Elaine W. Clark is a native of New Mexico where she has lived all but eight months of her life. Reading was a joy she discovered from the yearly Christmas present books she received as a child from her uncle and aunt who were both librarians.
Influences
The first book she remembers having an impact on her was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. The escapades of Meg saving her brother Charles Wallace in that first adventure, as well as continued escapades in A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, set Elaine on the road to being an avid reader.
The next major influence on Elaine came in the form of Isaac Asimov’s robot series (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire) as well as the Foundation Series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth) that she found on the shelves of her local library when she was in high school. Her father took one look at the books she was reading and said, “Oh, that
science fiction nonsense.”
Sprinkle in all the writings by Ursula K. Le Guin and you have the foundation upon which Elaine’s imagination is built. Well, and then there is Tolkein (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, etc.), C.S. Lewis (in particular the Narnia series), Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night translated by Richard Francis Burton (not the actor), and so on. All these voices, and more, swim around in her head creating a lot of havoc. She had to become a mathematician in self-defense!
Writing
As for becoming a writer, back when Elaine was an undergraduate, she needed to pick an elective so signed up for a beginning creative writing class. All the prose she put on page was so awful she decided fiction writing was just not in the stars for her.
She went off to study computer science and then numerical analysis, and then abstract algebra (not the high school kind), and a bit of topology and then ended up teaching math to college Freshmen and Sophomores for the better part of thirty years.
Writing kept knocking on the door, however, so in between teaching and being a mom, she signed up for a graduate level creative writing class (three semesters in a row!) and finally began to learn the craft.
She’s been working on her Twin Planet science fiction series for about twenty years now. Not all the time, but in spurts and stops, and hopes to finish all eight (the number planned) books in the series before she has to go into an assisted living facility. Now that she’s retired from teaching, maybe she can actually achieve this goal.
Publications
- “A Tea Story,” short story published in Punk Noir Magazine, July 2024. https://punknoirmagazine.wordpress.com/2024/07/19/a-tea-story-a-limbo-short-by-elaine-w-clark/
- “Ha Akedah,” short story published in Little Wolf #8 a student zine
associated with the Manzano Mountain Review, online literary magazine
published by UNM-Valencia, Los Lunas, New Mexico, April 2018 (now out
of print). - “Carnage on the Exam Room Floor,” a short story in the Las Cruces Poets
and Writers Magazine, Las Cruces, New Mexico, July 2008 (now out of
print).
Additionally, she has written several non-fiction mathematics and computer science articles for educational conferences or publication in academic journals.
Elaine W. Clark is a retired community college mathematics professor who has just as much fun playing with words as she does numbers. One of her missives, A Tea Story, appeared in Punk Noir Magazine in July 2024. She has had two other short stories published in local literary journals (both now out of print). She lives in Southwestern United States with her husband and adorable cats and is a member of both Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and Speculative Fiction Writers Association.