Coleen Clare

Coleen Clare completed her first novel at the age of eighty. She is a lesbian, a feminist, a teacher, a psychologist, a public servant, a community advocate and has a passion for the provision of social housing. Coleen has an extended family covering four generations and enjoys the lively interactions this brings to her life. She has worked with many families and has a deep understanding of family joy and trauma.

Coleen lives in Australia; she was born in Aotearoa and carries an abiding love for the country and people. She has worked in New Zealand, Samoa and Australia and has deep respect for Indigenous peoples, intensified by her experience of the pain and joy of the adoption of a Cook Island son, and a Samoan son.

Storytelling has always been a passion for Coleen, as a small child she grew up in an isolated household and began imagining and telling alternate versions of her home life in primary school. As she grew older and wiser she learned that if you embellished the truth too much it was called a lie. She turned her creativity to storytelling, which she used extensively as a teacher and counsellor, and for several years ran a storytelling group, together with art therapy.

An inclination to write was always present for Coleen but with a big family to care for through various traumas, the need to earn a living, and chronic fatigue and pain from childhood polio, there was never sufficient time.

With the time afforded by retirement, Coleen began writing at the age of seventy-two. A pilgrimage to explore Minoan Crete with a group of women deeply inspired her to reflect on a matriarchal society without war and violence. What began as trip notes from a pilgrimage in 2013 morphed into Minoan Footsteps, her first mystery novel.