Look and Listen

Biography

Carol Fullerton Samsel lives with her husband of fourteen years in a small country home in Haskell, Arkansas. Originally from the Tampa Bay area of Florida, she relocated to Arkansas five years ago, after her husband was hired by a Little Rock hospital. Her novel, The Clones of Langston, was a New Century Writer Awards finalist. The story tells of cloned workers who are deserted by their manufacturer. The corporation that discards them assumes they'll quietly die, but instead the workers muddle on to form their own society. With time, the facility housing the clones begins to deteriorate, leading those within to suspect that there might be more to the world than they've been led to believe. Carol is an artist, as well as a writer. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited in regional, national, and international exhbitions. In fact, Clones is Carol's second book. Last year she released An Artist's Path: Two Years Toward Professionalism, which is written for those pursuing art as a career. She designed the cover of Clones using photographs licensed through a stock photography agency (having become acquainted with the ins and outs of art licensing while working for a decorative paper bag manufacturer). For six years, she worked at the University of Florida, preparing articles and grants for various researchers and professional publications. Her desk was eventually moved into a laboratory where diabetes research was being performed. She drew from this experience while creating the laboratory settings in Clones. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, as well as a degree in Zoo Animal Technology. She has traveled through much of the United States and western Canada; also to Nova Scotia, much of the Caribbean, and Kenya.

Inspiration

I've written stories since I was a small child. In high school I took English and creative writing classes, and worked on the newspaper. Throughout my adult life, I journaled. In my forties, I began to write journal entries that were more like short stories. I'd include dialogue and observations. This is when I started to work toward becoming a novelist and screenwriter. The initial inspiration for Clones came to me while I was walking around a zoo. I passed a group of school children and started to think, "What if there were no animals at the zoo? No animals anywhere? What if these children were visiting an archaeological relic?" I started writing the scene, but then decided it I needed one child to represent the many; one animal to represent the many lost. Soon it became about a boy discovering a mouse—in a world where no animals lived. What would he think? What would he do? This scene is found in the center of Clones, and it's from this chapter the rest of the work unfolded.