnesota, she had a fourteen-year career in theater, performing in dozens of shows from Oregon to Maine. After founding and running a professional Equity theater for seven years, Classon earned her MBA and began working in international business. She also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has written a memoir and over six hundred columns.

In her 600-word weekly column, The Postscript, Classon writes about the transformative power of optimism and how to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. She champions the idea that it's never too late to reinvent our lives in unexpected and fulfilling ways. She performs a live show based on her writing—with lots of sequins. With her husband, Peter, and former street cat Felix, Classon splits her time between St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Her debut novel is Loon Point.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Loon Point is my first novel, so other than my weekly syndicated column, I have no name recognition as a writer, and I wanted something both memorable and not overly used. Neither my agent nor my publisher had any issues with it or other suggestions.

“Loon” conjures up wilderness for most people, and that is a good image to begin with. “Point” implies a small place, and that is also accurate. Loon Point deals with the lives of a middle-aged woman, an older man, and a young girl all living in the Northwoods and their various brands of loneliness, so I think beginning with their shared location makes sense.

What’s in a name?

I seem to have two types of character names: the ones that show up with the characters that I seem to have no choice about, and the ones I must name. I much prefer the former.

In this book, Wendell was named early and as a close echo of the name of the real person (Wally) who inspired him. Lizzie came, fully named, as did her dog, Mr. Benson (it took me a little while to figure out why the dog deserved the honorific, but I knew that, for some reason, he did!)

Norry did not have a first name, only a last, so I had to find one for her and I noted that both Lizzie and Wendell had double letters in them so, as the third POV, I liked the idea of her name fitting into that pattern. Bud Gustofson was named as I walked by a weathered sign leading to a road to a cabin in the Northwoods reading “Gustafson,” and his jocular manner reminded me of a 50-year veteran of Minnesota weather reporting, Bud Kraehling.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be astonished to know I was writing anything! I never wrote as a young person. When I started writing fiction at 58, it was after a 50-year hiatus that ended in the second grade after the very unsatisfactory conclusion to my short story, "The 500-Pound Mouse."

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Oh, beginnings, absolutely. Endings seem inevitable. While Loon Point is my first published novel, I’ve now completed three novels and, in every case, the beginning requires retooling in revision and the end rarely alters by more than a word or two.

Part of this is, no doubt, because I am as surprised as any reader when I write. I have no idea what will happen in the next scene. So I am driving into the dark when I begin. After the story is complete (and I know how it ends), I have the luxury of beginning it in a way that draws the reader in a little faster, so they don’t have to remain in the dark as long as I did!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

My characters are usually all a part of me, pushed a little further in one direction or another. I can be as stubborn and judgmental as the middle-aged Norry, and as quick to become emotionally attached. I had a happier childhood than my eight-year-old Lizzie, but I learned to love the woods and books and often enjoyed them together.

Only the older gentleman, Wendell, is a departure from me, in that he represents a real person in my life with whom I feel I share very little. I find his pervasive negativity both comic and sad, but I developed more empathy for both the character and the man who inspired him by writing Loon Point.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

More than any character in a book, my writing is inspired by the places where I have spent time, particularly as a child, and the people I have known. I would not be surprised if readers find Loon Point a little nostalgic, even while it is rooted in the present, because it is built from places that have lived in my memory since I was a girl. It took 50 years to tell the story, but it turns out that I had stories to tell, after all.

Visit Carrie Classon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Loon Point.

Writers Read: Carrie Classon.

--Marshal Zeringue