I’m Lori-Lyn, a writer and artist in Lexington, Kentucky, with pieces of my heart rooted in California and New York.
My written work has been featured in print and digital publications including Sentire Magazine, Over the Moon, and Her Way of Love. I have exhibited at Art and Invention Gallery, Wildfire Yoga, and City Gallery.
I have a BA in studio art and an MFA in fiction writing.
I’m at work on a novel. I write memories, philosophies, and longer serialized pieces here.
The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother asked me if I would like to attend a week long poetry conference at the college. I looked at the materials she brought home and saw that I didn’t meet the age requirement.
“I’m going to ask him to let you in,” she said, meaning the organizer of the event, a friend of hers.
“He said you could come,” she said a few days later and I could tell by her tone of voice that he didn’t want me there but was acquiescing to her request. She handed me a folder.
When I was a child, my family went to church - Methodist at first, then Episcopal. My mother was (and is) a church organist, so we were an every-Sunday family until my brother and I were old enough to stay home alone by ourselves.
I remember sitting in a Sunday school classroom. I was around five or six years old. The teacher was talking to us about something serious. I knew that she was earnest. I also knew that what she was saying was wrong. I knew, with my body, that I didn’t believe what she was saying. I remember looking past her to the beam sunlight streaming through the window and the dance of dust motes.
In garden news, we have new natives in the ground, a gift from our neighbor. I opened up the back door one morning and our garden was filled with eastern phoebes. The same day, I spotted two red-cockaded woodpeckers.
We also have a red tail hawk couple nesting just beyond our garden and we see them soaring overhead everyday. We’ve been pulling up wild onions and we planted a witch hazel tree and a hellebore.
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.
My earliest memories are of making things - writing books on newsprint before I actually knew how to form letters and words, sitting at the kitchen table with a tray of watercolors, trying to control the watery tempera paint as I stood at the nursery school easel. When I made things, time dissolved.
I also spent a lot of time during my childhood walking with the dogs on my grandparents’ farm, preparing tiny dinners for fairies and serving them in acorn caps, and imagining what it would be like to be a teenager who could drive a car in slow circles on the bypass on Saturday nights. I watched a lot of television, filled spiral notebooks with song lyrics, and lounged on the hot pink shag carpeting in my bedroom, lost in the world of books.
It was on a farm walk, when I was around ten or eleven, that I saw a face in the sky and felt an understanding about the spirit of the land. I knew enough to keep this experience to myself, even though my family often discussed spiritual theologies and paranormal theories and even saw a UFO on a night drive once. As a teenager, I explored the metaphysical section of my local bookstore, acquired a tarot deck, and stocked my bedroom shelves with little bottles of fragrant oil and incense sticks.
I graduated from high school thinking I wanted to be an actor. Looking back, I think what I really wanted to be was a movie star. Although I still sometimes feel the urge to write and perform a one-woman play, acting didn’t work out for me. I studied writing in college and wrote a great deal of confessional poetry. Ultimately, I majored in art. It was in the world of the artists that I saw freedom. I saw artists speaking the truth and living on their own terms, refusing to yield to convention and trying to change the world for the better.
On Thanksgiving weekend 1992, the autumn after my graduation, I moved to New York City with no plan, as you can only do when you are young and foolish and have a family support system. My brother - who is also an artist, and a musician - drove me to the city on icy roads in the van his band drove to gigs. He dropped me off in front of a residential hotel, and I stayed in the city for nearly a decade. I did a variety of things that ranged from sorting fabric swatches at a design firm to setting up jewelry to be photographed for catalogs to crying in bars late at night.
In the later years of my city life, I joined a small, supportive writer’s group in Brooklyn. The warm light of that community allowed me to re-discover my voice as a writer and gave me the courage to pursue graduate school. I moved out to the suburbs and earned an MFA in fiction writing.
In 2001, I returned to Kentucky where I still live with my partner Tracy (we met in high school.) He is also an artist, and a musician.
One day, sitting at my desk at the children’s section in a branch of the public library, a friend sent me a link to a blog. Immediately, I adopted this format for myself and began blogging. For years, this is where most of my writing energy was focused. I stopped making art, however, and channeled that energy into other pursuits, like baking wonky cakes and attending psychic development workshops.
During a snow storm in early 2015, I enrolled in an online painting course and came back to art-making, only this time it was all about intuitive flow rather than adhering to anyone else’s rules of artmaking. Painting moved back into the center of my creative expression.
I began to write my prayers and intentions on my canvas then paint intuitively. I had a dream that I did this for other people, which seemed pretty crazy, but I made the offer and people showed up. For several years, this is how I flowed in creativity and spirit. People sent me their wishes and prayers, and I created paintings for them.
You have landed here just in time to see me bring my writing back into focus. I am currently at work on a fiction manuscript. I’m still painting, but differently than I once was.
Tracy and I love to travel. We go to California and New York as often as possible, which is not nearly as often as we would like. I once said, “I’m from New York,” and it took me a bit or too to realize, that isn’t true. Surely a large part of my heart is from New York and remains there, just as a part of my heart is in California.
We share our lives with a pug named Rocky. His brother Woody died in July of 2022. We are aunt and uncle to three amazing humans and one human-in-law.
We are dedicated to transforming our lawn into a sanctuary for pollinators. I collect moon water in mason jars -sometimes sun water, if I forget to bring the moon water in. I’m probably wearing pajamas right now sipping on a cup of coffee. (It might be herbal tea, but it’s probably coffee.) I still leave gifts for fairies, with absolutely no strings attached, and currently we are grooving with a giant red tail hawk couple who are nesting in the tall tree out back.
