Author Archives: Laura Roper

About Laura Roper

Laura Roper is working on a novel based on her family’s history in western Massachusetts during the late 1600s. She is a graduate of the Novel Incubator (Year 6) during which she finished a novel on the clash of cultures (Hispanic, Indigenous, and American frontiersmen) in early 1800s New Mexico. She lives in Somerville, and divides her creative energies between painting, writing, and volunteering.

Exploring Character Through Memoir

Fiction readers expect more of characters than they do of people in real life. In life you can have a person who does inexplicable self-destructive or transgressive shit, and friends and colleagues just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that’s…

The Thrill of Discovery, The Agony of the Fact

I decided to write a historical novel because I wanted to get completely out of my day-to-day life and contemporary everything—terrorism, the failure of capitalism, modern marriage, childhood and adolescence, politics, racism, climate change, you name it. Did I have…