Introducing Yve Laran

My Writer’s Biography for Illumination

Hello All! Thank you for stopping by to visit.

I’ve been writing for Medium a short time and am pleased to join Illumination as a writer. I’ve enjoyed being part of this publication and reading excellent stories from around the globe.

I am a born and bred New Yorker and live in a busy suburb 45 minutes outside of New York City.

During an early part of my life, I was a classical musician and performed with an orchestra in the Bronx for 15 years. Although I no longer perform music on a professional level, I listen to music of all genres. When I am networking on LinkedIn, I listen to country music. When I am proofreading at work, I listen to hip-hop music. When I clean the house, I enjoy R&B. When I’m chopping vegetables in the kitchen, I love listening to jazz.

I’ll listen to any piece of music at least once, no matter how good or how bad it is. If I don’t like it, I won’t listen a second time.

For most of my professional career, I worked in an office in Manhattan. I switched offices several months before Covid-19 emerged in March 2020, and wrote about that experience in a self-published article, “Covid-19 Autobiography,” on Medium.

I relocated to Arizona for six months after the pandemic began. With plenty of time to spare outside of work, I launched a blog on Wordpress.com. A kind writer there recommended that I write for Medium, which was my transition to this platform.

I am not new to creative and non-fiction writing, although I have been on hiatus from it for several years. When I was in my 20’s, I enrolled in classes at the Writer’s Studio, a creative writing school formed by Philip Schultz. Phil was formerly a professor at New York University, and decided it was time to establish his own organization to support and teach writers. At the time I attended the school, it was staffed by instructors who worked at Poets & Writers magazine.

Being in a writer’s class at the studio was a wonderful experience. It was expected that we were writing throughout the week. When we attended class, we were required to bring a piece of writing for analysis, and to provide copies for others to read and review. We were also given a list of books to read outside of class, which met once a week for 10 weeks. The books were chosen to highlight an aspect of writing we were studying that week, whether it was fiction, memoir, or poetry.

My memories of attending the classes were my rush to leave work, to copy my writing at a copy shop on Astor Place, and to take a freight elevator up to the floor in a loft where the classes were held. The copy shop is no longer in business, and the Barnes and Noble across the street was converted to a gym.

Another memory of attending the classes over several sessions were the times the classes diminished in size. Everyone started out wanting to be a writer, but the ones who really wanted to be writers were the ones who did the work and produced the writing. If you did the work, you showed up for class, passed your writing around the table, and braced yourself for a critique if you knew you missed the mark on what you were writing. Critiques were handled with respect and care, providing helpful guidance. Even if the piece of writing didn’t work, others would offer constructive advice.

There were 10 to 12 writers at the beginning of the 10 weeks, and for the last 2 to 3 weeks of a session, a handful of writers remained. The rest of us who stayed had the benefit of more time for critiques, and the writing instructor had more time to spend discussing our work and the mechanics of writing. It wasn’t a review of grammar; we were asked to analyze why it was effective for a writer to choose first-person narrative over third-person narrative, the tone of a piece, and the emotions it evoked. We then considered how we could attempt the same in our own writing.

I’m grateful to return to creative and non-fiction writing, which is a pleasure after a workday of writing, proofreading, or editing business documents.

I have no set formula for what I will write or share in a story. I begin each writing session with an idea and write from that point.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to connecting with you through our stories!