I am a writer and I live in the woods.
In the summer of 2002, Carol Dunbar moved off the grid to the woods of northern Wisconsin with her husband and their 15-month-old daughter.
They set up an off-grid woodshop powered by a diesel generator and sold custom furniture, using wood from the trees they slabbed and air-dried on their land.
In the fall of 2006 when their son was two years old, her husband had an accident with a table saw that became the springboard for her first novel, The Net Beneath Us.
Carol has been writing books since kindergarten and worked freelance as a ghostwriter on her path to becoming a novelist. In 2023, her debut novel, The Net Beneath Us, won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, was shortlisted for a WLA Literary Award, and was an honoree for The Society of Midland Authors Fiction Book Award.
Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Lit Hub, Brevity, The South Carolina Review, and others. Her essays about living off the grid can be heard on Wisconsin Public Radio; one essay, involving her encounter with a mother bear, was televised as an animated short. Her second novel, A Winter’s Rime, won a WLA Literary Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fiction.
Before devoting herself to writing, Carol earned her BFA in theatre and worked as a professional actor based out of Minneapolis. She trained as a coloratura soprano, co-founded The Huldufólk Theatre Company, and served as director for various summer youth camps.
The daughter of a naval officer, Carol was born on the island of Guam and bounced around to different schools across the globe growing up. She moved to the Midwest for love, married a Minnesota boy, and never left. She writes from a solar-powered office on the second floor of a water tower in the woods of northern Wisconsin where she lives with her husband, two kids, and a Great Pyrenees mountain dog.
