Live nude, my friend

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 […]

Continue reading Live nude, my friend

I was thinking about courage

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 […]

Continue reading I was thinking about courage

Copyright © 2026 Laura McBride - All Rights Reserved
Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa