Photo by Sal Taylor Kidd

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less
but to dream more, to dream all the time.
—Marcel Proust

Louise Turan’s fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in nearly two dozen print and online journals in the U.S. and Canada including Superstition Review, Forge, Diverse Voices Quarterly, the dap project, and Existere. Her short story, “Foreign Lands,” was listed in the top five percent of submissions to the Whitefish Review’s 2018 Montana Award for Fiction, judged by Rick Bass. In 2014, the year she began writing full-time, her short story “Obsessions” won the 2014 Southeast Review Spring Writing Regimen Contest.

Works in progress include a children’s story set in 17th century Kashmir and a memoir about her family entitled, “The Great Before, And the Not So Great After.” Both are inspired by travels to foreign lands, both real and imagined, based on her childhood growing up overseas. Moving from one country to another, she found her true home in reading. As a child she loved fairy tales, E.B White, Daphne Du Maurier, the Bronte sisters, Rumor Godden, and later, Marcel Proust, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald, Brock Clarke, and so many others who led her to the writing life.

Louise holds a degree in French and Philosophy from Chatham University. She credits much of her success to Alison Hicks, noted poet and author, of the Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, whose writing workshops based on the Amherst Writers & Artists method pioneered by Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others (Oxford University Press). Louise regularly attends writing workshops and programs. She is a member of the Maine Publishers and Writers Alliance.

When she is not writing, Louise spends time in her garden in Maine. She has planted more than five hundred species of plants: shrubs, trees, perennials (native and non-native), roses, flowering bulbs, and exotics. She compares her garden to a book, each season a different chapter, filled with joyful, and sometimes not so joyful endings. She believes in immersing yourself in nature’s glory, and celebrating, as Virginia Wolf said, “the chocolate earth beneath the nail.”

And when she is not writing, or in her garden, Louise can be found in her kitchen: making pasta and Italian dishes from her childhood in Italy; following hand-written recipes for Turkish food, left to her by her father, Ekrem Turan, who was born in Isparta, Turkey; and always being inspired by the memory of her mother, Sarah Louise, a great cook and teacher.

From the 1980s on, Louise was a prominent non-profit executive in Philadelphia and president of her own consulting practice. Through her work at the Schuylkill River Development Corporation, she played a major role in the revitalization of Philadelphia’s urban riverfront. She retired as Executive Director of Bartram’s Garden, the oldest botanic garden in America, in 2012. It will always be her favorite place on earth.

Born in Ankara, Turkey, Louise lives and writes in Philadelphia and Owls Head, Maine. Visit Louise on Instagram: @louiseturan.