Carol Bly

Bly died of ovarian cancer on December 21, 2007, aged 77, in Oakdale, Minnesota.

Bly was awarded the 2001 Minnesota Humanities Award for Literature. She had previously been named the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Minnesota Author (1998–1999) and the Minnesota Women's Press Favorite Woman Author (2000).

Bly was a member of the Board of Directors for The Loft Literary Center from 1991 to 1994, and the board of Episcopal Community Services in 1978–1979. Bly was also a member of the Minnesota Book and Literary Arts Building Authors' Advisory Group in 1999. She has designed workshops for Women Against Military Madness, National Association of Social Workers, and the Midwest Institute of School Social Workers, and was a consultant to the Land Stewardship Project from 1983 to 1992.

At the beginning of the next decade, Bly was asked to write a monthly column, "A Letter from the Country" for the Minnesota Public Radio Magazine. Writing these short essays about rural life taught her how to think and to express herself well in a relatively small number of pages. The essays were later compiled into the book Letters From the Country, published in 1981. Three of her stories were also combined into the movie Rachel River, which starred Craig T. Nelson.

The couple had four children, Micah, Bridget, Noah, and Mary, who is an English professor at Fordham University and a best-selling romance novelist under the pseudonym Eloisa James. Carol and Robert Bly divorced in 1979.

Following her 1979 divorce, Bly moved to Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota; in 1986, she bought a house in St. Paul. In 2003, Bly donated to the University of Minnesota her correspondence, notes from writing workshops and classes she taught, and drafts of her works. The eighty-nine boxes included papers written when she was a child as well as later work. Also in 2003, Bly and a friend, Cynthia Loveland, opened Bly and Loveland Press, a small publishing company which has so far published four books that they have written together. Their press also sold custom crossword puzzles, which Bly designed. She continued to work until the end of her life, completing a novel, Shelter Half, which was published posthumously in June 2008 by Holy Cow! Press.

Perhaps inspired by Robert Bly's co-founding of American Writers Against the Vietnam War in 1966, Bly used her literature to reflect modern-day concerns. Her work is in many ways an ethical treatise, often featuring a "bully", embodied by either a person or a corporation, who takes pleasure in forcing his will on another person or group of people. Some of her stories also explore evil, which, to her, is seen in people or organizations which find enjoyment in enslaving, humiliating, or crushing their opponents. The stories emphasize redemption through empathy, which, to Bly, is the step of deliberately looking at how one's actions impact others. Bly always called herself a C.S. Lewis person; she dutifully read Bonhoeffer, but found him dull.

While at Wellesley, McLean met Robert Elwood Bly on a blind date. She was Episcopalian; he was Lutheran. They married in 1955 and moved to Robert Bly's family farm near the small town of Madison, Minnesota. At the time, the farm had no running water. The family lived a relatively simple life, and as she once told a disbelieving census taker, instead of owning a television they entertained themselves with their more than 5,000 books. Their house was usually filled with visiting poets, including Donald Hall, James Wright, and Bill Holm, all of whom were asked to do their share of chores before Bly would feed them.

After graduating from the Abbot Academy boarding school, McLean received her B.A. in English and history from Wellesley College in 1951 and spent several years working in New York and Boston before undertaking graduate-level work at the University of Minnesota in 1954 and 1955.

McLean's mother died in 1942, at a time when two of her older brothers were fighting in World War II. As a young teen, she worried for the safety of her family and often had nightmares about the Gestapo. She never lost her preoccupation with the damage that evil people could do.

Carol Bly (April 16, 1930 – December 21, 2007) was an American teacher and an author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing. Her work often featured Minnesota women who must identify the moral crisis that is facing their community or themselves and enact change through empathy, or opening one's eyes to the realities of the situation.