About the Author

Hello stranger! My name is Lyra Meurer, and this is my blog, where I intend to record my travails at writing. I am bi/pansexual and am agender, using they/them pronouns. I live with fibromyalgia, as well as ADHD and C-PTSD, conditions which deeply inform my writing.

I have been writing since childhood, first concocting stories of zoo animals who save the world from a giant snowstorm and a dragon leading a rebellion against an evil queen. I’ve grown a lot since then, but I still hold true to what I was trying to do all along, namely to depict emotional landscapes strikingly and genuinely.

I grew up in Cockeysville, Maryland, surrounded by trash and greenery, and exposed to all the literary and musical obscurities my mother brought home from her job at the library. I spent my teenage years writing obsessively, producing three and a half books on college-ruled notebook paper that were, naturally, quite terrible but also fascinatingly weird. When I was 16, my family moved to Perth, Australia, where I lived for two years before I set off on my own to college.

I graduated from St. John’s College, Annapolis, in 2016, with a Bachelor of Liberal Arts. St. Johns’ Great Books Program allowed me to immerse myself in Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ histories, struggle with Aristotle and Hegel, and fall in love with George Eliot and Jonathan Swift. I have since moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where I live with my husband and pet rats. Other than writing, I enjoy drawing, attempting to garden, listening to podcasts while doing the dishes, reading through my infinitely expanding reading list, and analyzing films, literature, and television shows. I hope to include some of this analysis on this blog.

I believe that fantasy, and speculative fiction in general, has a uniquely powerful potential for metaphor; when the limits of reality no longer apply, psychological and societal subject matter can be portrayed with new and imaginative poignancy. This is what has drawn me to fantasy from the start. However, I also firmly believe in doing research -- as much as fantasy dwells in other worlds, it is one of the primary ways in which people currently interact with historical content. I believe there is no place for normativity of any sort in fiction, especially in speculative fiction. A created world should be as diverse and wondrous as the one we live in. In short, I strive to perfect the balance between the fantastical and realistic, to show people as they are, within and without, in all their emotional and experiential color.