I’ve always been fascinated by what drives stories and believe that sharing them is key for inviting compassion, creating community, and knitting the world a little closer together.
Born in L.A., California, I started my career as a storyteller with a job as tour guide at Universal Studios. Sharing the history of films; how movies are made; and insider secrets about actors, sets, props, and scripts was great fun, and it piqued my interest into the question of how narratives come into being. I next worked in TV production, which involved long days and some glittery red-carpet moments, before deciding to get a master’s degree in fiction writing at Columbia University in NYC. Following my program, I moved to Germany, where I spent several years teaching business English and writing a novel. Then, in 2002, I came to Canada and began teaching creative writing at Western University.
I loved sharing the inner workings of craft and practice with emerging writers in the classroom and seeing their lights turn on. But over time, I felt increasingly frustrated by the limits of academic institutions, and that they couldn’t nurture burgeoning writers specifically enough, so I started coaching and editing privately. That intimate relationship allowed me to focus solely on each writer’s needs, and I saw enormous leaps forward in my writers’ productivity, agency, and success.
Wanting to be able to serve more writers across all the genres, I launched my full-service writers center, One Lit Place, in 2015. Our team of award-winning writers, coaches, and editors has helped build an infrastructure that now supports creative, academic, and business writers to feel strong, motivated, and to add their voices to the conversation at every step of their writing journey.
Many of our clients have published books (some of them multiple books!), while others have achieved professorships or tenure, become more adept at writing for work or, in general, developed much greater confidence and agency as writers.
Now, nearly 10 years in, we offer a full suite of services to help writers reach their goals: our Write Your Novel, Memoir, and Business Book programs have successfully ushered countless writers through their first drafts; our custom writing coaching supports, guides, and nurtures writers in the precise ways they need to achieve their goals; and we continue to add more programming to meet the ever-changing literary landscape, such as self-publishing, author websites and, coming soon, an author marketing course to help book authors create a brand-specific communications strategy to meet their readers and sell books.
These days, in addition to serving the OLP community, I’m busy writing a nonfiction book for business owners; I write personal essays and poetry; I read when I can; and, because I strongly believe that writers need to keep up our calories, I bake – a lot.
“Make friends with doubt.”
Ron Carlson