About

Marie Laure’s education began in a one-room school house north of Boston. When she was in the second grade, the school was demolished to make room for construction of Interstate 495. Her French-Canadian parents then moved Marie Laure to a school in Lowell founded by the Sisters of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It served bilingual Franco-American families who had emigrated to work in the mill town where her mother had worked years earlier as a “mill girl.”

After receiving a Merit’s Who’s Who Among American High School Students scholarship, Marie attended a community college. After raising a son and daughter, Marie Laure entered Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. There, she was awarded a Boston Theological Institute Certificate in Conflict Transformation and Religion plus a Master’s Degree in Theological Studies (2008). Her Master’s thesis, “Pilgrimage: Crossroads of Place, Time, and Space,” signaled the sort of teaching and writing Marie Laure would do after earning a second, advanced Master’s degree in Sacred Theology from the Boston University School of Theology two years later. At BU, her second Master’s thesis was titled “Giving Voice to Spirituality through Narrative.”

Marie Laure’s book, Chances Are... is a spiritual autobiography of her own, published by Balboa Press in 2016. For the past decade, Marie has taught classes in spiritual autobiography through lifelong-learning programs at the University of North Florida and at Flagler College. She has also organized and led writing retreats at Epworth by the Sea in Georgia and at St. Joseph’s Renewal Center in St. Augustine, Florida, where she and her husband live.

 

In the summer of 2019, Marie made a pilgrimage to East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, to the location of Julian of Norwich’s tiny anchorage. For some time, Marie had been doing intense research on Julian, who had a series of near-death visions during a 14th-century plague called the “Black Death.” Julian wrote about these visions while living out her life in self-imposed exile in her anchorage. Hence the title of Marie Laure’s new book, Return from Exile Revelations from an Anchoress in St. Augustine.

 

The author’s pilgrimage to England included stops at the British Library to see Julian manuscripts held in their archives and to the Norwich Cathedral Library for more research. Within a year of Marie Laure’s solo pilgrimage, while still writing Revelations in Exile from an Anchoress in St. Augustine, the coronavirus pandemic began to ravage the world, mimicking the plague Julian had suffered through in the Middle Ages. Both women’s stories and revelations, written more than six-hundred years apart, speak of loss upon loss, of the importance of love, and of living life fully in faith, in spite of it all.

Her first book, published in 2013, is titled Tuscan Retreat. It is a book of poems, half written by Marie and half by her husband, Lance Carden, while they lived for some months in Italy.