In addition to her artwork, Carolyn Holm is also a writer. She worked for years writing commercially, and wrote Everyday Art for Kids (now out of print). She has recently completed a novel, The Prosper Gospel, and is presently in the process of submitting it to agents. A description and an excerpt follow:

The Prosper Gospel

It is the middle of the twenty-first century, global warming has taken its catastrophic toll, Christian Right extremists run the country, and daily life in California has become grindingly difficult as the state slides into third world mediocrity. Maggie Prosper finds herself compelled by circumstance to leave this disintegrating urban world behind her, to move with her daughters and a young homeless man to her grandmother’s farm in Saddle Bar, a tiny rural backwater in the upper foothills of the Sierra. There she attracts a group of unlikely companions who forge a new community made up of Dissidents, non-Christians, the unwilling second-class citizens of an Evangelical Christian nation that maintains its grip with it’s own powerful police organization, God’s Army. Moving to the idyllic mountain community is Maggie’s first step in a journey both physical and spiritual, as she learns to farm for their own survival, and then experiences a spiritual vision that changes her life, and the lives of the people around her, even while she is on a collision course with God’s Army over her mother’s life, her daughter’s future, and her community’s vision.

While this subject matter sounds both quirky and controversial, readers find that in fact the tone of the book is thoughtful and humorous. It is Maggie’s relationships – with Eric, with her former husbands, her two daughters, her mother and grandmother, with each of the odd assortment of people who end up on the farm, and with the land itself – that makes The Prosper Gospel compelling to its surprising end.

Excerpt

    His voice grew sleepy, and there were more silences than conversation, and finally Maggie could tell by his breathing that he was asleep. She remained wide awake, devoured by anxiety. She couldn’t stop picturing her mother's arrest. The two men dressed in the tan God's Army uniform. The hand on her mother's head, pushing her into the waiting car. The clinic staff, staring, no one saying a word. She imagined Adele in a jail cell, seated on a cot, her back very straight, her hands folded on her lap. She pictured a judge looking down at her from a bench, speaking sternly to her. Sometimes she pictured her mother with the three others who had been arrested, but mostly she pictured her alone.

    Maggie knew that Adele would not have considered herself guilty of a crime. Over the years society had become so bitterly divided, that each side no longer had the imagination to understand the other. Now that one side was firmly in control of everything, there was little the other side could do but dissent.

    They call us Ungodly, as if we have no morality of our own, Maggie thought bitterly. She wished she could stop thinking about Adele, but she did not seem to have any choice. All night long the arrest scenario repeated, as if it were on a loop, reviewing over and over the faces and distressing circumstances that she had no power to change. These alternated with random memories of her mother, memories like snapshots, some recent, some from her childhood. Adele holding a folded sheet as she said so earnestly “some, like me, have chosen another spiritual path.” Adele sitting at the dining room table, holding one of Maggie’s hands in hers while Maggie’s other hand traced the crack on the sugar bowl, tears drenching her face, as her mother told her “You were lucky to have that kind of love. The sad thing is the more we love the more we have to lose.” Adele shouting, striding back and forth across the living room, at Emily the time she came home stoned from a high school field trip. Muttering darkly as she bathed the family dog, an hysterical spaniel, after an encounter with a skunk. And standing in the doorway of the big Prosper house saying goodbye to friends after a dinner party, elegant in a black sheath and heels, her dark hair pulled back into a French twist. Maggie always wished she had inherited her mother's looks, the dark wavy hair, striking brows and deep brown eyes, but she was solidly on the Prosper side, with a head of thick light brown curls, hazel eyes, and a dusting of freckles across her face. She could look forward to a halo of white curls by the time she was sixty, like Grandma Jenna. Miranda shared Maggie's coloring and curls, but lucky Gina, like Emily, was born with Adele's beautiful dark lanky hair and large brown eyes.

    Miranda suddenly woke, sitting up wildly in the dark. Maggie pulled her close saying "It's all right, Mommy's here", and then the child began to weep.
    "I want to go home."
    "I know you do, we all do."

    Now and then she was aware of the sound of a car passing on the road, a vague noise on the edge of her consciousness, but she was startled fully awake when one stopped nearby. Lifting her head Maggie listened carefully. She heard a distant creak, the unmistakable sound of a car door opening. Then everything was silent but for the gentle breathing of the sleepers around her. Her shoulder ached as she lay awkwardly raised on an elbow, but she was unwilling to move as she strained to listen. After a tense minute there was the sound of a car door slamming, then an engine starting, and gratefully she heard it drive away. Maggie rolled off her elbow in relief.

    She finally went to sleep, but woke again, abruptly again, this time at the sound of Ned's low growl. It was too dark to see, but he must have heard something. His head was raised alertly, ears cocked. She listened but could hear nothing but Miranda's light breathing against her chest, and had to hope that he was reacting to nothing more than a nocturnal forest animal. These woods had to be full of them, raccoons, possum, badgers, skunks, and deer.

    With morning’s arrival the dense white fog still blanketed everything around them, but it was beautiful now, not frightening. Maggie walked Ned and the sleepy girls into the forest. The ground was soft with dead leaves; all they could hear were their quietly crunching footsteps. The ghostly trees emerged from the white mist as they came closer, and as they took form their details became visible: the red peeling bark of the madrones; the lichen on the twisted oaks; and, at the base of some, the grotesque shapes and fleshy tumescence of yellow and orange fungus. Maggie pulled on the leash as the dog nosed under a log, snuffling loudly. There were delicate ferns, and the bare, seemingly dead branches of anonymous dormant shrubs. In a clearing they came to a huge ceonothus, its leaves tiny, glossy, and dark green. It would burst into glorious blue bloom in March. With a hand on each back Maggie steered the girls to a fallen tree.
    "Don't touch those branches" she cautioned, pointing to some bare sticks growing out the ground. "I think that's Poison Oak. If you so much as touch it you'll have the worst itch of your life. It will blister up with pus, and you'll go crazy wanting to scratch and scratch."
    The girls shrank back against Maggie, looking at the guilty twigs with horror.
    "I don't want poison oak on my peepee" whined Gina.
    "You won't get it. It's way over there."
    "I'm afraid I'm going to pee on my sock." complained Miranda.
    "That's why you have to be careful," admonished Maggie. Miranda glared at her. Maggie felt a twinge of guilt for her lack of warmth. She didn't like peeing on the ground either, and she too worried about getting urine on her shoes or pant cuff, envying men for their ability to direct the stream. But she was too tired to muster up real sympathy.

    Back at the car Maggie got out the last of the bread and opened a jar of jam. She wished she had thought to bring paper plates and cups. She got out her good chef's knife to spread the jam. They would have to pass around the milk bottle. Drinking directly from the plastic bottle reminded Maggie of being a child in school, when they drank their lunch milk from little cartons made of waxy cardboard She could remember exactly how it tasted. Now milk came in plastic bottles, and her girls were growing up with an entirely different taste memory.

    Suddenly she remembered Isabel again, and got out her cell phone. As she feared, there was no service here. Hopefully she would be able to call her as soon as she got to Nonna's. Isabel would be sick with worry. Maggie felt badly because she had not yet paid her for last week as well as Monday. She would send the money.

    She heard coughing, and Eric emerged from the foggy woods and sat down on the ice chest with his arms crossed tightly on his chest. "Damn cold" he said shortly. Maggie handed him some bread and jam, an orange, some cheese.
    "We're sharing the milk," she said. " I wish I could let you share it but…"
    Eric waved his hand dismissively. "No problem. No point in all of you folks getting this flu."

    Still, he was looking much better, no longer listless, though his face was still badly bruised. He offered to clean up the breakfast when they were finished.
    "Man, I could use a cup of coffee" he said wistfully as he screwed the lid back on the jam.
    "That makes two of us," Maggie answered glumly.