Morlocks in the Basement

Morlocks in the Basement is an irreverent, bittersweet, often outrageous chronicle of accidental motherhood in the age of fractured families. Love story, soap opera, play-by-play of a train wreck, Carolyn Colburn’s debut memoir is not quite like anything you’ve read before. It’s a treatise on housekeeping, a primer for roller skating on acid to Canada and back, a how-to for dodging calls from the county jail concerning “an incarcerated loved one,” your daughter. Throw in a cabin in the woods, the howling of wolves, a flying pig, and a couple of incongruous recipes, and you have the ingredients for this riotous odyssey of a memoir. The little voice in your head might be muttering wtf?!?, but you keep hanging on to find out what’s coming next. Written with humor and pathos in equal measure, Morlocks in the Basement takes the reader on a hilarious and heartrending ride from a 1950s childhood through the mid 2010s, in a series of connected stories that jump around in time. Part Chelsea Handler, part Erma Bombeck, part nail-biting outlier crouched behind the furnace taking notes, Morlocks in the Basement is a read you won’t soon forget.

Carolyn Colburn received an MFA in Writing from Goddard College and has been awarded a Loft-McKnight Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. She has worked as a musician, teacher, typesetter, and contract writer. Minimum Maintenance, a novel, was published in 2010. Ms. Colburn divides her time between a 100-year-old house in Duluth and a cabin on Lake Superior near the Canadian border. Cecilia Kennedy earned a PhD in Spanish literature at The Ohio State University and taught English composition/literature and Spanish language/literature in Ohio for 20 years before moving to Washington state. Currently, she trains online writing tutors part-time for an education publishing company. Since 2017, she has published her stories in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, and is an adult beverage columnist for The Daily Drunk.