She taught fiction and nonfiction for the Oregon Writers’ Workshop and other writing organizations in Oregon and Washington. Her work has been published in literary journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and by independent presses. Her popular blog, Go Ask Alice ... When She’s 94, focused on her mother's aging, on the deep and often funny intergenerational exchanges between mother and daughter, and on caregiving.
At Electric Lit Carlisle tagged seven books "from around the world that take older women seriously," including:
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-JonesRead about the other entries on the list.
A literary mystery set in wintry Poland among a group of mostly deserted houses, this novel touches on not only crime, alarm, and bizarre events but slowly reveals a deeper mystery: what lives in the heart of a singular old woman. Janina is ourguide through the strange happenings that unfold. Witty, quietly charming in her way, and darkly smart, she is an astrologer, an observer, an animal lover and caretaker of the houses abandoned for the season by wealthier neighbors. Her telling of what happens in this remote area is reminiscent more of a fairy tale than a mystery, the sort where children are lost in a forest and stalked by something coldly threatening.
The original mystery may not turn out to be the reader’s ultimate reason for wandering deeper and deeper into the marrow of this novel, but it’s a hard book to describe without ruining that element of it. Like Um Qasem, Janina sees that the world we naively sum up and set apart as “nature” entwines with out of control human desires and ambitions. She must confront the perceived imbalances that threaten what she cares about. Her telling of shadowy events may be riveting, but not as riveting as she is.
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is among Francesca McDonnell Capossela's seven titles about women committing acts of violence.
--Marshal Zeringue
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