February/March 2010 MACONDO WRITER PROFILE

Leslie Larson


Courtesy

by Celeste Guzman Mendoza

When I first met Leslie Larson years ago at Macondo I couldn’t place her accent. It reminded me of the pioneer women I would hear in the Westerns I watched with my father on Saturday afternoons. Her voice was almost a whisper, a rasp actually that unfolded in starts and stops. The tone remained even and rarely lilted up or down.

Don’t get me wrong; she wasn’t boring--far from it, in fact. If you got away from the loudmouths (of which I was a member) and sat with Larson you would hear that biting wit and those bone-dry-humored stories that seemed to be about your family or your friends--you knew her characters so well. She was and remains a “true storyteller.”

Macondo was the first community where Larson felt comfortable and challenged to write and share her stories, “It [Macondo] is a pure experience that is geared toward the writing and the work,” she shared. “Macondo helped me view my work as an ongoing thing and I learned how to listen to criticism; as someone who had never had a writing community before Macondo was so important to me.”

Larson’s first novel, Slipstream, was published in 2006 by Crown/Shaye Areheart.

“Fear was the catalyst for the action in my first book,” Larson said. “The momentum of fear and how it’s contagious.”

The book is told in third person and follows a handful of characters over the course of a few days. It takes place at LAX after September 11th, when fear in the country was at its peak.

“You could be doing anything, and it could all fall apart,” she said.

Larson takes the reader on a different emotional journey in her second novel, Breaking Out of Bedlam, which was recently published by Crown/Shaye Areheart Books in January 2010.

In Bedlam the reader follows the life of eighty-two-year-old Cora Sledge, who has been placed in an assisted-living facility by her children. She is addicted to pharmaceutical drugs, is obese, and cannot (chooses not) to get out of bed. Mostly she is angry and upset at the world so she begins to write a journal to set everyone straight on why she is the way she is.

As Larson’s website describes, “In entries that are at once profane, profound, and gossipy, she [Cora] chronicles her childhood in rural Missouri, her shotgun wedding, and the terrible event that changed the course of her life.”

The reader follows Cora in her own words through her past life and her present one in the nursing home, including day-to-day dramas, a romance with a newly arrived resident, tiffs with some of her tablemates, and a series of petty crimes that “set everyone on edge.”

Cora reminds me of my maternal grandmother who was hilariously funny and completely irreverent. And like my grandmother, Cora is resilient as hell, a survivor who will not go gently into anything, much less her older years. She is a risk-taker, and adventurer who bucks up against the idea that getting old means you are two steps away from the grave. Cora approaches this time of her life fiercely, with a desire to try something new, grow, and learn.

Cora’s story was inspired by the story of Larson’s grandmother who lived in a facility much like that in Bedlam, and who shared Cora’s humor, resilience, and brassy attitude though lived quite a different life.

Bedlam has received some fabulous reviews. My favorite was in Publishers Weekly, “Larson injects a jolt of liveliness into the bleak setting of an assisted living home… Cora's machinations—sometimes wily, sometimes curious, always funny—and her lovable crustiness give this [story] plenty of heart and humor.”

Fellow Macondista Alex Espinoza adds, “In a voice brimming with wit, energy, and originality, and with a keen eye and a pitch-perfect ear for language, Leslie Larson delivers us a protagonist like no other. Through Cora Sledge’s unique perspective, we ache and laugh along with her until the very last page, and she reminds us that longing and acceptance are at the very core of the human condition no matter what our age or circumstance.”

That pitch-perfect ear for language might have been what I heard in Larson’s accent—a natural feel and intonation for the nuances of the spoken word.

Of course Larson is quite experienced when it comes to the written word as well. She has more than fifteen years experience in the publishing business. First, she worked at a publisher based in London, then as a copywriter for the University of California Press. After Slipstream Larson left her full-time job to dedicate herself entirely to her writing.

Personally, I think Larson’s almost two decades experience with publishing is a true asset to her career as a novelist. The ins-and-outs of publishing which are really rather normal to someone working in the publishing business can seem daunting and frightening to a neophyte (like me!). But Larson takes them completely in-stride; in fact she says the journey Bedlam took from manuscript to published book was really not that different than any other title.

“Bedlam took about a year to write and Crown signed it several weeks after I finished. A little later the editor who signed the book left, so I didn’t know if the status of the book. After quite a few months a new editor for the book came on board,” she said calmly. Then she added, “I revised a bit, cut about 40,000 words, and then sent it back to the editor.”

Courtesy

You can catch Larson at a reading of Bedlam or participate in one of her upcoming workshops. Check out her website at www.leslielarson.com for more information.