Although it's not super fair because even though I've read a few of her amazing stories, only one is out for the general public right now. And oddly enough, I read one of her unpublished works before reading her published book, "The Unlikely Gift of Treasure Blume". (You can get it here)
But it doesn't even matter that, at the moment (but not for much longer because her next work of art will be gracing book shelves soon) there's only one book for you to read. Because that book is worth reading.
So I don't know how author spotlights normally go, but this one is basically going to be me telling you the main reason you need to be reading anything Lisa Harris has the time to write (because time is surely not easy to come by with four little girls, a husband, a giant dog, an even gianter cat, AND teaching ACT prep classes).
Lisa Harris doesn't write books. She writes art. And it's taken me several years to figure out exactly why I loved her writing so much. And it literally just hit me about five minutes ago, hence the blog post.
Lisa has this amazing gift. Her books all have this sense of magic about them and her characters are experiencing sort of semi-paranormal phenomena, but that's not what makes them magical. The real gift she has, is that she can magnify the profound beauty of the commonplace. Her scenes with actual magic are great, and fun to read, and written beautifully, but the scenes in her books that always mean the most to me are the ones where nothing all that amazing happens. And it'll usually happen in one line. And it'll be completely out of the blue. But I read her stories, and suddenly I feel like I've been a part of this profound, incredible moment that I didn't even know was coming. Because, again, it's always in a random sentence about a totally normal thing where she suddenly lays the deep meaning on you.
She does it so well that I can't even really fully describe HOW she does it!
So yes, this blog post may be random, and yes this might be the most non-spotlight-y spotlight ever done. But I don't really care. Because seriously, you need to read anything Lisa writes.
And you REALLY need to keep an eye out for the next book she has coming out, because it's the first one of hers I ever read, and all I could ever contribute in our critique group was, "Everything you write is a gorgeous piece of art that makes me feel like I'm unworthy to be in its presence."
Maybe I should have titled this post, "A love letter to Lisa and her amazing artful writing".
So there you go.
Until Next Time,
Shannen
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