by Emily Glimco, Communications & Marketing Coordinator December 2022
Addison resident Laura McPherson has been writing professionally for over a decade, balancing her writing skills between both fiction and nonfiction. By day, McPherson writes in a more corporate style; by night, she unleashes her creativity and focuses on personal projects. Her latest project, an experimental chapbook called inVISIBLE, was published in 2022 is now available to borrow at the Addison Public Library.
“I’m so grateful to the library for deciding to add my book. It’s very validating as an author,” said McPherson.
McPherson aspired to become a professional writer as early as second grade, when she began reading longer books and finding herself absorbed by their stories.
“Even before I was writing professionally, I was writing in my spare time,” said McPherson. “When I began writing professionally, I worked in an office setting, which gave me the chance to hone my skills by learning to adopt other voices than my own. If I have to point to something that developed me as a writer, it would be that experience.”
McPherson’s latest work, inVISIBLE, is a testament to her ability to write in a wide variety of styles. The experimental chapbook blends poetry, prose, and a few surprises like QR codes to weave a tapestry of her experience navigating chronic illness.
“I was going through a tough time where I needed surgery during the pandemic, and accessing care was extremely difficult. The surgery kept getting canceled, and every time it got canceled, it became a different surgery because meanwhile my issue was getting worse,” said McPherson. “So every morning, when I had to take care of myself, I was on my phone writing memos: self care memos, or sometimes just venting into my phone. After a while, I looked back at the memos and realized there was potential to be something more.”
McPherson workshopped her chapbook in an online writing class, where her classmates did more than provide valuable feedback; they shared their emotional experiences with her chapbook as well.
“There were a couple other people in my class that also have invisible illnesses that I didn’t know about until they started sharing their feedback with me,” said McPherson. “People told me they felt seen reading my writing and I realized that if people were responding to my work, I definitely wanted to push it further and get it published.”
When her chapbook was complete, McPherson began reaching out to publishers and connected with Alien Buddha Press to see if they would consider publishing her work.
“I was feeling unsure about the chapbook. It’s short and it fills a weird niche: it’s not quite poetry, it’s not quite nonfiction, so I wasn’t expecting much when I started reaching out,” said McPherson. “But when I got the email from my publisher that they wanted to go forward with my chapbook, that was so huge to me.”
McPherson said that while her chapbook deals with serious themes surrounding life with chronic conditions, it is also about hope: finding ways to take care of yourself and find something around the corner to look forward to, even when times are tough.
“I think everyone knows someone who has some kind of chronic condition. But even so, there’s universality in the kinds of struggles I have, whether you have an invisible illness or not,” said McPerson. “When you’re dealing with invisible illnesses, or even visible illnesses, we often feel compelled to hide how we’re feeling because there’s social pressure to do so. inVISIBLE is a glimpse behind the curtain. I just hope the people who need to find it will find it.”
As for aspiring authors, McPherson says the key to success is to write, write, write…but to write for yourself before anything else.
“People respond to honesty. Whether I’m writing creative nonfiction, horror, literary fiction, and everything in between, the heart of it all is honesty. And if you’re being honest, your audience will find you,” said McPherson. “Embrace your weird. There’s a huge market out there for people being weird and honest. I say, go for it.”
Local authors who want to submit their book to the library’s collection or want to learn how to self-publish their book can learn more and get started at addisonlibrary.org/LocalAuthors.