[caption id="attachment_1701" align="alignright" width="183" caption="Jeanine Serralles will read Sleeper's "Naomi and the Writer""]
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First, an editorial disclosure: I'm a Laurie Sleeper fan. Yes, I teach the workshop she has attended--off and on--for years now. But I find it kind of ridiculous that I'm the "teacher," because anyone who's ever been in a workshop with her knows she's out-of-this-world brilliant. I often take notes while she speaks. Or I would if I weren't so busy eating the outstanding fresh-fruit-and-goat-cheese-inspired appetizers she's known to bring to class.
We were thrilled to announce that our friends at Stories on Stage selected Laurie's original story, "Naomi and the Writer," to be read by NY-based actress Jeanine Serralles at this month's Secrets and Lies show. Now we want to introduce you to Laurie, in case you've suffered the downbeat reality of never having met her.
(Oh, and by the way, no one at Lighthouse has anything to do with judging the Stories on Stage contest, so my lack of objectivity is not really as bad as it sounds. Though I confess it sounds pretty bad.)
Laurie moved with her family to Boulder from California several years ago, having earned an MFA in fiction at San Francisco State University and having further earned the distinction of mothering two lovely children. (Conveniently, they're now old enough to attend school so that Laurie can write from time to time.) Since she moved here, she's been a mainstay at Lighthouse events, the retreat in Grand Lake, several "reading as a writer" courses, and the advanced short story workshop. Laurie was enrolled in one of the five workshops this fall that were part of the Page to the Stage contest, and she submitted a story that knocked the workshop's socks off. It will knock your socks off, too, trust me.
I've asked Laurie a few questions about how she came to writing, and how she came to write "Naomi and the Writer," in particular. Here's a stock get-acquainted question--how did you get started writing?--and her non-stock answer. Stay tuned for more throughout the coming weeks.
When I was around seven or eight, I realized that someone got to write the words in the books I loved to read, and that’s when I decided I was going to be a “famous author.” My adult self has always been amused that my child self latched onto the word “author,” but it’s probably because among the games we played at my grandmother’s house was the Authors Card Game. Somehow I understood that an author used a typewriter, so one day I lugged my parents’ typewriter up to my room and wrote my first story. It was called “Timmy, the Boy Who Got Blind the Hard Way,” and it was about a boy who was bitten on one eye
- "Gory Laurie" is actually really nice.
by a rabid dog, and while he was hospitalized got an infection in the other eye and thus became blind. That’s as far as I got, and it took about half a page. But it was all mine.
Around the same time, when I was part way through second grade, my elderly teacher became ill and could no longer teach, so my class was combined with a third grade class. To handle the large number of children and the disparate learning levels, my new teacher had to come up with activities we all could do, and one of them was writing our own stories. We were each assigned a wooden box with alphabetized dividers, and this became my “Word Box.” If I didn’t know how to spell a word, I asked the teacher and she would write it in big clear letters on card stock, and then, after I used it in my story, I filed it in my Word Box. Something about that process was so powerful to me, to own a word like that, and I loved my Word Box. I specifically remember the day I learned to spell “balloon,” how it was such a big word and how I was able to learn it at the time I really needed it to express myself. It was magical.
In seventh grade, after several years of writing really bad poetry and short stories about vampires and death, we had to write a sentence for each of the 10-12 spelling words for the week to show that we understood their meanings, and as an option, we could form our sentences into a story. At the end of the week, we could volunteer to read our sentences to the class. Each week, I wrote horror stories full of blood and ghosts and dismembered limbs, and then read them to the class, earning the nickname “Gory Laurie.” That’s where I learned the power of connecting to an audience, to understand that others might enjoy my writing, too.
When I think about my early relationship to writing, it does feel like it had a life of its own, although I know I was encouraged along the way. But it was always that private act of melding intention to word to page that pulled me in from an early age, and continues to pull me in, no matter how many internal or external roadblocks I’ve experienced along the way. There have been times in my life when I didn’t write at all, and I’ve always come back. I feel more whole as a person when I write.
Please join us on November 13 at the Denver Civic Theater. The shows are at 1:30PM and 6:30 PM. Order tix now (and mention Lighthouse for a discount). See if you, like me, become a Laurie Sleeper stalker. I even have the same sandals and blouse that she has. So top that.
--aed
