Lauren McGovern penned an insipid novel at fourteen, thinking it’d win the first Avon/Flare Young Adult writing competition and she’d become a famous author. She lost, but was able to get an essay out of that rejection decades later for Midstory Magazine.
She’s always been a team player. “The Game” has taken many forms over the years, but never published until now. As losses piled up, Lauren turned it into something many of us do: toggle between then and now, before and after. She loves cheering others on, encouraging friends and family to reach their goals, and she’s felt supported and surrounded when dealt a defeating blow herself. She writes often about the grief she carries from the loss of her younger son, Owen, to suicide. Creative nonfiction is a flexible container for holding and sharing that bereavement with the world.
Lauren does not consider herself an athlete, more an active participant in sports like cycling and cross-country skiing. She also likes to hula hoop in her kitchen. She loves experimenting with old stuff, like antique postage stamps, discarded library books, and boulders she photographs on hikes, to create something new in the studio space she’s carved out in her home in the Adirondacks of northern New York. She is mostly a writer, but pushes herself to make whatever art she wants. Her essays, collages, photos, and graphic narratives have appeared in The Sunlight Press, What’s Your Grief, The Razor, Gordon Square Review, MUTHA Magazine, and elsewhere. Visit
laurenmcgovern.online.
If you haven't done so already, check out Lauren's award-winning story "The Game" and then return here for a chat with the author.
WOW: Congratulations on placing second in the Q3 2025 Essay Contest! How did you begin writing your essay and how did it and your writing processes evolve as you wrote?
Lauren: While the story of my athletic prowess has been told and retold at countless family gatherings over the years, I started writing this essay in earnest in 2019. Then I put it on the back burner. I looked at it again after taking a few writing workshops and publishing several essays and creative nonfiction pieces. I thought the story would appeal to WOW! readers, so I returned to it.
Teachers like Christopher Locke, Sage Tyrtle, and Joni Cole have helped me figure out what’s in service to my story. Do people need to know I’m the oldest of four? Nope. Are the sports where my siblings excelled important to the narrative? Nope.
I researched the sports pages from the local paper about the game. That’s where I discovered Miss Phil had prepared my teammates for a shootout weeks leading up to the championship. Of course, I still have my diary. Lots of “so psyched” and a paragraph of exclamation points!!!
In February, a library director friend secured a Poets & Writers grant for me to conduct a public reading of some of my published work and works in progress, including a version of “
The Game.” Miss Phil was in the audience. It was so much fun to see her delight in my retelling and hear her kind words about my writing. That vote of confidence pushed me to put some finishing touches on the essay and hit “submit.”
WOW: That’s an exciting evolution of your story! Thanks so much for sharing the details with us. What did you learn about yourself or your writing by creating this essay?
Lauren: Mostly how lucky and privileged I am to have experienced a positive, healthy childhood and an enjoyable high school career with skilled teachers in a rural area, even though I found soooooo much to lament while growing up.
If I owned a time machine, I would go back to those years and reach out and connect with classmates and team members who were probably struggling, feeling invisible, ashamed, unsteady, and anxious. All I can do is recognize the protective factors that have shaped me and how to help build those into young people’s lives now. We cannot have life without loss, but with a team in place, you can keep going.
WOW: In your bio, you write that you experiment with “old stuff” to create something new. Can you speak to how this process informs your writing practice or vice versa?
Lauren: My favorite book for erasure poetry is The Woman’s Day Book of House Plants by Jean Hersey with illustrations by Harry Marinsky (copyright 1963). The Household Searchlight Homemaking Guide (copyright 1937) is on my shelf, awaiting some use. Its tabbed sections are calling to me. In Health and Beauty: “Daily Walks - Walk on out-of-the-way streets, or, better still, on country roads where motor horns and traffic do not disturb the smooth flow of your thoughts.” Or Color in the Home: “Psychological effect of color - Colors do not possess physical properties that inflict tangible results, but they do soothe or disturb the mind. Consideration should be given to the exciting effect of red, the warmth of orange, the quieting influence of green, the coolness of blue, the happiness of yellow, and the reserve of violet.” Those books and many others are gifts from my husband to support my writing adventures.
A couple of summers ago, he and I spent hours talking with artist Ann Breedan at the Spring Woods Gallery in Maine. She gave us a tour of the garden behind the gallery space. It was a beautiful, brambly mess. I spotted a birdhouse that’d blown off its foundation, lying on its side with a hole in its moss-covered roof. I photographed it, knowing I’d use it in some future work. I’ve incorporated the broken birdhouse into the opening panel of a graphic narrative I’m trying to publish now.
WOW: Innovative ideas! I love hearing about ways art creates art. Which creative nonfiction essays or writers have inspired you most, and in what ways did they inspire you?
Lauren: This is such a hard question. I spend a lot of time in the lit mag world, reading a variety of prose. Anyone published in Split Lip, Hippocampus, and River Teeth Journal is a mentor for me. I’ve also read stunning CNF in Lunch Ticket, like Liz Breen’s “Regarding the Highchair You’re Selling on Facebook” and Eileen Vorbach Collins’s essay winner “Love in the Archives.” I’ve also been inspired by Kelsey Francis’s flash piece “Teacher who is a Mother who is a Teacher” in Longleaf Review, but anything Kelsey writes is something I want to read. Lucy Zhang is a writer who codes and collaborates; she makes fascinating stuff. Bethany Jarmul and Myna Chang, writers who’ve won WOW! contests have also inspired me.
I look at the essay structure, especially if it’s an experimental form; I examine ways they balance humor with heartbreak, the use of symbolism, word choice, how much an author reveals and what they leave up to us readers.
I also read a lot of fiction. I’d read Lily King’s grocery list if she let me. Ditto for Kevin Wilson.
WOW: Ha! Their grocery list! I love it. And that’s a wonderful list of lit mags and essays, too. If you could tell your younger self anything about writing, what would it be?
Lauren: You are going to pick up the book SomeBody to Love by Leslea Newman in the Strand Bookstore on your first date in NYC with the man you’ll marry. Your relationship with your body, food, and exercise will be transformed because of the author’s words and that partnership. You will build a home and a life that grows out of that first date. Reading and writing will accompany you along the way. Oh, and the internet is coming. Writing opportunities will explode. It’s going to be wild. Buckle up.
WOW: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to give our younger selves that kind of preview? Anything else you’d like to add?
Lauren: I have a mantra that’s a variation on the ubiquitous messaging in airports and train stations: “If you see something, say something.” I reach out to writers when their work has moved me, telling them specific lines I loved, why the opening or closing of an essay worked, and congratulating them on the publication. It builds community and I think everyone should adopt this routine. I love to hear from readers; I treasure the positive feedback people have taken the time to communicate with me over the years. When I'm licking my rejection wounds, I return to those messages for an emotional boost.
WOW: That is a fabulous idea, and a truly an uplifting way to build community. Thank you for sharing your writing with us and for your thoughtful responses. Happy writing!
Interviewed by Anne Greenawalt, founder and editor-in-chief of Sport Stories Press, which publishes sports books by, for, and about sportswomen and amateur athletes. Engage on Twitter or Instagram @GreenMachine459.
