As a writer and as a human, Lauren Harkawik is preoccupied with how our understanding of ourselves is impacted by who we're in relationship with, where we are, and how we spend our energy. This curiosity culminates in the study of identity present throughout her work. She is also drawn to exploring interactions between the logical mundane, the unknown, and the unknowable.
If you're still reading, Lauren would like to share that she once wrote inside the bedroom of Emily Dickinson and, on a separate occasion, in the writing space of Herman Melville, which was considerably larger than most bedrooms in his house. Defying her expectations, Lauren didn't accomplish much in Emily’s bedroom. In Herman’s, she was prolific. She wrote mainly about topics of feminism and the female body's relationship to capitalism. During pauses, she looked through Herman's window, which looks out at Mount Greylock. This view is said to have inspired Herman in writing "Moby Dick."
Lauren has held many different types of jobs, each of which she considers related to her career as a writer. They include drug store cashier; camp counselor; Walt Disney World cast member; child wrangler on a kids’ TV show; reality TV intern; Sesame Workshop intern; Lifetime Television intern; assistant to the president of a boutique talent management firm; ghostwriter; food journalist; and small-town reporter. In the latter, she put her full heart into documenting the milestones, struggles, and passions of the people in her community for 10 years.
Lauren is based in rural Vermont, in a town that has about 2,000 full-time residents, two lakes, two soft-serve ice cream stands, and two ski mountains. Its biggest shopping destination is a thrift store inside a former motel. In the summer, the town has a festival celebrating blueberries. It includes a blueberry jello slip-n-slide for children. The fire department attends this event and uses its fire truck's hose to spray the jello off of the children.
Lauren grew up in a suburb of Albany, NY. Within a 15-minute drive of her childhood home, there were three malls, seven soft-serve ice cream stands, and the biggest indoor roller skating rink in the world. Inside that rink was a dance club for children. It was called "Secrets." On its radio commercials, Secrets boasted that it had "dual water cannons," which sprayed water over the crowd of dancing pre-teens. Lauren was enchanted by Secrets' water cannons, fog machine, light-up dance floor, and strobe light and was simultaneously far too awkward to dance. This made Secrets a confounding place for her. She went there any chance she got.
In between the suburbs and the small town, Lauren studied English and then dramatic writing. She graduated with a BFA from the Conservatory of Theater Arts and Film at Purchase College. At Purchase, Lauren found a group of friends comprising fellow artists. It was magic. One of those friends was Garret, a filmmaker, whom she fell in love with. This, too, was magic. They have since built an entire life together. They have two children.
Before moving to Vermont, Lauren and Garret lived in Brooklyn. Lauren has an abiding love for the way the East River quietly laps the shore at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the way it feels to walk up 7th Avenue in south Park Slope at dinnertime, and the way you can tell the train is about to arrive to the York Street station from the slight breeze that emanates from the station's tunnel. Lauren misses riding the New York City subway system the way some people miss the ocean, which is to say, "deeply."
Despite the subway and the East River and dinnertime on 7th Avenue, while living in Brooklyn, Lauren was on an Amtrak train and got the idea to move to Vermont. En route from Albany to Manhattan, she saw lights twinkling from cabins in the mountains and thought that seemed like the best way to let one's imagination run wild: move to the mountains, seek out bears and ghosts and luna moths. Following this whim, Lauren and Garret moved to Vermont in 2011.
Lauren has never seen a ghost. She’s sometimes comforted by the concept of them, but she is also afraid to see one. She's always thought that if she were to see one, it would most certainly be at night and in a kitchen. Lauren has seen many black bears and is also both afraid of and comforted by them. She has not seen one in the kitchen, but that did happen to someone else in her town, so it isn't out of the realm of possibility. Each summer, Lauren sees at least one luna moth, for which she considers herself lucky.
Lauren wants you know every tiny bit of every cell of her being, even the mitochondria, and she also wants to be a little mysterious. Mostly, she wants you to know that some of the weird stuff you’ve thought or felt, she’s thought or felt too.