Carol Lee Flinders | |
---|---|
Occupation | Author, Educator |
Education | Stanford University, B.A. University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. |
Genre | Vegetarian Cooking Spirituality |
Notable works | Laurel's Kitchen and The Making of a Teacher |
Spouse | Tim Flinders |
Carol Lee Flinders is a writer, independent scholar, educator, speaker, and former syndicated columnist. She is best known as one of the three authors of Laurel's Kitchen along with Laurel Robertson and Bronwen Godfrey. She is also the co- author of The Making of a Teacher with Tim Flinders.
Flinders was born to Gilbert H. and Jeanne Lee Ramage,[1] and grew up on a farm in Oregon's Willamette Valley.[2] In 1958 her family moved to Spokane.[1] She graduated from North Central High School (Spokane, Washington) in 1961,[3] later receiving a bachelors degree from Stanford University, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley.[4][5]
Flinders became nationally known in 1976 through her coauthorship of Laurel's Kitchen, a widely acclaimed guide to vegetarian cookery that has been described as a "renowned countercultural cookbook,"[6][7]: 417 and as "the Fannie Farmer of vegetarian cooking."[8]: 142 Later, cultural historians contended that "Laurel's Kitchen was as much a lifestyle guide as it was a cookbook."[9]: 153
Beginning in the late 1980s, Flinders published a series of books on spirituality. The first, entitled The Making of a Teacher (1989), was coauthored with her husband Timothy Flinders. It provided an oral history of the life and work of spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran, who had helped inspire the creation of Laurel's Kitchen, and who in 1968 at U.C. Berkeley had taught what was believed to be the first accredited course on meditation at a Western university.[10]
She was a Lecturer in Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California.[4]
Several related books have been published by the same groups of authors. These books were based on a similar underlying philosophy, and also included the phrase "Laurel's Kitchen" in the title:
Flinders published a syndicated newspaper column for 12 years (1977—1989), focused on vegetarian cookery. Entitled Notes from Laurel's Kitchen, it appeared in 20 newspapers in 1987.[1] The column was published in a number of newspapers including The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA),[11] and The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR).[12]