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About
Laurie
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Laurie was born in Bryan, Texas (yes, her Daddy was an Aggie); her family moved to Wayland, Massachusetts, when she was 10 months old; La Jolla, California, when she was 3 years old; and finally to Fairfax, Virginia when she was 6 years old--which is where she considers herself "from." She attended Flint Hill School from the third through twelfth grades, where she played field hockey and tennis, won the 5th grade duckpin bowling championship, was a cheerleader in ninth grade, and racked up incrediable fines for overdue library books. When she was eleven, she attempted to write the sequel to Gone With the Wind; she stopped after three chapters when her mother pointed out the plot problem resulting from Laurie's ignorance about the birds and the bees (why couldn't Scarlett have Rhett's baby three years after they'd parted?). She was so horrified, both by the plot problem and the fact that you "did it more than once," that she didn't attempt to write fiction again until she was thirty.
Laurie attended Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York as a theatre major until she realized she wasn't talented enough--or passionate enough--to survive as an actress (at least in the technical sense of the word). She got an on-campus job working for SASP--the Student Auxilary Security Patrol. She worked as a police dispatcher in Ithaca for two years when, prompted by her family's move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she moved way down south and suffered a culture shock from which she never completely recovered. She worked at LSU Police Department as a plainclothes officer for the Crime Prevention Division and then joined the Baton Rouge Police Department and worked as a uniformed police officer. Yes, it's true she once tore a car door off, while in uniform, because of a cockroach. And yes, she once put out a call for help, "I've been shot by a dog." But you'll have to read her memoir to learn more about those escapades. A serious car accident while on duty brought Laurie's police career to an end. She attended Louisiana State University to finish her undergraduate degree where she discovered she had some talent for writing stories and a wealth of experience from which to draw. And so she enrolled in the MFA program at LSU where she studied under James Gordon Bennett and Rodger Kamenetz. She also discovered she loved teaching. In 1991, she moved to Austin, Texas, where she taught writing--creative writing, composition, technical & business writing, and magazine writing--at St. Edward's University for 13 years. She loved--and still loves--Austin. In 2004, right after Anything You Say Can and Will be Used Against You was published, Laurie moved to Eugene, Oregon, and joined the faculty in the MFA Program at the University of Oregon where she teaches graduate classes in fiction and undergraduate classes in fiction and creative nonfiction. It is very wet in Eugene, Oregon. Very wet. Quite conducive to writing.
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