Season 1: The Chateau Season
Episode 16: Laura Wagner, Writer
In this episode, I interview Laura Wagner, a writer from New York who was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and has been a Manhattan resident for the past 30-plus years.
Laura explains that she doesn’t have a specific discipline – instead, inspiration hits her sometimes in the middle of the night or while walking down the busy city streets, where she might see a word that becomes her creative spark. She expresses her creativity through writing, and shares an example of how hearing a word several years ago led her to create a story about springtime in New York. The word referenced Lady Bird Johnson, who was married to Lyndon Johnson and created a beautification programme across America, and from that single word, Laura created what she describes as one of her more flowery yet descriptive stories.
She explains what she loves most about writing – that it gives her so many opportunities to express herself quietly, without interruption, without phones beeping – just allowing her thoughts to flow onto the page, piece by piece, until the work reveals itself.
