Leaving a creative legacy
After my mother died, I took on the task of organizing her papers. It was a prickly process. Rather than burden my children with a similar task, I have put my training as an archivist to work.
The result is this manuscript archive. I hope it will do two things: serve as a container for work that brought me joy to write and publish, and encourage other writers and creators to shape their own archive.
“Down the hall, the bedroom carpets hold impressions of the furniture that once stood here. Cassie would have it all ripped out, but for now it is proof of a history, of a life lived in one place, of an eddy in the current.”
Selected work
Breathing Room
This short story was written during a class I took at the New School in New York City. I was working in marketing at New York Magazine at the time and lived on 113th street between Broadway and Amsterdam, while my fiancé and future husband was in graduate school. The story reflects the itinerant life of the military family in which I grew up. Published November 1990. Sassy magazine. New York, NY
Sassy magazine, November 1990
Undertow
In the early 2000s, I interviewed Rolf Peterson, the lead researcher on the long running wolf-moose, predator-prey study that takes place each year on Isle Royal in Lake Superior. What I learned about the lives of the researchers fascinated me more than the wolves. That conversation, combined with the two years I lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as a teenager, shape-shifted over many years. Published 2022. Northern Virginia Writers Club 15th Anniversary Anthology.
iStock Omar Diaz Manrique
Playing Basketball
First produced at the Tipping Point Theatre’s Sandbox Festival, June 2012
Playing Basketball
Class
Fiction
Novels and published stories
Class
Essays
Creative nonfiction and ruminations on archiving and on society
Class
Plays
10-minute shorts produced in festivals and sandboxes
Preserve Your Story
Lori is an archivist as well as a writer. She guides writers and creatives, institutions and organizations through building an archive of their work.
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