About Carrie

In 2006, Carrie Knowles bought a small office building at the southernmost edge of Historic Oakwood in Downtown Raleigh. She named the building the Free Range Studio and inscribed this on the wall: Creativity should have no boundaries and dreams no fences. “That’s how I see the world,” Knowles says, “and the way I hope to live my life as a creative person.”
 
The Free Range Studio provided office space to a wide range of writers and other creative
individuals, including Carrie’s close friend and fellow author, Peggy Payne. In 2021, Carrie sold the Free Range Studio. It was time to make a shift in her life and her work
and to leave Raleigh so she and her husband could spend more time with their children and grandchildren. They now split their time between a home in Washington, DC and one in Oberlin, Ohio.
 

“This move,” she says, “is part of my continued belief in what I first stenciled on the wall of the Free Range Studio, that creativity should have no boundaries and dreams no fences. I’m hoping this next stage in my life will open new ways of writing and creating for me. It’s a bold step in a new direction, and I’m looking forward to how it will shape the work I do.”

For the moment, Carrie is focusing on writing short stories as well as articles for her Psychology Today column, Shifting Forward: A Wanderer’s Musings, and watching her grandchildren grow and flourish.
 
Carrie has published dozens of short stories, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, and five novels: Lillian’s Garden (Roundfire Books, 2013), Ashoan’s Rug (Roundfire Books, 2013), A Garden Wall in Provence (Owl Canyon Press, 2017), The Inevitable Past (Owl Canyon Press, 2020), A Musical Affair (Owl Canyon Press, 2021). Her published work also includes a collection of short fiction, Black Tie Optional: 17 Stories (Owl Canyon Press, 2019), a writing workbook, A Self-Guided Workbook and Gentle Tour on Learning How to Write Stories from Start-to-Finish (Owl Canyon Press, 2020), and her latest book, a collection of her first fifty columns for Psychology Today, Shifting Forward. Her non-fiction memoir about her family’s struggles with their mother’s Alzheimer’s, The Last Childhood: A Family Story of Alzheimer's, initially published by Three Rivers Press, was recently revised, updated and reissued through Amazon.