Laura Johnsrude’s creative nonfiction essays have been published in literary journals including but not limited to Appalachian Review, Bellevue Literary Review, River Teeth, Under the Gum Tree, and Fourth Genre. Laura’s craft essays have appeared in Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, her advocacy work in FORsooth and the Courier Journal, and her book reviews in Good River Review, where she is the assistant book review editor.
Read excerpts of her published works below:
TIGER IN THE BIN
Appalachian Review - DATE
EXCERPT HERE
FOR THE EDIFICATION OF MY SOUL — AND THE ENHANCEMENT OF MY WRITING CRAFT
Brevity Literary Magazine - DATE
EXCERPT HERE
LEANING CLOSE
Intima - DATE
EXCERPT HERE
SMOKING GUNS
Crepe myrtles are everywhere in hot July in North Carolina. Hardy and showy, they line railroad tracks and freeways and stand alone on residential lots, bearing flowers of searing ruby red, Pepto-Bismol pink, or dirty-cotton white. I drove past hundreds of them while worrying one of those guns in my trunk might go off, killing a small child in a neighboring minivan.
I tried not to think about all the other guns in the other vehicles on the highway with me. Handguns and long guns, in trunks and glove compartments and under seats and stuffed into diaper bags, belonging to owners who are sure their guns are loaded.
- River Teeth, Fall 2023
BEHOLDING SOMETHING FINE
“We lingered in the corner of a delivery room while the obstetrics staff attended to a laboring woman. Tall and slender, the soon-to-be-mother was writhing and moaning, clenching and stretching, with the otherworldly work of it all. She transformed, suddenly, moving from supine arching to standing straight up in the stirrups, like an angry Greek goddess, bellowing her pain.
She was not our patient, though.
We were waiting for the baby.”
TO EAT A FIG
In the weeks after my sister-in-law died from Covid, baked pies arrived by post, by delivery, from well-meaning friends to my brother. Pies to set on counters, covered with foil. Pies to slide into the refrigerator. Pies to photograph, alongside his ceramic ones. Pies to eat. Bronzed German chocolate studded with coconut flakes. Apple crumb, sandy with sugar. Maybe my brother left the pies around the house, untouched, or swiped the lot into the bin. Maybe my brother plunged his bare hands into the cobbler, scooping up handfuls, wanting more.
I must have said these things, but it was thirty years ago, and I don’t remember the dialogue. I only know what would have been said, because I know that part. I know what would have been said.
But I remember the mom, so very young and sitting so still—her long straight silvery hair, her thin summer top, her bare arms on either side of the boy, watching me talk but too tired to respond, too tired to cry. The two of them, a young mother and a baby boy, facing me, watching me talk, watching me talk. Wondering what I was saying.
THE EXAMINED LIFE JOURNAL - July 2023
I went there, my elementary-aged self, in a bathing suit with a towel around my neck, by walking through other peoples’ yards, as kids do. I don’t remember wearing shoes; I remember the cushion of pine straw and the rough prickly pinecones from my back door to the paved Poplar Avenue, then the soft grass and hard Fuller driveway, then silky soil before stepping onto the hot concrete foundation around the pool, the clang of the hinged door closing behind me, the squeals and splashing in front of me. Vending machine coins clutched in my sweaty fist.
Sweet: A Literary Confection, March 2023
Winner of the 2022
Flash Nonfiction Contest
LOSING FLESH
Under the pool table in the basement, there’s a plastic bin for the stuff I want to suffocate. The pink blanket given to me by the hospital. “How to Live with Breast Cancer” brochures. The Percocet bottle, which used to contain pills I didn’t take. A piece of paper where my daughter logged volumes of fluid from the drainage bulbs hanging from the holes in my chest after my one breast was removed. The single gray “knitted knocker” prosthesis, made for me by a friend, tucked away in a pink organza drawstring bag.
Fall 2022
DAFFODIL
My children never had a dog or a cat. My husband, Chris, was allergic to both, and that was a useful excuse since I didn’t want either. It’s one of my maternal flaws. My children will say that about me, when they complain about their childhoods. They never had a real pet. Their mother was a germaphobe and deprived them of that caregiving experience.
Drunk Monkeys (2022)
HONESTY AND BRAVERY IN CREATIVE NONFICTION WORKSHOP COMMENTARY
Brevity - 2022
No creative nonfiction writer reveals everything. We all choose what to include in a piece, select words and phrases that sound best, depict the memories that are most powerful. We vary sentence length to convey tone, or control pacing, or to end the last paragraph with a punch. We shape the story to suit the goal.
POUNDING THE STEERING WHEEL
Minerva Rising Press, 2021
Mamas in some other places are terrified their kids will fall down wells, be eaten by alligators, suffocate from air pollution, succumb to lead poisoning, drown in sewers, slip off the top of that monster train hurtling through Mexico.
And then, here in America, the radio reports a fifteen-year-old boy down in the middle of a park or a toddler on the way to the hospital after finding a gun inside a shoe box. We watch videos of small children exiting schools after shootings, looking vulnerable and scared, arms over their heads proving they aren’t carrying firearms.
Mamas here, and Mamas there, watch the news, or turn off the news, pound their steering wheels, or scream into their computers.
““By the Neck,” Laura Johnsrude’s gorgeous meditation on the neck’s structure and highways that “keep us alive,” is interspersed with language spawned from it and her adventures as a pediatrician with it’s delicacy. ”
So many vital structures reside in the neck, all the highways that keep us alive, upright, sentient—an airway tube, a spinal cord cocooned in bone, and those magnificent vessels transporting blood to the brain.
Which is why children shouldn’t wear dangly necklaces while playing soccer, or chew gum while bouncing on trampolines, or suck lollipops while riding bicycles. Why athletes shouldn’t bench press without spotters, why football players shouldn’t use their heads as battering rams, why swimmers shouldn’t dive into shallow pools. And why Isadora Duncan shouldn’t have worn that long scarf while riding in an open convertible.
Bellevue Literary Review (Fall 2020)
FINISHING THE BREAST (OR, FOUR BRAS A YEAR)
I’ve imagined that last visit like an unveiling of a piece of art. Imagined the office staff coming to the door to see. The receptionist, the scheduler. The other patients. Everyone exclaiming and applauding. Confetti drifting down from the ceiling.
For the twenty-fifth time I’ll take off my blouse and show the doctor my chest, and I’ll pose for a horizontal photo of the final landscape, image complete.
Maybe he’ll tell me my chest looks fabulous.
Maybe I’m supposed to say that to him.
JUST AS I AM
The Boom Project - 2019
We cycled through the verses, plodding along in a weary rhythm, until all the penitents were spent and glassy-eyed, and the pastor was left alone at the front, hands moist and well-wrung. The preacher raised one hand to the rafters, pinched his eyes closed tightly and tilted his head towards the ceiling, thanking the Lord for those of the flock who had been lost but now were found, and we stood stock still, frozen in place, until the booming release, ‘Amen!’”
LEAVING EARTH
I was on a third-year medical school rotation in the pediatric intensive care unit in January, 1986, on a team caring for a baby girl with Listeria meningitis, spinal cord stiff and curved into a C-shape, head reaching back for her heels, as if stargazing.
Please See Me, Sept 2019
I spent a lot of time thinking about blood during my training years—hoping I could get enough of it, wondering which vein would yield the best supply of it, wishing the patients had more of it, calling the blood bank for a bag of it. I cushioned samples of it in my sweaty palm, palpated arteries for the pulse of it, auscultated hearts for the beat of it.
Bellevue Literary Review, 2018
Honorable Mention
Fel Felice Buckvar Prize
forNonfiction
The Spectacle, 2018
Tom Petty dies of a heart attack on the day of my breast biopsy. I picture him, this rock star I loved, looking down at his chest, clutching it with his hand, and then collapsing, lying down for the last time. If I live as long as Tom Petty, I only have ten more years.
At the top, I collapsed into one of the chairs, able to see Ben descending below me, toward the ocean, blonde head tilted down. But, this wasn’t the usual lapping water. We were further out, and the waves were crashing aggressively against the jetty, and Ben stood on a flat, mossy rock jutting into the water. My mommy-antenna was vibrating when I noticed a speedboat in the distance, trailed by a large wake.
Hippocampus Magazine, 2017
