I am someone whose whole life is organized around paying attention.
To the inner landscape. To the past. To what’s shifting. To what’s hidden in images and symbols, in the cards I pull, and the bees that come every summer to burrow into our flowers and curl up there, covered in pollen dust, to sleep and sway in the wind.
I catch glimpses of the invisible lining within the visible world. Writing is where I press my fingers against it.
I’m Lori-Lyn Hurley. I hold an MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College with a background in studio art and theology. I’ve spent most of my life in hypersensitivity, noticing what’s really going on in a room, in a relationship, in a self.
The impulse behind everything I create is the same: to express what insists upon being expressed and tell what is mine to tell.
I write personal essays and creative nonfiction on my Substack, Creative Living Diaries. I’m currently writing a YA novel set in the 1980s. I paint, make digital art, pull oracle cards, and grow native plants for the pollinators in a slightly haunted house in Kentucky.
CREATIVE LIVING DIARIES
Creative Living Diaries is where most of my writing lives.
Free subscribers get long-form personal essays, my ongoing series about jobs I had in NYC in the nineties, Cosmic Heart—a spiritual autobiography, and a love letter on the last day of every month.
Paid members get the Diary Unlocked—essays that feel to close to the bone for the open internet, videos, workshops, and live gatherings where we talk about creativity, meaning, and whatever is pressing on us. It’s the living part of Creative Living.
And maybe that is why we revisit stories together, sifting through shards of memory, comparing field notes and evidence. Maybe that is why my impulse is to walk through the same memories, the same stories, over and over again, piecing together a narrative, attempting to make sense of it, linking one memory to another like a paper chain.
Sometimes I wonder if being a romantic is a sort of haunting, a way of being haunted. I walk through the world attuned to its invisible layers, not just the people and places lost, but the emotions that once informed them. The way curtains move in morning light. A record sleeve in my hands. The way a line from a song can hold my whole life inside it.
That year, I changed. I slowly reverted to the clothing I liked to wear. I let my hair be straight and unsprayed. I started wearing a perfume oil called China Rain, sweet with a dark undertone. I spent hours in the campus library reading poetry collections instead of studying for my classes. I read Marge Piercy and Anne Sexton. I studied their work and feverishly wrote my own poems.
On Valentine’s Day in 1969
in a small college town in Kentucky, my mother had a craving for a hot fudge sundae, so my dad drove her to the Dairy Queen. I imagine it was snowing, she sat next to the window, the chocolate was particularly delicious. Early the next morning, I was born, a little late and a little small. My body, I am told, was bright red except for a patch of pale white skin over my right eye. My skin tone evened out, but my right eyebrow, a patch of hair at my right temple, and a streak on the back of my head, grew in white.