Blog | Laura McBride

Women’s Bodies – and a sneak peek (at a book)

March 25th, 2024

The Women’s Alliance at my college asked me to give a talk on “women’s bodies,” and this is what I shared with students.

“Here’s the thing. Every quality of our lives – everything that we are and everything that we will be and do – is going to play out in our bodies. In the Western World, there is a classic philosophical split – codified for us by Rene Descartes – between our bodies and our minds, or our bodies and our spirits, but as a point of concrete experience, all of who we are is in our bodies.

Our thoughts, our ideas, our wild flights of imagination, our creative impulses: these are our brains, that twisted mass of spongy gray neurons and blood. […]

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VegasStrong: What I’m going to do

October 3rd, 2017

It turns out I have nothing to say.

Yesterday, the horror just grew from morning to night. I’m a professional imaginer, and it was the imagining that did it. I wasn’t glued to the television, I didn’t read more than a few articles in any newspaper. I did my best to know what was happening, what had happened, what concrete things one might do, and then I tried to stop listening, to stop seeing; how else to carry on, and how else to resist the way the constant attention turns the real to theater?

And still, I learned enough. Enough to start the imagining.

How people stood there, and heard popping sounds, and wondered what they might be, or didn’t even bother to wonder, and […]

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Live nude, my friend

August 3rd, 2017

I live in a place that might be considered exotic (or bizarre or fantastic, fanciful, implausible, preposterous, incredible: there’s a long list of adjectives, often conflicting, that might be applied) and I wrote about Las Vegas not as an exotic place, but as an ordinary one.

Somewhere in We Are Called to Rise is a line about how Vegas children do not notice the oddities of their city – the naked women on the billboards, the blitz of neon lights – but in my family, we have one particular story that illustrates this. My daughter played soccer for years, and she often practiced at a somewhat run-down soccer complex near the old highway that runs from Hoover Dam to downtown Vegas. When she was about […]

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May you know there is enough

April 24th, 2017

At American Dreams: A Festival, I was asked to participate in “A Prayer for the American Dream.” It was a gorgeous night in Red Rock Canyon, and here’s what I said:

“I have a long history with prayer. I was taught to pray probably before I could talk, and some of my earliest memories are of praying: at meals, at bedtime, on waking, when I heard the whine of an ambulance, when I overheard a curse, when I was old enough to curse on my own.

In my childhood family, the prayer of choice was the rosary. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Roman Catholic devotion, a kind of meditation, which involves saying certain prayers over and over. There are prayers at the […]

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Give it up!

March 29th, 2017

I belong to a GiVe group of women who donate a small amount of money each month. We don’t look very diverse (twelve white women in their 50’s) but we represent – and rather passionately – a range of views and beliefs. My friend Leslie launched a website to help folks start their own giving circles, and I wrote about us there:

“There are so many GiVe experiences that have touched my heart. Here’s one. It was my month to choose our recipient, and I picked an elementary school where I had been asked to read to the children a few months before. (I had gone there with my mom, who had developed dementia, and I was assigned to read aloud to fifth graders. I […]

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Pals on the bus

March 13th, 2017

I grew up in one of the oldest neighborhoods of Spokane, Washington. For my family, it was a compelling community that also had a river, and glorious sunsets over that river’s steep banks, and just a two-mile walk to the downtown library. For the rest of the city, it was Felony Flats. Perhaps there was cause for that neighborhood nickname, but it doesn’t match my memories of the place.

I rode the city bus to high school. There was a stop right out the door of our kitchen, which encouraged a sort of casual approach to arriving there on time. I was a friendly kid, and nearly all the bus drivers were friendly enough to toot the horn right before they made the turn to […]

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Yada yada . . . Yaddo!

March 12th, 2017

Last month, Touchstone’s associate publisher, David Falk, sent me a photo he recently took in the Yaddo library. Yaddo is an artist residency program in upstate New York, and I wrote a good chunk of We Are Called to Rise there. During that magical four weeks, I wandered into the library every single day. Its shelves were lined with books written by Yaddo artists, and each night, I took a different one back to my room to read. I don’t remember even once imagining that my novel would join them one day. But . . . look! In 2014, I wrote this essay about the amazing Yaddo:

“Even to me, it seems unlikely. A fifty-year-old woman – with no writing history, no MFA, no […]

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Who was that grad student?

March 3rd, 2017

About a million years ago, when I was in college, I did my senior thesis on Virginia Woolf. It was an odd choice of topic – for an American Studies major – but my department was an easygoing place. They didn’t mind that I was preparing to launch my deepest academic work on a British author I knew nothing about. They just asked me to find my own qualified advisor (which they might have thought would be limiting) so I queried my friends in the dining hall, and someone recommended J. Hillis Miller (a famed member of the Yale deconstructionists). I made an appointment, and asked if he would take me on.

I have no idea why he said yes. I may have struck him […]

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What will I write?

March 2nd, 2017

I have spent extended portions of my waking life in a dreamy state. When I am working on a new novel, the characters and their situations live in me. They grab at my attention and pull me away from what I am doing. They nip at my concentration, they beg for my awareness, they leave me in a frequent state of ill focus.

I was a dreamy kid too. As a seven-year-old, I whiled away the hours wondering if aliens had kidnapped my family and shape-shifted into their forms. They looked and sounded like my parents, my three brothers, my two sisters, but who really knew? These childhood reveries turn out to be pretty close to what being a writer is like. Deep in a […]

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Peace, Latasha

March 1st, 2017

I recently watched the winner of the Oscar for best documentary: OJ Simpson: Made in America. I’d been avoiding it, because all these years later, that case still thrums a line of rage through me. For me, someone who had worked at the New Haven Project for Battered Women for two years, and was the director of the Spokane Domestic Violence Shelter for one, OJ Simpson’s acquittal was simply proof that a man could kill his wife if he were rich enough to hire the right lawyers.

I remember a black friend telling me that her family had celebrated the OJ verdict. I’ll admit: I was astonished. And somehow, I hadn’t known. I didn’t have the courage to tell my friend I was surprised, because […]

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“On seeing a photo of the Antarctic – 2019”

October 27th, 2016

“If it comes to this

If one day, you are someone who cannot afford to see what everyone now sees

If some day, everyone is someone who cannot see what everyone once saw

If the wild abandon of our voyaging season

has been brought to its own AIDS-like end

Remember

You can experience this

You can enter the intimate world of your own mind and

See that towering prow of ice

Feel its chill wind

Hear the shocking crack of its calving

And don’t forget

The pinpoint spray of freezing rain on your starboard cheek

The glinting knife of a sun’s ray slicing through cloud

The mournful call of a bird you cannot make out

or the silent flight of the one you […]

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What one person can do

October 15th, 2016

I’ve been meaning to post this short review I wrote of Bryan Stevenson’s incredible memoir, Just Mercy. I was so very moved by this book.

From Off the Shelf, May 3, 2017

Time magazine called Bryan Stevenson’s JUST MERCY one of the 10 best nonfiction books of 2014. The next year, it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. I wouldn’t have known. The book was sitting on my nightstand, making me feel slightly guilty.

It had been recommended to me by a trusted source, but I knew it was about the author’s work as a lawyer representing people condemned to die, and somehow, it just didn’t seem like the right book to pick up when I was hoping […]

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I was thinking about courage

June 19th, 2016

Writing is nearly always hard. Capturing inchoate ideas and feelings and experiences, forcing these into precise words arranged intentionally, demands fierce psychic energy: more with every passing year. It is tempting to say that the drain comes from all that is not expressed, all the ways that the words are less than what I feel or think, and yet I’m not sure this is true. What keeps me writing, what draws me back to it, is the way that the words suddenly become more than what I knew, the way a sentence will take off and reveal so much that I had not realized was so.

Almost anything is easier to do than write.

Recently, my publisher asked if I would compose a letter to […]

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