Carl Brookins on Carl Brookins

In a previous lifetime, I acquired a B.A. degree from the University of Minnesota, via a program that allowed me to explore many areas. A wise man suggested that path and I am forever grateful.

I wrote scripts, articles and did radio and television for the traffic safety division of Minnesota for a brief time and in the mid-fifties, moved to public television, where I helped KTCA-TV in St. Paul broadcast an enormous number of "educational" television programs.

After a stint at graduate school in Michigan, I again heard the siren call of a new frontier for public television and we removed to North Dakota to start (with a lot of help) the smallest non-tax supported public television station in the nation. I continued to write, legal arguments, articles for national professional journals, but never my thesis.

Somewhere in there I produced a television series of interviews with traveling people of Note, many of whom were authors.

Then, in 1970, after nearly fifteen years in television, a new high-tech company enticed me back to St. Paul. At about the same time an innovative new college was being talked of, a state college that would cater to working adults who wanted to return to college for that missing degree and still keep career and family together. This college, friends told me, was right up my alley. So I looked into it and this year Metropolitan State University celebrates 25 years, and I'm still here, currently as an admissions counselor, helping adult students find their way into and through, the morass of higher education. The high-tech company, poorly funded is gone. Along the way I've had successful careers as a free-lance photographer, helped recreate out of bloody ashes, an exciting public cable television service for St. Paul, and continue to write, produce, direct and occasionally perform, in myriad cable programs.

In addition to my day job, I've embarked on the perilous seas of a fiction writing career, to date not too successful, but I have high hopes. I write reviews for Walter Sorrell's MYSTERY ZONE, a short story has been published and I'm working on my fourth mystery novel. Oh yes, there's Bouchercon 27, as well, in which I'm currently also involved.

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