November 1, 2020: Interview with WOW! Women on Writing, for first-place nonfiction essay, Winter 2020.
June 2, 2020: Reading from a poem, “Soul Sister,” and the first two chapters of my novel The Kid from the Other Side.
August 22, 2018: Reading from “Road Through the Trees” (DoveTales, An International Journal of the Arts).
July 16, 2018: Reading of “Walrus Brings the Dominoes,” third-place in flash fiction category, Fish anthology, Bantry Ireland.
WEST CORK LITERARY FESTIVAL, MARITIME HOTEL, JULY 16
“It was an unusually dry day for a West Cork summer and the sun shone on the fields across the harbour, and through the wall of glass behind the stage the 100 or so assembled at the Fish Anthology launch could see it all, and the boats bobbing on the glinting water, and yet they had gathered to listen to the 18 writers who came to celebrate and to mark their own achievement and that of their fellow contributors . . .
It is one of the most challenging events at a literary festival, a reading from many different writers. The audience have to be paying attention, and keep it up through 18 different changes of direction, and when that attention doesn’t waver right to the end you know it has gone brilliantly. And it did.
Afterwards we trickled downstairs to the bar in the hotel, had a drink and tried best we could to get to know each other, a tricky but rewarding task with so many. From there we osmosed to Ma Murphy’s bar and continued the evening. I think that some friendships were formed and the beginnings of a new shoal of the Fish family.”
November 22, 2016: Interview with Poudre River Libraries, for first-place flash fiction story, Winter 2016.
“Walter Musgrave should have known better than to leave story time without permission, but he had a policy of not listening to grown-ups which had taken a firm root. It was bad enough he had to spend the entire day with his witchy grandmother. But he definitely wasn’t planning on hanging around for read-a-loud. Everyone knew that was for babies.”
And so begins Fort Collins-based writer Laura Mahal’s flash fiction story, “Firmly Rooted Policy,” a first place winner in the Poudre River Public Library District’s 2016 Spirited Stories Contest.
For Laura, writing a complete and layered story between 500 and 1000 words was a great departure from her typical long-form, novel-length writing. But, when her teenage daughter asked her to submit a story, Laura “took it as a personal challenge” and opportunity to expand her writing skills and try new approaches to writing.
“Prolific is not hard for me,” she explains. “Flash fiction was tough. I went through many drafts for something so short.”
April 21, 2017: Reading of an excerpt of “Ancestors Take a Walk,” part of the Sunrise Summits anthology, Colorado Book Awards, Denver, Colorado.
