I did the same thing in the first two minutes upon meeting her for the first time that I did while sitting with a friend of more than 20 years two days before. I cried. I felt humbled and felt the tears well up, […]

This past week I had an unusual experience in a memoir class. Several of us had turned in an excerpt to be critiqued during class. The workshop leader asked another writer to read my excerpt aloud. We were not to […]

The dogs at Chicago’s Belly Shack are the best. In the bare, post-industrial setting of this diner beneath the rumbling tracks of the L, you can get a Belly Dog loaded with egg noodles and pickled green papaya. A […]

When I returned home from the grocery store a few weeks ago, in the Boonsboro neighborhood of Lynchburg, I looked up to see that my next-door neighbors’ shutters had been removed from the front façade of their ho […]

A conversation with writer director Eleanor Gaver
I met Eleanor Gaver in a writing workshop in L.A. and we kept in touch after she and her husband and daughter moved to NYC. I knew she had recently finished a […]

by Laura Marello
Three years ago I phoned Specialty Exterminators in Lynchburg. My side yard, viewed from my screened porch, was starting to look like a cheap horror movie: rats, mice, and baby mice, running from […]

A few years back I took a trip to Texas with Bill Clinton. It was not a fun trip. Clinton is pathologically self-referential and by the time he’d repeated the phrase, “Let me tell you one more clever thing I said […]

By Laura Marello
 

Imagine that, 20 years ago, my father and I were visiting my sister in her apartment. It was a warm, sunny day. My sister was making us ice tea. I was sitting in the living room with my […]

By Laura Marello
I’d never owned a house before, and when I finally bought one in Lynchburg, I found that I enjoyed decorating it. The rooms would take on a life of their own, sometimes a history of their own a […]