Robyn Carter Writer Educator Storyteller

Storytelling Services

Web Copy & Product Descriptions Grant, Funding Opportunity & Fellowship Applications Blogs, Email & Social Media Scripts & Game Narratives Curricular Resources & Ed Writing Business Plans, Pitch Decks & Pitch Form Content

I write narrative-driven work for clients in the education, youth development, beauty/wellness, travel, adventure game, and arts sectors.

When I'm not writing, I teach writing to kids and college students. As an educator, I develop curricular resources and blog about teaching, but as a freelancer, I mix it up. Canine bowel obstruction, Alaska, mental illness, igneous rock formations, affordable housing, lip gloss, and San Francisco history have each starred in recent projects.

Check Cozy Ripples for my TV reviews. Find my articles in Playboy, KQED Teach, and Teachers & Writers Magazine, my scripts on Coverfly and ARDI Adventure Games, and my fiction in Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Prime Number Magazine, and other journals. My copy and graphics appear on websites that sell or promote curriculum, clean beauty, climate justice, women's health, sleep, and art by insomniacs. My short story collection, Impossible Object is forthcoming from Whiskey Tit Press in Fall 2024.

​Got a job in mind? Connect with me on Upwork!

Recent Work

Pitch Form Content for an Art Startup •

Elevate Creatives Fund

Chrysalys is a surreal and provocative art collective. Our online art gallery offers an immersive, multisensory experience that challenges perception, champions a safe and sustainable planet, and values human creativity.
Our model is unique. We donate ten percent of gross sales to Earthtopia, our sister climate justice non-profit, and provide a space for artists to showcase their work to a client base that shares their green convictions.

Though AI is helping us combat the climate crisis, it is also erasing our humanity. Thousands of human artists now risk losing their livelihoods at the click of a mouse. This Faustian bargain mirrors the broader tension between technological progress and environmental sustainability. Instead of succumbing to the same fate as so many of my colleagues, I started Chrysalys.

Chrysalys is more than an art gallery; it is a movement to safeguard our only known habitat and the creative spirit that defines us.
Teachers & Writers Magazine •

Let There Be Light!

When I started a fifth-grade writing workshop 20 years ago, I fired a lot of shots in the dark before I hit on an effective approach to teaching imagery-writing strategies, especially when it came to rendering sense of sight.

The prompts and feedback I used to offer in efforts to guide my students’ descriptions of what they or their characters see would generate laundry lists––i.e., I see a dog and a car and a sidewalk––more often than the vivid and dynamic sentences I was hoping for.
Chrysalys Email Campaign •

A Cure for Onism

Welcome Human,

Specializing in limited edition art and custom projects, Chrysalys is a team of seasoned creatives
dedicated to transforming spaces. Our passion is crafting visual experiences that challenge perception and
spark curiosity. Often labeled surreal, we see our aesthetic as less adjective and more verb: explore,
wonder, reflect, transform. Innovation and craftsmanship drive our commitment to delivering work that
resonates with our clients.
Press Release •

Awake for a Cause: Insomniac Artist Promotes Green Justice with Surreal Dreamscapes

New Kickstarter Campaign Aims to Unite Environmental Nonprofits, Artists, and Eco-Conscious Collectors

On November 16th, West Coast-based artist and insomniac David Fenton announced the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to fund what he calls “an immersive, narrative-driven art experience” consisting of an online gallery and eCommerce platform where a collective of conscious creatives will showcase and sell their
Conjunctions •

Aftershock

A FEW DAYS HAD PASSED since I’d spoken to Simon about the blow-gun. But it was still stretched across the living room floor, now with a fresh litter of clockworks burrowing in the shadow of its plastic throat. Built from cracked sprinkler pipes someone had abandoned in
the vacant lot next door, the blowgun was the newest addition to the cache of homemade weapons Simon had been stockpiling that fall. The menace of their points and surfaces would dull with time and dust, but newly born they pulsed with savage potential, lurking around the
house, webbed or stuffed with metal nerves and organs harvested from dead machines, if not to live again then for their restive beauty.
Teachers & Writers Magazine •

Why Hurts Is a Verb: A 14 Million Year-Long Story

It’s February 2020, one of our last weeks in the classroom before everything turns inside out, but we don’t know this yet. I am a writer in residence at a public elementary school that serves San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. A San Francisco Arts Commission grant funds my residency, part of an initiative to place poets and fiction writers in public schools, community centers, and jails to lead creative writing workshops. I’m about to teach––and learn––my most difficult lesson as an educat
ROOM2RUMINATIONS A Writing Workshop Round-up •

Exploding the Moment with "Part Charts"

Nudge Young Authors toward Verbs that Describe with this Writing Workshop Scaffold

One of the biggest writing workshop roadblocks is sheer overwhelm. The sense that the task ahead is never-ending, especially for learners who get stuck on big picture stuff like character and conflict. Often, these students uncover the path forward when you point them in the opposite direction, and “Part Charts” are my go-to tool for getting granular.
Women's Health Blog •

Gut-Hormone Axis: Why Menopause Can Upset Everything in Orbit & How to Reset Your Spin

Whether your menopause journey is hot and flashy, bloated and belly-bulging, brittling your bones, harming your heart, shredding your sleep, or fogging your brain, chances are an imbalanced microbiome is to blame.

The gut microbiome is the collection of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live inside our GI systems. Our reproductive tracts have their own microbiome too. The population and diversity of a microbiome’s flora not only support the health of the organs they live in but also affect immu
The Bureau Dispatch •

From Fifty-One to Eleven

When you were five the sky looked so enormous it was invisible. Then your big-kid eyes grew in at nine and you saw its shortcomings in a documentary about the Apollo Missions. From space, it’s nothing really, just a webby membrane coating the world in a thin, blue hum. Back then you didn’t think about how it’s all that separates us from never-ending darkness.

But now that you’re eleven, you do. You’re hardly a kid anymore. You know the same amount of math most grown-ups do: enough to figure out
Teachers & Writers Magazine •

The Poetry of Prepositions

As a San Francisco WritersCorps Teaching Artist in Residence, I spent the last six years teaching creative writing workshops to third, fourth, and fifth-grade second-language learners at a public elementary school that serves the City’s Tenderloin neighborhood. I’m always scouting out engaging ways to integrate lessons on syntax and mechanics into creative projects, and when I discovered Robert Burleigh’s poetry picture book Hoops, I scored!

My class was full of basketball fans who had also bee
Cozy Ripples •

PHYSICAL Streaming on Apple+

A disturbing, but delicious ‘80s flashback featuring shiny fashion and big hair, a Season 2 nod to Richard Simmons, and an honest and nuanced look at the psychosocial forces that feed an eating disorder.

Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) is a frustrated housewife who relies on heavy doses of ballet and bulimia to dull the blades of an especially ‘80s SoCal spin on the Feminine Mystique. When dance class is canceled, she finds salvation in the newborn aerobics craze, but success is not easy.
Web Copy & Graphics - Landing & About Pages •

Dog Training | Heidi's Hund Haus | San Francisco

Raised in small-town Nebraska, I grew up around livestock, and trace my kinship with animals to childhood. As a graduate student, I fled the feedlots for more humane pastures, relocating to San Francisco where I earned a Master's Degree in cultural anthropology, then worked as an NIH-funded researcher at UCSF. When the Great Recession of 2008 dried up most scholarly grants, I fell into dog walking as a temporary gig, but soon realized I’d stumbled onto a rewarding new career. Though humans are a

Member, Intersection for the Arts

Intersection for the Arts is a bedrock Bay Area arts nonprofit that provides people working in arts and culture with fiscal sponsorship and resources to grow.