Coming May 2026 from Sybilline Press
Welcome!
The second most exciting thing in life for me has always been learning something new. The first? Getting to share what I’ve learned with others. My life has given me so many opportunities to do both—as a professor (retired), as a historical novelist, and as a cruise lecturer.
My goal as a historical novelist is to provide you, the reader, with high-quality fiction about women and the forgotten and undervalued roles they played in their societies. Whether it’s the real-life physicist Emilie du Chatelet, the literary heroine Penelope, or women who have sprung entirely from my imagination, I offer you stories true to the facts of a time and place, to bring history alive for you and make you feel as much a part of other cultures as you do your own.
As a world-wide lecturer for several cruise lines, I use my career as a college professor of humanities to find the stories that make travel more exciting and memorable.
If you have either met me recently or been in my life since I was a teenager (or younger), you may know me by my birth name, Laurel Weeks. I have been using this name in my private life for several years.
Please check back from time to time for updates on my new projects and schedule, and drop me a line at lacauthor@gmail.com to let me know you’re out there reading and traveling!
From my diary
- Water Magic‘If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” This is the first line of the essay “The Flow of the River, which opens Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. First published in 1959, the book is replete with anachronisms, such as using the word “man” to stand for humanity, and talking about how someday “man” will go into space, but it is to me one of the most exquisite collection of essays ever written. This line came to me today as I traveled along the western side of the Canadian Rockies. It started with two of my favourite geological features,…
- Kindness‘I have the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein,’ My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins claims in “I’m an Ordinary Man.” And what does ordinary mean to him? It’s someone “Who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance/ To live exactly as he likes and do precisely what he wants.” Of course the song highlights the stodgy professor’s cluelessness about what would actually make him happy. It takes a shabby flower seller in Covent Garden, with none of the qualities Higgins thinks he values, to show him how wrong he has been. I’ve been thinking about kindness a lot…
- Bus Number 8Yesterday I went on a tour out of the Chilean port of Puerto Montt to go to several villages on Lake Llanquihue, the second largest lake in the country. Its backdrop is Osorno, one of those perfect cone volcanos that make Chile so unique in our beautiful world. I’ll spare you all the little signs that this was not a day that would go exactly as planned, but suffice it to say that my travel companion Megan and I were laughing most of the way through the first stop in Frutillar about how just buying a take-out empanada became a project…