Childhood

Carolyn McLean was the youngest child and only daughter of Mildred (née Washburn) and Charles Russell McLean of Duluth, Minnesota. She was raised in Duluth and Tryon, North Carolina, where she was sent to live with one of her father's sisters because her mother had had tuberculosis and was often away from the family being treated in sanitariums.

McLean's mother died in 1942, at a time when two of her older brothers were fighting in World War II. As a young teen, she worried for the safety of her family and often had nightmares about the Gestapo. She never lost her preoccupation with the damage that evil people could do.^[1]

Education

After graduating from the Abbot Academy boarding school, McLean received her B.A. in English and history from Wellesley College in 1951 and spent several years working in New York and Boston^[1] before undertaking graduate-level work at the University of Minnesota in 1954 and 1955.^[2]

Family

While at Wellesley, McLean met Robert Elwood Bly on a blind date. She was Episcopalian; he was Lutheran. They married in 1955 and moved to Robert Bly's family farm near the small town of Madison, Minnesota. At the time, the farm had no running water.^[1] The family lived a relatively simple life, and as she once told a disbelieving census taker, instead of owning a television they entertained themselves with their more than 5,000 books.^[3] Their house was usually filled with visiting poets, including Donald Hall, James Wright, and Bill Holm, all of whom were asked to do their share of chores before Bly would feed them.^[1]

The couple had four children, Micah,^[4] Bridget, Noah, and Mary, who is an English professor at Fordham University and a best-selling romance novelist under the pseudonym Eloisa James. Carol and Robert Bly divorced in 1979.

Works

Bly's short stories are known for their realistic characters and situations, which are fully developed within the small number of pages the story allows.^[7] Although many of her stories are set in Minnesota, the people and the situations transcend local boundaries, emphasizing pride in one's work, resourcefulness, the ability to laugh at one's self, and the ability "to hold values beyond one's own immediate welfare."^[8]

Perhaps inspired by Robert Bly's co-founding of American Writers Against the Vietnam War in 1966, Bly used her literature to reflect modern-day concerns.^[1] Her work is in many ways an ethical treatise, often featuring a "bully", embodied by either a person or a corporation, who takes pleasure in forcing his will on another person or group of people. Some of her stories also explore evil, which, to her, is seen in people or organizations which find enjoyment in enslaving, humiliating, or crushing their opponents. The stories emphasize redemption through empathy, which, to Bly, is the step of deliberately looking at how one's actions impact others.^[9] Bly always called herself a C.S. Lewis person; she dutifully read Bonhoeffer, but found him dull.

A typical Bly protagonist is a conventional woman who has been content to live in "ignorant complacency," but, through her own strength and intelligence must first identify the moral crisis facing either her or her community and then work to accomplish change. In her best works, the moral center is hard to find, as each character has some claim to the reader's sympathies.^[8]

Teaching

To reach a broader audience, Bly wrote several books to assist others in learning to write well. Rather than concentrate on the technical basics of writing a story, these books provide tips for writing a story that is "morally, politically, and emotionally deep."^[10] Her books are somewhat controversial, as they encourage students to use "the sort of 'empathetic questioning' therapists and social workers use" in order to find their strongest feelings and amplify their ideas.^[11]

These principles were demonstrated during the four creative writing workshops that Bly taught each spring in Saint Paul, Minnesota as well as in the talks and readings she gave.^[2] The workshops were of limited size, usually including only eight students, with Bly lecturing as well as providing individual advice and criticism of the student's works.^[12]

Recognition

Bly was awarded the 2001 Minnesota Humanities Award for Literature. She had previously been named the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Minnesota Author (1998–1999) and the Minnesota Women's Press Favorite Woman Author (2000).^[2]

Bly was a member of the board of directors for The Loft Literary Center from 1991 to 1994, and the board of Episcopal Community Services in 1978–1979. Bly was also a member of the Minnesota Book and Literary Arts Building Authors' Advisory Group in 1999. She has designed workshops for Women Against Military Madness, National Association of Social Workers, and the Midwest Institute of School Social Workers, and was a consultant to the Land Stewardship Project from 1983 to 1992.^[5]

Fiction

• Backbone: Short Stories
• The Tender Organizations
• The Tomcat's Wife and Other Stories
• My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories (2000)
• Shelter Half (Holy Cow! Press, 2008)

Essays

• Letters from the Country (1981, reissued 1999)
• An Adolescent's Christmas: 1944 (1999)
• Bad Government and Silly Literature: An Essay
• Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture
• Changing the Bully Who Rules the World (1996)
• There once was a man from Nantucket, (1950)

Books on writing

• Beyond the Writer's Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction (2000)
• The Passionate, Accurate Story (1990, reissued 1997)

With Cynthia Loveland

• Three Readings for Republicans and Democrats
• Stopping the Gallop to Empire
• A Shout to American Clergy
• Against Workshopping Manuscripts