Like many creative people, the roots of these passions are easily traced to Lori's childhood. In first grade, two notable essays--one on Abraham Lincoln and one on the marriage of her two favorite stuffed animals, both mice--catapulted her to the sort of grammar school acclaim that sets one’s life course in an instant. Lori soon became a prolific writer of short stories, essays, diary entries, letters, and notes to her classmates, reaching what her mother has labeled her creative zenith in the sixth grade with the musical, “School House Patriots,” for which Lori wrote book, score and lyrics. Former classmates may also recall the school anthem Lori composed, “All Glory to Glenwood School.” Meanwhile, Lori displayed an early passion for making and fixing stuff. She  completely remodeled her dollhouse in her basement workshop as a girl, where she also spent years attempting to build a functioning car using only wood scraps, tin cans, and found objects. In the same period, she enlisted the help of neighborhood boys in building a double-decker tree fort, piling spare sections of white picket fence against a tree and using mud packs in place of concrete. The boys walked off the job when they discovered Lori was a girl (well, duh) and the fort was torn down by her father before it was ever remotely inhabitable. Still, the project telegraphed her affinity for near-condemned properties, which she began collecting or coveting as an adult with her own real power tools.
    After experimenting with a derelict lifestyle in high school to “gain material for my art,” Lori went on to  study English in college, then followed her father’s footsteps into journalism—a field where she was able to actually earn a living writing about unusual bar mitzvahs, parachuting grandmothers and the weather. She briefly quit the newspaper world to work in a book store and in a wood shop and, when they fired her there (mainly, she thinks, for being a girl), she set off on the western adventure that would become her first book.

    Her latest book, The Change, was the fruit of a long drive she took with her dog Colby, setting off to find "the most depressing places I could find in the country," Lori has explained, though she only had time to scratch the surface. Colby died peacefully at home shortly before his sixteenth birthday. Lori now lives in New York City with her Portuguese water dog Graci.

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