Of course everyone always asks me about my own life’s story. Yes, I have written it, but I chose to do it in the form of a novel, Mirror Mirror. But it is my story. It was better for me to write the story as a novel and I always tell my students that this can be an option for them as well. Indeed the best memoirs do read as if they were novels.

My own life was haunted by the death of my father when I was only five months old. It colored everything and I was not able to release myself from its power until I wrote it. The details of his life were kept from me in an effort to keep me from being sad. I was a grown woman before I attempted to find his own family and learn about him. It was quite a journey.

Mirror Mirror is the story of a woman compelled to search for her father and decides to write a book about him. Published by Taylor Productions Inc., it is a book within a book and can be used as an example for writing your own story. Click here to order.

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Excerpt from Mirror Mirror (pp.107-108):

(This story deals with my father’s life when he was a young boy.)

 

He awoke in the night, the figure of a ghost outlined on the soft wall of the barn. He pushed with his heels backing up into the straw, not daring to look away until he realized it was the moon playing against a hanging harness’s shadow that made an elongated head with an open mouth waiting to swallow him. And even when he knew it was only a shadow, he had to get out of there because it had spooked him. Bolting out the little side door, he ran for the house just as someone was descending the porch steps — someone he never had seen before, and it made him stop short. A tall scarecrow man jolted down the porch steps to his horse and buggy.

“Bye, Barret,” he said over his shoulder. Carter could see his father crouching in the doorway. “Let it set now. Don’t disturb nothin’. Be back in the mornin’ to take away the buckets. Least we got a start in this heat.”

“I’ll keep the parlor door shut.” his father’s voice was thin and empty.

“Jes don’t let the kids in there till I finish with the buckets. Takes a while to drain.” He flexed the reins, flipping them against the horse’s back until it clopped away, leaving Carter with a sense of dread he could taste. Barret went inside.

Carter ran to the porch’s open windows and stared inside until he could make out the form of his mother. She lay on the dining room table, the heels of her feet hanging over the edge, and a sheet draping her body. He eased himself through the door and into the room with her, and he inhaled what the man had been talking about. Under the table the four buckets stood in a row and the smell of blood smacked him like an assault. Where can I go? he thought. How will my mind ever be able to think of anything again without seeing this? The buckets under the table — the buckets of blood.

“Oh, Papa,” he sobbed. “No fair.”

“Carter — boy. Come out of there.” Hearing his voice his father had come to the doorway. “Come. Don’t never stay there. Come inside with me.” And they hugged each other as they walked to the stairs. And then they cried.

Carol Kafka is a master teacher whose career spans twenty years in the high school classroom, five years as publications director for the Mount Vernon Board of Education, and assistant director (under Walter Miller) of the New York University Summer Writers Conference, working with such luminaries as E.L. Doctorow and William Packard.

In addition, her creative writing classes with senior citizens at St John’s University in Queens, New York evolved into the creation of AUTOBIOGRAPHY: YOUR CHANCE TO LIVE FOREVER (published by Soul Search Inc.) – a workbook and video package that has solved the dilemma of how to write ones autobiography. Her method works equally well with beginning as well as advanced writers, and she has taught this course at the Learning Annex in New York City as well as the Wainwright House in Rye.

Carol founded and directed a children’s theater called The Clown Arounds which toured Westchester County in the 70’s. But she feels she became a "serious writer" in the 80’s. She is the author of a novel, MIRROR MIRROR, several plays, and MY OWN BEST FRIEND, a self-help book for teen aged girls.

Co-founder and Artistic Director of Innovative Stages, a theatrical group dedicated to the development of new plays, now Carol teaches Innovative Stages' semimonthly playwriting class and finds it exciting to watch the development of plays as playwrights read their work aloud. She is also the coordinator of the Young Playwrights Competition throughout Westchester County which will afford the winning high school students the opportunity to see their plays performed by professional actors in 2006.

Her own plays have been performed in Greenwich Village, on Queens Cable TV,as well as locally in Westchester County. Co-founding Innovative with John Driver is a long-held dream fulfilled, affording the opportunity for playwrights to see their work come to life.