Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
Louise Erdrich
A native of Southern California, Caroline Mertens moved to Colorado as a teen. She received her B.A. in English and Secondary Education from Colorado Christian University in Denver. Her grandmother's immigration tales of adventure, love, pain, and redemption provided ample amounts of hope, grace, and literary inspiration for her debut, In Those Other Lands.
After a season of work in the Netherlands, England, and France, Caroline returned to Colorado. Over the years, she has worked as a magazine editor, a professional writer, and an assistant to a Young Life director. However, Caroline's most fulfilling career is teaching high school English and Creative Writing. She strives to encourage teenagers to read what they love, and inspires her students to engage in purposeful creative writing. Caroline is passionate about traveling, cooking Indonesian food, and exploring Colorado with her family.
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