Colleen Olle writes incisive and quietly funny literary fiction for adults and charming, naturalistic picture books for children.
Colleen Olle writes incisive and quietly funny literary fiction for adults and charming, naturalistic picture books for children.
Recent Children’s Picture Book
Sophia and Sinclair wander into a strange forest. And get lost! They separate and become even more lost—and lonely. How will they find each other? How will they find their way out? Read more…
Recent Literary Fiction
“I suppose you want dinner?” Laura opened the refrigerator.
Her husband, Everett, hunched at the kitchen table, his hands cupped around a mug. He transferred his glasses from atop his tousled hair to the bridge of his nose and squinted at the clock above the sink. “Of course, I want dinner. It’s almost six-thirty.”
She sighed and shut the fridge. “I thought maybe you’d gone ahead and eaten, given the time and that no one else was here.”
“Where are our daughters again?”
“At your mother’s for a sleepover.”
Against the backdrop of their beige-and-avocado-green-patterned wallpa-per, a cone of lamplight beamed down upon him. The juxtaposition of light and shadow and a slight sense of despair that draped over him like a damp, ill-fitting coat called to mind the gloomy, isolated scene of an Edward Hopper painting. Except she usually felt herself to be the solitary figure brooding in-side the canvas.
Recent Literary Fiction
CW: miscarriage/child loss
After misting our houseplants, wilting in an unseasonable September heat, I clomp into the fifth-floor laundry room with a basketful of clothes and find Janet and her three-year-old. Her right arm half-sunk inside the top-load machine, Janet glances over her shoulder and flashes me a smile. We met four years ago, shortly after her family moved into this building. I was in between jobs—a lost liberal arts major and former assistant manager at the big-chain bookstore now attending the community college for an AS in horticulture—and since she, a stay-at-home mom, seemed nice, we would visit with one another. She cried on my couch after her cat got run over. I reminisced about my grandmother on the second anniversary of her sudden passing. Read more…
Meet the Author
Colleen Olle
A tireless rabbit and a thoughtful turtle. A married woman who undergoes an unexpected metamorphosis on the Big Island of Hawaii. A newly sober single man squirming from physical and emotional pain during a dentist’s appointment. These are some of the characters who inhabit my mind and prose. I earned an MFA in fiction, and my prose has appeared in several literary journals. I am also the author of the children’s picture book Sophia & Sinclair Get Lost! and coauthor of Sophia & Sinclair Go on an Adventure!
From the Blog
Animal Characters in Children’s Picture Books
The Cat in the Hat. Peter Rabbit. Winnie-the-Pooh. Franklin. Frances. Angelina Ballerina. Olivia. Animal characters have frolicked, slithered, and trotted, squeaked, meowed and pranced, pirouetted, oinked, and entertained readers in children’s literature for centuries. Published in 1658, Orbis Sensualium Pictus was the first picture book made for children and the first to use animals as characters. Written by John Amos Comenius, Orbis Pictus (The World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures, or... Read more ❯
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