Extended biography

Carolyn Smart was born in Kent, England, the younger of two sisters with an American mother and British father, and grew up in a small village where some houses on the village green dated from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. Her love of rural walking was nurtured by her regular walks on Pilgrim’s Way and the winding country lanes of the Weald of Kent. There was a delivery to her house once a week of eggs by Mr. Bird The Eggman, and on Saturday afternoons she and her sister would visit Mrs. Stott’s sweet shop for hard candies and sherbet. When she was six, her father and mother asked what she’d think about moving to Canada. She had no idea what that meant; when asked if she wanted to visit Switzerland she’d thought it was a chocolate bar. Nonetheless, she thought it might be alright, and she and her family moved to Ottawa, where she lived until the age of 11. 

Her subsequent year in a boarding school on the south coast of Sussex was unhappy, but led to her first writing: the biography of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in November of that year, and then several short stories inspired by popular songs of the time. That was the year she discovered reading as a serious passion, too. Sitting in the chilly classroom one day she saw the Nicholas Montserrat novel The Cruel Sea on a nearby bookcase, and remembered him from a party her parents held one winter in Ottawa. He was a member of the diplomatic corps too, though far more urbane than most, and a subject of jealous gossip. All this added great cachet to his novels, and so began a fascination with writers, as well as their writing.

Returning to Canada, she began high school in Toronto where she was mocked for her English accent; in Sussex she’d been mocked for what was assumed to be an American accent. She did her best to fit in, but mostly took comfort in an overwhelming obsession with the Beatles. In the summer of 1969, after graduating high school (much to her parents’ surprise, because she’d spent most of the time staring out the school window and climbing trees instead of studying) she returned to England, to her childhood village of Brasted, Kent, and had the happiest time of her young life with childhood friends. But there was something else that had entered her experience by this time: she had fallen in love with the poetry and songs of Leonard Cohen, and had begun to write her own poems, winning contests and publishing in an anthology for high school study published by Gage, entitled Vibrations. She earned $10 from that publication and has kept the cheque stub forever.

Somehow she slipped into the University of Toronto, studying English Literature, and because of her passion for the Beatles, managed a Minor in Far Eastern Religion as she wanted to know what they knew about Hinduism, Buddhism and all things mystical. She wrote and published in campus magazines, acted in on-campus theatrical productions, and was accepted into the competitive-entry creative writing course offered by Dave Godfrey, co-founder of the House of Anansi Press, New Press, and Press Porcépic (later Porcupine’s Quill). She gave her first public reading at Hart House in 1972.  She obtained her BAH in 1973 with an undergraduate thesis on the female characters of Virginia Woolf.

Upon graduation she had the great good fortune of being hired at Doubleday Canada as an editorial assistant, working alongside the man who would later become Alice Munro’s editor, Doug Gibson. She moved on to Macmillan’s of Canada the following year as Promotions Manager for Dennis Lee (whose bestsellers Alligator Pie and Nicholas Knock were about to be published) and Canadian icon Hugh MacLennan. But it was the position of her dreams to also act as Poetry Editor, working with such astounding writers as Don Coles and Gwendolyn MacEwen. She remembers her knees literally knocking as she walked down the hall to meet Gwen for the first time.

An early and brief marriage took her to Winnipeg for two years, where she worked for the Provincial government run by Premier Ed Schreyer. With very little knowledge of Math, she oversaw the printing and publication of the Manitoba Budget Address, and very much enjoyed organizing and running the 1977 Western Premiers’ Conference in Brandon, Manitoba, where she was chauffeured around by the RCMP.  

Back in Ontario and keen to leap into the literary world again, she signed up for a poetry workshop led by someone she’d originally met through Dave Godfrey: Joe Rosenblatt, who ran a vibrant class through the Three Schools of Art. The subsequent class was taught by Pier Giorgio di Cicco, and she began to take writing and publishing as seriously as he suggested she do. At that point she began to support herself working retail, and put her career as a writer first. A Canada Council grant in 1979 gave her the confidence to pursue it fully.

Reading obsessed her. As a teenager her earliest influences were ee cummings and Leonard Cohen, and in her 20s she became fascinated by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly and Michael Ondaatje. In later years she has been drawn to the work of a broad range of poets, both narrative and lyric, including Jane Kenyon, Marie Howe, Carolyn Forché, Carol Ann Duffy, Mark Strand, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, Lynda Hull, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. In terms of fiction writers, those that still draw her to read and reread their work include Alice Munro, Roberto Bolaño, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, and Patti Smith.

Her first collection of poetry was published in 1981, and her second book appeared the following year. She began to teach writing workshops in Toronto, first at the Free Times Café on College street, organized by the now-defunct “Poetry Canada Review” magazine for whom she wrote a regular column, ‘On Craft’. She began running workshops from her apartment the following year, publishing in magazines, giving as many public readings as she could, and making friends with fellow writers. She was a member of a poetry workshop with seven other writers, and was part of the feminist collective that produced “Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly” and throughout this formative time began to meet other women poets interested in the kind of writing she was producing as well as hoping to encourage within the magazine. 

The poet and mentor Bronwen Wallace was a major influence, not only publishing her work in “Quarry Magazine” and reading with her at public events, but introducing her to the man Carolyn would marry within seven weeks. Bronwen was then teaching at Queen’s University, and Carolyn would come in as a guest reader and workshop leader. When Bronwen was offered the temporary position of writer-in-residence at another university, Carolyn was hired by Queen’s to fill in. In a heartbreaking turn of events, Bronwen died in the intervening summer after a brutal short illness; Carolyn took the job at Queen’s and stayed for 32 years.

Her teaching career at Queen’s marked a period of intense growth in students’ interest in creative writing, and during her tenure she increased the offerings in creative writing from one to seven courses, ran a very popular long-running reading series, and instituted a Writer-in-Residence. She was instrumental in the founding of two campus literary magazines: “Ultraviolet”, and “Lighthouse Wire”. She won a student-nominated award for her mentorship, and notably followed up with graduates to see if they were still writing, and if there were anything she might do to encourage them further. More than 60 of her former students are published authors. She began a series of biannual anthologies entitled Lake Effect to promote and feature the work of her most advanced and talented creative writing students. By the time of her retirement she had edited 10 volumes. The first five were published by Artful Codger Press, and the second five by Upstart Press, and may be found in the National Library of Canada.

In memory of her beloved friend, Carolyn founded the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, managed by the Writers Trust of Canada.  After a decade it began to be sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada, and has become a major award worth $10,000 each year to both a poet and a short fiction author, of any age, all Canadians, all previously unpublished in book form. 

Her collections of poetry have been Swimmers in Oblivion (York Publishing, 1981), Power Sources (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982), Stoning the Moon (Oberon Press, 1986), The Way to Come Home (Brick Books, 1993), Hooked - Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009) and her poetic study of the Barrow Gang, Careen (Brick Books, 2015). Her memoir At the End of the Day was published by Penumbra Press in 2001, and an excerpt won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She has taught poetry at the Banff Centre and participated online for Writers in Electronic Residence. Both Careen and Hooked have become theatrical productions, the former in Canada and the U.K., and Hooked was nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore awards after a full-length production at Theatre Passe Muraille. It has toured across Canada, as well as multiple productions in the U.K., including the Edinburgh And RADA Festivals.

She continues to edit poetry for the MacLennan Series at McGill-Queen’s University Press, and to mentor and advise emerging writers across the country. She lives in the country north of Kingston where she and her late husband raised three sons, and she grows an extensive flower and organic vegetable garden. She travels when she can, walks in the woods with her dogs, and still climbs trees. She reads voraciously, loves music, photography and film, and writes in her study looking out into the sugar maples and cedars, where owls like to nest.