Louise Murphy
Born in 1943 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Louise Murphy began writing stories when she was five years old. An avid reader and prolific writer, she attended the University of Kentucky and taught English to middle-school students in Newark, Delaware, before moving to California in 1968. There, she raised her two children and received a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she taught for five years. She later taught novel writing at Acalanes Adult Education in Lafayette, California.
Murphy is the winner of a Writer’s Digest award for formal poetry. In 2003, she was awarded the Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook Award for her chapbook, Pilgrimage. Her writing and poetry has been published in numerous journals and magazines.
She lives in northern California, where she is working on another novel. Besides reading and writing, she enjoys playing the flute, opera, and classical music.
“God didn't come down and kill us. I don't see God shooting children and priests. None of us met God beating up Jews and shoving them into railroad cars. This is men doing the murdering. Talk to men about their evil, kill the evil men, but pray to God. You can't expect God to come down and do our living for us. We have to do that ourselves.”
“There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again.”
“Do not struggle when the hook of a word pulls you into the air of truth and you cannot breathe.”