Daily triumphs

By triumphs, I don't mean grand achievements like Olympic gold medals or Pulitzer Prizes. I mean persevering, despite early heartbreak and abuse, to realize dreams that might, at first, seem out of reach. My work often involves small decisions, easy to ignore in the moment, that lead to either succumbing to or beating the odds.

“The way live storytelling requires you to know stories in your bones, rather than memorize them or read them from printed text, has enriched my writing. Tales I've told are part of me now, whispering and guiding the rhythms and twists my stories take. I've also seen how creative experiences build on one another in unexpected ways. So if you have the urge to pursue something new, do it. Your life might never be the same.”

— Laura McHale Holland (iRead book tour stop)

Laura McHale Holland - First Day of School

I was born in Chicago, Illinois, a sprawling city on the shores of Lake Michigan. I loved the crush of sounds, smells and people there. But when my sisters and I were in grammar school, our family moved to a suburb—a difficult change.

One of the good things that came from this, though, was that we were close to relatives in the country and still close enough to the city to spend time with family there. And I found that wherever in the state people lived or whatever they believed, Illinoisans shared an inimitable down-to-earth goodness and genuine warmth.

And it's my love for the fine people of Illinois that inspired my novel, The Kiminee Dream. It incorporates fantastic elements but is grounded in reality—a place I like to straddle in fiction.

A rocky, rewarding road

Truths buried in years of contradictions

The move from Chicago wasn't the first disruption of my childhood, nor the last. My sisters and I had a mother, then, suddenly she was gone. We had a home, then we were shuffled from place to place.

We met a stranger, then our father said she was our mother. We were Catholic, then we were not. We fit into our community, then we did not. We had a father, then he was gone, too. We were loved, then we were not. All of this by the time I was eleven. And, though our extended family was mostly Irish Catholic, there wasn't one storyteller in the bunch. Secrets festered; feelings were off limits.

My first book, Reversible Skirt, recounts, from my point of view as a child, how I found truths buried in years of contradictions and took steps toward healing.

Me in the middle, with my sisters, Mary Ruth on the left and Kathy on the right.

A string of bad decisions

If you think my unstable beginning led to turburlence, you're right. In my teens, I made bad decisions. But I also wrote poems and songs. As a young adult, I was despondent and directionless for long stretches, but I would pick myself up eventually and scribble in my journal.

Gradually, creativity became more central to my life. I earned a degree in interdisciplinary creative arts and flourished. Significant mentors for me have been surrealist poet Nanos Valaoritis, who kept groups of students spellbound during office hours at San Francisco State University, and Ruth Stotter, a master at telling stories live without text, who taught me the importance of getting out of the way of tales I am meant to tell.

Something I do out of love

Through the years, my writing changed from something I had to do for self-expression to something I do out of love for the people I've known and the people I hope will read my work one day. My current novel in progress is inspired by friends I made in San Francisco in the 1970s, people who, like me, arrived seeking something but often didn't know what it was.

My published books have received recognition in the indie publishing sphere, including the National Indie Excellence Awards, Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and INDIES Awards, among others. In addition, four of my short plays have been produced recently in Northern California, where I live with my husband, Jim, and one goofy little mutt. Thank you for stopping by. I hope you stay a while and send me your thoughts via the Contact page.