C.L. Stambush

Storyteller. Speaker. Seeker.

About C.L. Stambush

I grew up in southern Indiana in the 1960s surrounded by lush nature and vibrant women who filled my life and imagination with stories, a legacy I’m honored to carry on.

Like many of you, my journey as a writer began with reading and writing stories as a little kid hoping to convey my feelings and connect with a larger world. I wrote my first book—bound with pink yarn and filled with images colored and cut from my books—when I was five. It was the story of a lost chick in search of her place in the world, and it’s one I’ve been writing, in one form or another, my whole life. 

While I write professionally today, as the senior writer and editor for a magazine, and have for 30 years, when I was younger I was a babysitter, then horse-stall cleaner, waitress, drugstore clerk, grocery cashier, housecleaner, factory worker, medical proofreader, journalist, motorcycle instructor, writing professor and a few other things I either can’t recall or am not telling.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Indiana University and a master’s degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College where I studied with the former editor of The New Yorker and 2014 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry Vijay Seshardri, essayist and Guggenheim Fellow JoAnn Beard, and memoirist and essayist Penny Wolfson.

I am currently the editor of a university magazine and have taught writing classes at two Indiana universities to hundreds of students and led writing workshops for company teams. My work has been published in travel anthologies, international magazines, national newspapers, and more.

My Start as a Writer

Storytelling is embedded in my DNA. I learned the art of weaving tales listening and learning from the two most important women in my life: my mother and maternal grandmother.

My Start to this Adventure

While my mother and grandmother taught me the need for storytelling in the world, it was my father who said the nine little words that planted the seed in me that eventually lead me to ride a Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle solo around India when he said, “You can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone you want.”