Laura McNeal at her computer with Link on her lap
As a child in rural Utah, novelist Laura McNeal was obsessed with books. “I lived in books more than anywhere else,” she said. But she never gave much thought to writing one herself until she was asked to analyze a Hemingway short story in high school. The experience taught her that books could teach readers something about life. McNeal reckoned that if she could write like Hemingway she would be able to understand life in a way that she really wanted to understand it.
Halfway through her studies at Brigham Young University, she decided to become a writer and after graduating she enrolled in Masters program at Syracuse University. McNeal chose Syracuse because it was one of the best creative writing programs in the country and would afford her the chance to study with Tobias Wolff, one of her literary idols. It was also, she said “far, far away and I wanted to go far away. I wanted something different” than the life she had known in Utah.
McNeal’s Utah roots did not run deep. Her father was in the Air Force and every few years the family picked up and moved to another state – Arizona, where she was born, to New Mexico, to South Carolina, and once to another country — Iceland.
Her Mormon roots, on the other hand, did run deep. Her parents were devout and the family observant. “It was a lovely way to grow up,” she said. “There is something about being around adults who are compassionate and very humble that I still really admire.” The faith gave her an appreciation of family that still guides her. “Family comes first,” she said. “I really write only part time because I’m so involved with our kids,” she said.
Still, growing up she was aware of a bigger, wider world. Her parents, in large measure, opened a window to that world.
“They talked to me all the time about places I might want to go, things I might want to do,” she said. “They gave me a way to create a path that took me away from Utah.”
McNeal did go back to Utah after graduate school to teach English, all the while pursuing a literary career. She submitted work to literary magazines and attended writer’s conferences. It was at such a conference that she met her husband, Tom.
Ultimately, they moved away from Utah permanently, choosing Fallbrook to be close to Tom’s mother. It proved to be a wise choice, especially after the birth of their sons, Sam and Hank. “It was wonderful having grandma just across the hedge,” she said.
She was also able to write full time. As is so often the case with gifted writers, McNeal found writing often “arduous and frightening.” To ease the process, she began collaborating with her husband. It allowed her, she said, to avoid the “fretful, painstakingly slow process of writing every single thing” herself.
The duo penned four young adult books together before Laura finally wrote one, Dark Water, on her own. The decision to fly solo was “deliberate and accidental,” she said. “Tom happened to be working on other books at the timeÂ…and I actually did have sense of the whole plot and felt a little protective of that.”
She based Dark Water‘s action in Fallbrook, and employed the journalistic skills she learned writing for the San Diego Reader in shaping the narrative.
“I learned the names of the birds, insects, kept track of when things came into bloom and when certain fruits were in season,” she said. These details grounded readers to a place and time and added richness to her critically acclaimed novel.
In her upcoming novel, Incident on the Bridge, she again anchors the story to a particular place – Coronado, where she now lives.
The story centers on Thisbe Locke, a 17-year old girl who drives her ex-boyfriend’s car to the top of the Coronado Bay Bridge one night and is seen standing by the rail before she disappears. “The police believe she’s jumped, but her younger sister refuses to believe that Thisbe could act so irrationally.”
Like all good writers, McNeal is a voracious reader of serious fiction. “For me, tragedy is part of what I read for,” she said. “I like being able to feel something so strongly,” she said. Even as a child she said she loved the novel Bambi because it made her cry.
“There is a lot of sadness in the world, and not to address that part is to leave out of the equation the suffering of other people and your own potential suffering,” she said.
She found her greatest expression for that in young adult fiction, a market she “fell into” in the early 1990’s. McNeal used the genre to explore the world in her own terms, taking her young readers along with her and achieved both popular and critical success.
Dark Water was short-listed for the National Book Award in 2010. While she didn’t win, the nomination, she said gave her “confidence at a time that I didn’t have much confidence” in her writing.
“With writing, I always feel that I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve,” she said. “If what you read is the great writers, that’s what you’re trying to do and you always fall short.”
Of course, McNeal’s many fans would beg to differ.
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Gloria Tierney
Staff Writer
eCoronado.com
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