You know I am the only one who can save you
and you come to shore splayed on the white tops of waves
mumbling, unable to look me in the eyes…
Escape is for life. Country buckles to country –
blue seafloor winks to green mountaintop
And wasn’t that you riding the quake last Christmas
before the tsunami skittled the children into the ocean with their tiny hands?
— from Ash Starling in Gargoyle
“Loneliness – it takes us away from people. There is no going on with our lives. ”
louisewleonard@gmail.com
New York, Paris, outback Australia; Manhattan, Mississippi, New Zealand, Germany. The treasure goes on gleaming in the dark (Maeterlinck).
My work begins with an exploration of interpersonal relationships and the family. From this, I expand to greater systems in society. Violence, inequality, scapegoating, war — and our concurrent quest for survival and grace — these are my foci in novels, essays and poems
ABOUT ME
1.
Loneliness – it takes us away from people. There’s no going on with our lives. We take the ax to them; we call the inspector to nail in the red X of the condemned. We become drifters, loiterers – filling up the world’s empty spaces, setting down phones in guest rooms, shared houses, cabins in the hinterlands. Plus: churches – we are in back pews, or discomfited in the ashram, lurking in the monastery.
2.
I would like to bring up to you now how I turned from the pursuit of wealth -- its feasts and hunting games, its furs and gleam, its white and imperious cover up with its cool silencing marble.
It was the silence my school friends lived inside – in high ceilinged rooms with unthinkable white carpets, on evenings with absent parents who had work and socializing to do, boards to sit on and maids napping on tiny beds in corners of their spacious apartments. I used to see the maids, who were often Hispanic, and never said a word.
And later, while the classmates of my youth took their positions in real estate and banking and philanthropy, in law and hedge funds, others fell away as leaves from the great trees.
3.
The easy life – it came to seem more and more bland and deadly to me. No matter where I traveled for my work, the destinations had a stultifying sameness – the rich designers, boat builders and owners I wrote about, traveled in a circuit of entirely their own kind; they ate a certain kind of international food; their white and capacious resorts were isolated and protected; conversations revolved around no topics requiring strong opinions. Even the fashions of the super-rich, seemed of a kind: the fine heavy fabrics, the tailored cuts -- but they also betrayed the rich person’s fear of appearing off the mark or ridiculous.
—
I think it better now to think of you as absence —
that pale disc of sun on a white clouded day —
and only later remember what you were to me —
bright, shining home of all my happiness
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See below
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Louise was born in New Zealand and grew up in New York City, working summers from age 15 to 21 as a news reporter. She graduated from the UN International School and the first co-ed class of Columbia College, graduating in three years while working at TIME Magazine. She is fluent in French and a lifelong enthusiast of German. Much of her life and work is devoted to the search for the treasure that gleams in the dark – treasure that is often just out of reach (Maeterlinck).
Louise left TIME and brief positions at Christie's,The Associated Press, and the New York Stock Exchange at age 22 to explore the south by car. She lived in Oxford, Mississippi for a year, clerking in the emergency room and at Square Books. She spent a summer in a Connecticut hospital and took a job at a local magazine, soon becoming a travel writer based in the U.S, with journeys in the Caribbean, Europe and the Aegean. At 28, she left the magazine to focus on her own writing.
Her novels, poems and essays address a woman's struggles to be free in a priapic often narcissistic society. She embodies, says Amanda Fortini in an essay in the LARB, a "woman alone, itinerant, deracinated, distant from family, and making it up as she goes." Her characters are often marginalized, struggling for stability, love and a sense of home.
She has won awards including a substantial Creative New Zealand grant and the U.S. James Jones First Novel Award. She also worked at Union Theological Seminary and the Vermont Studio Center, co founded an Aboriginal art gallery in outback Australia and was in 2021 and 2022 an Adjunct Professor of Literature for the University of Texas Permian Basin.
Louise has long taught writing and English, and served as a volunteer supporting refugees in New Zealand and New York through the International Rescue Committee.
Since 2023, she has lived in Hawaii with her husband Matthew Leonard and been a writer for a global support group for adults abused as children.
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52 Men, a novel in crots (Red Hen Press)
Featured in Tin House, The Rumpus, Fiction Advocate, the Creative Process and Gargoyle
With cameos by Lou Reed, Jay Carney, J Franzen, Michael Stipe, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper and Charlie Love of the Tangents
“Ingenious and a tad revolutionary.
Though in style and tone 52 Men differs from Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleeepless Nights or Renata Adler’s Speedboat, it is, like both of these books, a novel of impressions unified by the author’s sensibility.
Memory has a way of reducing people to their essence, like a piece of sea glass honed to a bright, beautiful nub. For Leonard, the statement is something like a literary ethos." LARB
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Since You Ask, a Novel (Akashic Books, New York)
Winner of the James Jones Award for a Best First Novel.
“It saved my life.”
“Since You Ask is an "intense and insightful work about a childhod sexual abuse Survivor that portrays a complicated character and her multifaceted mind with deep empathy.”
Also published in Moscow by Stolista Press
Optioned for film
Book of the Year, The Listener
Miss Me A Lot Of, a novel, Victoria University Press
World Famous In New Zealand
Finalist for the Prize in Modern Letters
Optioned for film
Excerpted in Best New Zealand Fiction 1 (Random House), The Listener
“Louise has perfect pitch for when you are young and in love and it is hopeless. She does it all perfectly.” Laura Kroetsch, TVOne
Blood Is Blood, Poems
“Textured, wiry, tough and original, Leonard breaks all the rules.”
— Nicholas Christopher, Poetry Society of America
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Fiery World
Featured on The Creative Process.
A young girl in grief meets Acheron, the River of Woe from Hades. A fairytale set in the Durand Eastman Arboretum on Lake Ontario.. With the language of flowers, stories of girls turned into trees and reasons to believe.