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By Josh Perry
Hometown Weekly Staff
Medfield resident Laurie Baker has a short story in the winter 2015-16 edition of the award-winning literary journal, “Ploughshares,” based at Emerson College. Baker had her story, “Here I Am, Laughing With Boers,” published in the journal, which comes out three times per year.
“Here I Am, Laughing With Boers,” tells the story of an American girl teaching at an all-black boarding school in South Africa. The narrator of the story is “ambivalently attracted” to a white South African man despite the fact that he personifies “the racial intolerance of his culture,” according to Baker.
The story was originally written while Baker was in graduate school and is part of a novel-in-stories about South Africa that she recently completed. The novel is entitled, “How We Entertain Ourselves in Isolation,” and Baker received the Larry Levis Post-Graduate stipend, which is given to a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program of Writers, to help finish it.
“Now that I have completed this novel-in-stories, I am trying to get as many of the individual ‘chapters’ published before seeking an agent for the work as a whole,” said Baker, who has lived in Medfield for the past eight years.
“Ploughshares is a well-known literary magazine and my biggest publishing coup so far!”
She added that her next project is a collection of nonfiction essays, which are largely autobiographical and deal with her “lifelong struggle with depression.” One of her essays, about taking her “Beatlemaniac” daughter to Abbey Road, was published in the December edition of Hippocampus Magazine.
Baker has written all her life. She joked, “Since those oh-so-sentimental pieces of prose of my childhood.” As she reflected on the kindling of her passion for writing, Baker highlighted fifth grade, when she discovered her father’s copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
She explained, “[I] realized what beauty could be made from language and character.”
When she wrote “Here I Am, Laughing With Boers,” Baker was not focusing on being published or where her writing may someday take her but rather on exploring her craft and “familiarizing [herself] with as many writers [she] admired as possible.”
Now that she has seen success with her writing and is starting to find outlets to get her work into the public eye, being published has become a method for “validating” her efforts to create stories.
“Most writers, I assume, want their work shared and enjoyed and have to persevere through a seemingly relentless onslaught of rejection before someone snatches them up and deems their work worthy of print,” she explained.
Baker continued, “I feel buoyed by my publication in ‘Ploughshares’ but know, realistically, that I will have to try dozens of magazines before another accepts my work. And, so, I persevere!”
To learn more about “Ploughshares,” visit www.pshares.org.
Josh Perry is an Editor at Hometown Weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter at @Josh_Perry10.
