Laura McCorry, a white woman with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses smiles at the camera. She is wearing a blue dress and a large straw hat. She's standing on a white curtained terrace with wicker chairs.

Writer

Welcome! Laura McCorry writes poetry, short stories, and novels in a variety of genres. She is seeking representation for HAVEN (96k Sci-Fi Romance).

Her poems have been published in the Spring 2021 issue of Poetry Quarterly. She has published articles on Messy Nessy Chic, Yoga Digest, and Yoga One Blog.

A longtime student of yoga, Laura received her 200 hour certification in 2011 and has been teaching yoga ever since.

Get to Know Laura

 

What’s your current work in progress?

HAVEN (96k Sci-Fi Romance) After a world ecological collapse, the citizens of the matriarchal Republic’s domed cities have port implants that render them oblivious to pain, causing pharmaceuticals and natural remedies to drift into history.

As an older sister (by three minutes) and a raging perfectionist, Haven always follows the rules. But when her twin brother is accused of treason for researching plant-based pain relief for Ex-Domites, Haven commits perjury to commute his sentence from execution to hard labor on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. To avoid being targeted through her port, Haven must remove it before rescuing her brother and risk feeling (including the chronic migraines she never knew she had) or she’ll lose the only family she has left.

Instead of a trained agent to accompany her, she’s saddled with Aster, her brother’s specimen collector from outside the dome who has never had a port and never followed the rules.  He frustrates her as much as she's attracted to him. While formulating a rescue, they draw the attention of a CIA agent determined not only to prevent them from returning to earth alive, but to eradicate the possibility of natural remedies from returning to society. Haven must choose between the successful, painless port-life she’d known and a life full of uncertainty and pain, but also passion.

How do you choose what to write about?

I usually start with the big idea. What fear or emotion or philosophical problem is big enough that it needs the length of a novel to explore its manifestations? Then the right character comes to me. The one who will struggle the most with that exact problem - but also the character who will put in the work to make a solution that fits their individual life.

Did you always want to be a writer?

Yes! I wrote stories, illustrated them and bound them into books as a child. In college, I took as many English credits as possible without completing the major (I majored in French and Education). I studied under Virginia Poet Laureate Claudia Emerson. Over the past twelve years, I’ve written eleven different novels through National Novel Writing Month (the only exception was the year I had a newborn).

I learn something new from every story or poem I write. I’m so grateful for every reader who completes the circle of the work and makes it real.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke