As a student, Carol Mavor started out making art objects, not writing about them. To steal the words of the French historian Jules Michelet, you might say that she is an 'artist historian'. Before embarking on her PhD (studying with Hayden White), Mavor received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, she studied painting and film with the critic-painter Manny Farber. She learned about cinema from the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin. She saw beyond 'objecthood' under the tutelage of performance greats like Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin. Inspired by her teachers, who were often writers and makers, Mavor made her own things and wrote scripts. Performing within her sculpted, painted, carved, wallpapered, furnished scenes, she told stories of childhoods, real and imaginary. One performance was entitled 'Alice Malice'. 'Alice Malice' was the seed of her lifelong interest in Lewis Carroll. Thereafter, the relationship between writing and art-making was forever knitted for Carol Mavor.