Writing is hard. Laura opted for a degree in philosophy because the papers were shorter and a career in libraries because hanging out with books was easier than writing them. Despite these efforts to avoid writing, the need to do so hid in her spinal cord like shingles, erupting in 2011 in the form of several personal essays for The Globe and Mail. When a short story threatened to develop into a full-blown novel, Laura sought treatment through UBC’s master of fine arts program. Various balms were applied along the way: In 2012 she won The Malahat Review's UVic 50th Anniversary Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition in 2013, and in 2017 won the Brenda Strathern Memorial Award for her YA novel-in-progress, The Anarchist’s Guide to Gardening. Laura lives by the hard-won, late-in-coming truth that writers have to write, and when she’s not managing her own condition, she’s helping other writers live well with theirs. Born in Toronto and raised in BC, she now makes her home in Calgary, where she lives with her family and a buffalo-shaped cat named Hattie.