Lynn H. Elliott

I was born and raised in Cardiff, Wales.  My undergraduate work was at Nottingham College of Education and received a degree in teaching.  One year later, I emigrated to the United States.  Here I attended the University of California, Santa Barbara where I obtained my M.A. and Ph.D.  

Following this, I was invited to teach at California State University, Chico.  So, my background is academic.  However, a racial murder in my town changed my focus to creative writing.  I wrote a play, trying to understand the nature of racism.  The “why” of such a vicious, seemingly unknowable, act.  The play won a national award.  And that began my shift to creative writing and teaching.

To date I have written 10 Feature scripts (historical, comedy and drama), 7 teleplays, an autobiographical work, a novel and several short prose and dramatic works. My writing continues to gain national and international awards.  At present, I continue to develop my teleplays.   I am always open to something new demanding my attention. 

One extremely successful feature screenplay, ALTA CALIFORNIA, encapsulates my vision.  When I first came to the States I took a class on American History.  There was no mention women, blacks, or native peoples.  My European background was filled with the good, bad and ugly of historical eras. And so—this was decades ago--my exploration of “The Mission Era” of California began.  It eventually resulted in the feature screenplay ALTA CALIFORNIA.  I gave a talk on ALTA CALIFORNIA recently, to university students from California, and discovered how limited and tainted their knowledge of their own state’s history truly was.   History is, as Edward Said notes, written by the victors.  Interestingly, a bill, signed into law in 2024, now demands that the truth of the “Mission Era,” particularly its effect on native peoples be taught.   

So that’s something about me.  In conclusion I should note that being an immigrant, I continue to love to explore and write, in serious and comic forms, stories of those who, through choice or happenstance, find themselves “strangers in a strange land “(or even in their own land).  I share the immigrant’s attempts to “navigate as safely as possible through an ever-shifting landscape of independent and unpredictable powers” (Alan Jacabs), and the difficulty of coalescing given and adopted values and ways of seeing.

Favorite quotation: “The great mystery is not that we have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars.  It is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.”  Andre Malraux.