My next chapter...novelist

Columnist publishes first novel at age 63

By Jillian Kellerman

Carrie Classon of St. Paul has changed gears a few times in her life and has not been afraid to try new things. Her most recent venture has been publishing a novel. Contributed photo

You may recognize the name Carrie Classon, as we publish her column, The Postscript, here in the pages of Sr. Perspective. Carrie started out self-syndicating her column before it was picked up by Andrews McMeel Universal. The Postscript column is now in over 200 newspapers nationwide, and she has also published her memoir, Blue Yarn. Now, at the age of 63, she has written her first novel -- Loon Point, released in January 2026.

“I think if I were 25, even 35, I would be losing my mind, but getting to have a first novel out at 63 is a wonderful gift,” Carrie said. “I get to see how the sausage gets made working with a large New York publisher, and I just don’t feel like my whole life is riding on it. That’s a wonderful gift we get a little bit later in life.”

But Carrie hasn’t always been a writer. Her first career was in theater. She performed on the East and West Coasts before founding a small professional theater, which she ran for about seven years.

“I realized I was spending 90 percent of my time running a small business, not really having much to do with the art,” she said. “I enjoyed it, and I might as well learn a little bit more about business, so I went back to school.”

Carrie graduated in her mid-40s with an MBA and began work developing feasibility studies and business plans, traveling to different countries around the world.

While she enjoyed this work and the travel, her business career came to an end after a few years when the company she worked for was overextended. She also happened to be simultaneously getting divorced.

“I had this life where I’m a business person with a 22-year marriage and, all of a sudden, I lost the key aspects of my identity,” Carrie said. “That was when I first started doing therapy writing, just journaling; and from there, I started writing sort of an email blog before there were really blogs and that kept getting passed on and then I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to write a weekly column… That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

Carrie embraced the momentum of change to completely reinvent herself and switched careers from business to writing. This new venture eventually brought her to New Mexico to attend a three-year writing program. Ironically enough, this is where she met her current husband Peter, whose family is originally from Willmar. They now spend part of their time in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where they fell in love with the landscape and culture and the other part of their time in St. Paul near family.

While Carrie’s column is the core of her writing life, she said Loon Point has a very similar appeal.

“It talks about people who are in times of transition and making choices about their lives and reaching out to other people and making connections. If you read my column,” she said, “you know that’s kind of what I’m on about all the time. So it’s very similar. It’s also very Minnesota. It’s set up north of the Twin Cities, but I think it could borrow from any small town.”

Loon Point was born of a column Carrie had written on the premise that “it’s not what we’re looking at that matters, it’s what we’re looking through, and looking through eyes that are trained to see beauty, [she] sees beauty everywhere.” The day the column came out, Carrie was blasted with a 1,200-word rant by a friend on Facebook about how wrong she was and how dangerous this kind of thinking was.

“That was like the little spark of what became a character, Wendell, who’s a 72-year-old hoarder who just believes he has the worst luck in the whole world. Nobody’s ever had as bad a life,” she said. “The reality is, he’s had quite a normal life and he’s had some loving people, but none of it has made a mark because he is so focused on the fact that he has terrible, terrible luck and always has. That character sort of led me into the story. And then the rest of the novel followed.”

Carrie with her mom and dad. They live north of the Twin Cities, which inspired the setting of Loon Point. Contributed photo

Just to be clear, Carrie is still friends with her Facebook critic. While he hasn’t necessarily changed his thinking, he was delighted with the inspiration for the novel and thinks the main character, Wendell, “makes some very good points.”

But it doesn’t end there… Carrie has two more books already in the works -- one on submission and another in the hands of her agent. While these books are not sequels, she did hint that the most recent book she finished is in the “same world” as Loon Point and some of the characters do make a reappearance.

At the end of the day, whether book or column, Carrie continues to share meaningful inspiration with her readers, making the case that cultivating optimism is worth the effort. She genuinely believes in the power of optimism and finding hope and reasons to be happy. Carrie enthusiastically lives her life with intention and is proof that it’s never too late to reinvent oneself.

“I don’t know many people my age who haven’t, for one reason or another, gone through a really traumatic period in their life, a big upheaval of some kind, whether it’s divorce or death. We just don’t get to live this long without having something that upsets the apple cart big time,” she said. “I also don’t think I’m alone in the fact that making changes when everything is great is not real tempting. When things are okay, there’s no real reason to try something new and scary. But when we go through loss of whatever kind, I think it can be an opportunity. The most important changes I’ve made in my life have been in times of pain, and as a response to pain. We have an opportunity to say, what is next? What does the future look like for me? If I only get one spin around on this ride, how do I want to spend the time that’s remaining? And I think those are terribly important questions for people to ask and come up with fun and daring and surprising answers.”

Until her next column, Carrie leaves us with this…

“I always just have to end with gratitude,” she said. “I’m so grateful to readers every single week. It’s just such a privilege.”