Welcome! My name is Laura Alary and I write stories that make us bigger on the inside.
What does that mean?
It means my books make you think. Wonder. Ask big questions. Maybe understand other people a bit better. Some of them are serious. Some are funny. Most are a bit of both. But they all aim to stretch minds and hearts.
A Lifelong Appreciation of Books
When I was small, I used to make my own books out of paper, glue, and crayons. The first one I remember making was about a little girl who kept having accidents with paint. She had to figure out how to turn all her spills into pictures (a good rule for life).
As I got older, my love for stories kept growing. I discovered myths from ancient civilizations (Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China) and began to figure out that stories can be true even if they never really happened.
When I went to university, I studied Classics—the language, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome. This introduced me to epic adventure stories about gods and heroes. Like Odysseus, I wandered from one story to the next, sometimes enthralled by their beauty, sometimes chilled by the monsters I met. Although I enjoyed the wandering, it also gave me a new appreciation for home–the bible stories I had been hearing my whole life long—so I went on to study those too! My studies took me all the way through to a PhD in New Testament. In the years since then I have done a variety of things, including raising three creative and curious children, who are now grown, but are never too old to curl up with a book or listen to a story!
Where do my ideas come from?
Sometimes people ask me where my ideas come from. I believe ideas are everywhere, often in plain view. My job is to pay attention and discover them. When I was a child, every time I went for a walk, I came home with my pockets bulging with treasures I had picked up along the way: sea glass, stones, shells, acorns, fool’s gold, or anything else that caught my eye.
Being a writer is a bit like that.
Wherever I go I am on the lookout for things that strike me as intriguing or beautiful. I look, listen, read, wonder, and ask a lot of questions. When I come across something that interests or excites me, I write it down in a notebook (I have shelves full of them). Out of this collection of bits and pieces come some of my best ideas for stories.
What are my books about?
Because I am interested in so many things, my books cover a lot of territory too, including science, mythology, stories from the bible, and biographies of people (like Maria Mitchell and Cecilia Payne) who have used their powers of observation and imagination to understand the world around them—and the universe beyond them.
What all my books have in common is a sense of curiosity, compassion, wonder, and delight in this amazing cosmos we share. I am always looking for truth wherever I can find it.
I hope you enjoy my stories.
Laura Alary 