Lacy Loar-Gruenler
Bio
Lacy Loar-Gruenler worked for a decade as a newspaper journalist and editor. In March 2023, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard University.
Stories (17)
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French Kiss. Top Story - August 2023.
The flight attendant dimmed the cabin lights hours ago. Only three reading lights glowed, casting an eerie pall on the few passengers under them who, like me, couldn’t sleep. The man behind me was awake and staring out the window as I stood and pirouetted toward the lavatory. He turned in his seat and looked up at me, the spitting image of William Shatner in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which I had watched two days earlier. He had the same pensive way of lifting the inner corners of his eyebrows, His hair was razor cut around the ears and nape, combed away from his face. Almost everyone else on the airplane was dressed in jeans, but he wore a charcoal suit with his tie still knotted. I hoped he wasn’t seeing little gremlins scurrying on the wings, trying to disable the plane. He smiled at me, and murmured, “Something is on the wing.” Damn, I thought. I knew it! I knew this would go badly. I must have looked like I had not understood him, because he repeated what he said: “Bonne nuit, Mademoiselle.” Relieved, I whispered, “Good night to you, too, Monsieur.” Thank God there were no hairy gremlins far above the Atlantic Ocean, only the twinkling lights that made us visible in the velvet night as we sliced through it toward Paris. My jitters were a product of my active imagination --- and what I had done.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Chapters
So, You’re Ready to Write a Sex Scene. Top Story - August 2023.
Whether you pen fiction or essays, eventually your human characters are going to want to have sex. While coupling is an instinct to ensure a species survives, for humans, it’s far more, mostly because our brains are the largest sex organ we possess. Sex can be existential if we procreate to leave something of ourselves behind when we die. It can feel sinful, nasty, embarrassing, terrifying, pleasant, loving, unifying, and downright like the best thing ever invented. So, why is it so difficult to put it down on paper?
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in Writers
The Pleasures of Hemingway and Freud. Top Story - August 2023.
In “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” a vignette included in the restored version of Ernest Hemingway’s last novel, A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, one can make the invisible claim that human minds are influenced by Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle. We avoid unpleasure and seek pleasure. However, the ego’s instinct for self-preservation attempts to replace the pleasure principle with the reality principle which, out of practicality, postpones the ultimate pleasure we are seeking. Our sexual instinct, which is difficult to educate, often succeeds in overriding the reality principle to the detriment of the organism (Freud 3-7). Poor Papa is the poster boy for the pleasure principle. This vignette is an anguished memoir of his love for two women, his first wife Hadley, whom he eventually betrays, and the woman he betrays her with, Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler2 years ago in BookClub
Blood Sisters
We moved to L.A. when I was eight; into one of those one-story, stucco, tile-roofed houses springing up from all the weedy, vacant lots along Norton Avenue. Construction was booming seven years after the war ended; all those GIs with their pretty wives and chubby-cheeked children filled the beige boxes on Norton, lined in front with sidewalks we scratched our names in with Popsicle sticks before the cement dried, and in back with miles of sky-high telephone poles, like giant soldiers in a row, marching all the way to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. I pouted about moving; I didn’t want to leave my old friends in San Francisco, but my mother told me stories about movie stars gliding along Hollywood Boulevard in Reef Blue Roadmaster Skylarks to restaurants with white tablecloths and no prices on the menus. Just after we moved, my father drove us downtown to ride the funicular, Angel’s Flight. Your heart feels like a freed bird when you look around from up there at the ziggurat buildings jutting even higher than you are, doves strutting on the windowsills. After that, we grabbed a chili burger at Tommy’s on Rampart and walked around a little. I liked the flowery smells surrounding all the beautiful women we passed, their silk summer dresses swooshing as they sashayed and smiled into the faces of their handsome men. It didn’t take me long to love the City of Angels.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler3 years ago in History
