Colleen A. Parkinson is an award-winning playwright and novelist living in Redding, California. She began writing at age nine with a serialized detective series for her elementary school newspaper. From there, she continued to hone her craft during her teen years with short stories, one-act plays, poetry, and two extremely awful novels she wisely tossed in the trash bin. The theater bug hit her while in college and she performed in many community theater productions and returned to writing for the stage with two award-winning plays. Her first published novel, "The Finest Hat in the Whole World," another award-winner, has been praised for its lyricism, realistic characters and tender, captivating story.
Biography of Colleen A. Parkinson
My earliest memory is the expression of pride and joy on my mother’s face as I walked (more like “tottered”) into her outstretched arms. I find it rather strange that the memory of that event always comes to me in black and white instead of color. Maybe I could only see in black and white back then, or maybe it’s because we had a black and white television that seldom worked because the tubes kept wearing out. When it worked, I sat cross-legged on the floor with my two sisters watching reruns of “I Love Lucy,” “Captain Kangaroo,” and every Shirley Temple movie that was ever made. My mother loved Shirley Temple. She loved her so much she actually had created her own Shirley Temple scrapbook when a teen in Hawaii. I don’t recall for certain, but I believe she often watched those movies with us when she wasn’t busy doing laundry for her eight children; in the count, I was number seven.
Although television had a profound effect on my later desire to become an actress and possibly even write screenplays and television shows, it was books that introduced me to a media that I had a better (so I believed at that time) chance of succeeding at. My mother and father were avid readers. We had a bookcase full of children’s books, novels, medical books (Mom wanted to be a nurse at one time), How-To books, and even some textbooks my brothers had never returned to their school at the end of the year. One of those books was about Psychology, and it fascinated me. I perused many of these books as soon as I learned to read. I can’t count how many I read over the summers when the T.V. sat dormant with another blown tube, but I know it was a lot. The first grown-up novel I read was called, “The Texas Rangers.” I read that when I was seven. Read the whole thing. Loved it. My brother Patrick, thinking I didn’t really understand it, asked me to describe the story. I did. He was surprised that I actually understood what I had read. I went on to other books, and I paid attention to not only the quality and mechanics of the writing, but the mechanics of punctuation, too. One of my teachers actually told my classmates I was the only one in her class who knew how to write dialogue with proper punctuation. That made me proud. I got beat-up later for it.
My elementary school had a school newspaper, and they were looking for material. I wrote a series of short stories about two midget detectives who solved crimes. (Please don’t yell at me for using the word “midget”—that was the word in use at the time.) Anyway, that series was a big hit with the students, and my older brothers Patrick and Tim encouraged me to keep writing. So, I kept writing. I even kept writing while in the hospital after a major surgery for an intestinal condition that almost killed me when I was ten. I wrote stories for the doctors and nurses, and they passed them around. I was the Surgical Ward’s little celebrity, their “author in residence.” Their enthusiasm encouraged me further.
Often, life doesn’t proceed the way we want it to, and my life took many turns and frightening dips. Ongoing health issues, however, provided me with an opportunity to attend college through a special program. It was there I honed my writing skills, and there I rediscovered my love for theater and film. My first theatrical play, “The Injured Child,” was accepted and performed by a local theater group. The producer, considering the fact it was a drama about two children living with a volatile alcoholic parent, cautioned me not to get my hopes up that it would attract substantial audience attendance. I had already expected meager attendance. No one was prepared for the reaction it got on opening night and the full houses that followed. The dang thing went on to win a theater award the following year, and a second award the year after that. Who woulda thunk it?
Now I’m much older and retired with time to write novels. I love writing novels. I love writing complicated characters with realistic flaws. I love life-affirming endings. I love that feeling I get when I type “THE END” on my final draft. What I love even more is getting feedback, complimentary and critical, from readers of my work.
What I don’t love is the marketing aspect. What a pain! Yet, the more I work on marketing, the better I become at creating a hook and a compelling synopsis. That in itself is another aspect of writing that all writers need to master. Do most writers make a lot of money? Nah… You can’t do it for the money; you do it because it makes you happy. You do it because, the more you write, the better writer you become. That’s why I write.