Author Karen S. Bell

Bio

As a child, it was always my greatest pleasure to read. On summer break, I would go to the Brooklyn Public Library and borrow the maximum allowed books and have trouble making it home with the giant stack in my arms. It was a very different time. No Internet, no live-streaming shows, minimal TV channels and few programs. So reading was the escape of choice for me. Also there was no Amazon or cheap ebooks, so going to the library was a treat I looked forward to. It felt churchlike, or in my case, synagoguelike to roam the quiet floor and bookshelves in the coolness of the building from the oppressive, before air conditioning, summer heat. I always managed to finish all my books before they were due. A fact of which I was most proud. My taste was eclectic from Nancy Drew to the Diary of Anne Frank to a book on the life of Madam Curie.

The love of books, slowly translated into a desire to write but the demands of dating and then family life got in the way. I started a book about my travels in Europe as single young girl, but Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying beat me to it. Many years later, I took an adult education writing class and the magic happened. The teacher gave us an assignment. He said, we should imagine a room with a single naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling…and go. Where I went was nothing like that image but I created a short story that seemed to write itself. I couldn’t write it fast enough. It was about two lonely mountain men that became great friends. After I visited Alaska, I made that the setting. “The Companion,” that story, is sold on Amazon.

Writing and editing became my line of work after I earned a M.S. in Mass Communication. While a working mother spending my time in Corporate America, I experienced firsthand the joys of working with competitive women and the sacrifices made. I was lucky to remain a homemaker until my children became school age, but my career path paid the price for that delay. One day, I went to the Ladies room and saw a women pumping her breast and thought, This is wrong. There’s a baby crying somewhere and this mother is not nurturing right now. And so the idea for my debut, Walking with Elephants was born. I wrote about the overworked working mother before it became a popular theme, but only found an independent publisher who would take it and then she went out of business. So I took it over.

I remain a self-published author, hoping that my next book will be the one picked up by a NY publishing house. I write about the human experience, the real world problems that become provocative to my narrative and I also weave-in other worldly elements because it fascinates me. I live in Ponte Vedra, Florida, with my two furry cat kids, my four human kids living everywhere BUT Ponte Vedra.

(Karen S. Bell, August 2019)