Bakotopia

My name is Melinda Carroll and I am just a girl from Bakersfield, California doing my best to follow my dreams… I have a great love for music, theatre, the arts, writing, reading, horseback riding and Bakersfield Condors Ice Hockey. I currently work as an office manager for a civil engineering firm in Bakersfield, California.

I’ve been writing since I was in high school and studied creative writing in college. I write a local blog called: One Bakersfield Woman’s Blog to Mankind, an inspirational, eclectic and often humorous peek into the life of single womanhood in Bakersfield, California and beyond…

I've had poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction published in the Bakersfield College Literary Magazine: Grapevine, the 2006 Cerro Coso community College Journal of Literature and Art: Metamorphoses, and Noveltown's literary magazine: The Noveltown Review.

I was the recipient of the Mary Wong Lee Memorial Scholarship at the 2006 Yosemite Writer’s Conference.

I’m currently writing a novel called: Killing Cinderella. Killing Cinderella is the story of one woman’s realization after a dead-end marriage that there just might not be perfect fairy tales of wedlock. The book is a sometimes-humorous adventure of her struggles to survive in a world where Cinderella and Prince Charming don’t really exist and where single thirty-something women are treated like desperate freaks… (Read excerpts and synopsis here).

I work with Noveltown, an Indie literary press out of the Southern Central Valley with a cultural vision of helping fuse California’s Southern Central Valley arts into one community. Noveltown’s cultural vision includes: multi-faceted creative projects and events that build literature, storytelling, poetry, music, fine arts, digital video and audio media arts, theatre and local online and print media. Noveltown: “Building an art community out of a love for literature…” (Learn more about Noveltown here).

I write newsletters highlighting Noveltown news and literary blogs for Noveltown's blog: Paperback Writer.

I find that friendships, connections and relationships between people are some of the most rewarding challenges in life…

Matildakay is a nickname I acquired at the age of 16 and use for my blog pen name.