I’m from Maine, and my thoughts are often there, though my heart (and the rest of me) resides in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. I’m interested in the stories that get covered up, perhaps from living in woodsy places and noticing old stone walls, abandoned gravestones. New Englanders are famously stoic. I like to dig underneath (at least on the page) and see what’s really going on. I like to start with setting. I’m often thinking about place and how it shapes a person.
Like most writers, I’ve held odd jobs: clambake waiter, cruise ship entertainer, creative writing instructor, yogi, hotel lounge singer, book reviewer, music booker, chicken wrangler. I’ve had the good fortune to travel widely, and my fiction reflects this. During my stint as a singer/dancer on a cruise ship – see my autobiographical novel, A Thousand and One Nights – I spent summers in Mediterranean ports and winters in the Caribbean. I’ve lived and performed in China, Japan, Thailand, the UAE and the UK. (Think Lost in Translation and the fancy hotels where no one listens to the lounge act.) I cowrote the screenplay for A Thousand and One Nights. Someday I’ll write the musical.
I got “serious” and enrolled in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, then taught creative writing at Rutgers University and became a professional commuter. (Juggler of coffee/everything bagels while grading papers on New Jersey Transit.) In this way I also wrote my second novel, Off Island, about the frustrations of Mette Gad Gauguin, wife of Paul Gauguin. I set part of this novel in Maine. (What if Gauguin sailed to Monhegan Island instead of the Marquesas?) It’s a murder mystery too.
My third book, Amphibians, a story collection set in cities around the world, won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize. It’s about flitting between land and sea – feeling out of sorts in all habitats.
One early reader described At the Center, my forthcoming novel, as “a timely topic that goes well beyond questions of the ethics (or economics) of book bans and AI…to consider, in a visceral way, the value of story.” It’s set in a cultish retreat compound and features a former teacher, ousted by AI, who writes in contraband notebooks. (Paper shortages have made printed material taboo.) It’s about one woman’s struggle to tell a story that’s hard to believe.
I’m often distracted by five pet hens, who have names and distinct personalities. (I’ll resist the urge to list them here.) When I need a break from my writing desk, I open the coop and speak to them. I’m fascinated by what they have to say.
For more, please visit https://www.laratupper.com/
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Lara Tupper’s At the Center in the spring of 2027.
