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Welcome

It was the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries when, in a small town in the Venetian province, a girl was born.
“She started dancing before she walked,” her mother would say. Music made her soul vibrate—she couldn’t stay still.
Then life happened. And stillness arrived.She sat down and started writing—
“For a million different reasons, and for a million different seasons.”A few decades later, she’s still writing.
As Nietzsche once whispered: “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
So she did.And here are the stories born from that chaos.

• ...and Action!

SCRIPTS

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Most recent:
BLOCKED
After her boyfriend dumps her and blocks her everywhere, an impulsive LA marketing manager buys a billboard he can’t block—with her face on it. When the stunt goes viral and becomes a business for strangers’ unsent messages, she must navigate sudden success, public backlash, and her own need for closure.DOMINO
After a series of maddening setbacks saves her from a devastating office fire, a control-obsessed designer becomes convinced life is steering her away from disaster — until her attempts to decode the pattern begin costing her the very life she is trying to protect.NO SAINTS IN LOS ANGELES
When a blocked Los Angeles novelist discovers that language from her unpublished work appears in the comeback novel of her legendary mentor, she is pulled into a public battle over authorship and consent - led by the literary critic who happens to be her ex and is preparing to expose a far more private chapter of her life.NEPENTHE (Based on a true story)
How much pain can love survive before it becomes endurance?
Set between Northern and Southern Italy, this is a haunting portrait of a woman’s long journey from silence to liberation. Inspired by true events, it’s a story of resilience, identity, and the courage to finally walk away.ANGELS & NIGHTMARES: The Shared Sin
A young woman discovers that the holes in her childhood memory are evidence of an experimental system capable of manipulating trauma, identity and eventually human emotion — pulling her and the people she loves into the hidden network behind it.PURVEYOR OF RENOWN (Influencer)
What if the first influencer lived during the Renaissance?
Genevieve reinvents fame before fame existed—creating the first viral trends by letter and pigeon. A witty, feminist satire bridging history, obsession, and legacy.ONE NIGHT
One night. One city. One man.
A provocative and deeply personal story about connection, self-destruction, and rebirth.
Think Fleabag meets Before Sunrise, but darker.
(Contains mature themes handled with sensitivity.)CHRISTMAS: UNSCRIPTED
After a disastrous Christmas dinner leaves a fiercely independent creative director blamed for her childhood best friend’s failed marriage, she escapes the following holiday to a Christmas-obsessed Wisconsin town determined to celebrate alone — only to discover that choosing connection on her own terms may be exactly the tradition she was looking for.ALL THAT IS
A writer preparing to abandon the life she's built discovers a tiny impossible point beneath an old chair through which every imagined possibility exists. At first she uses it to enter the kinds of stories that shaped her; eventually she discovers worlds created by her own mind — including a man she once wrote and could impossibly love. As infinite lives begin replacing her finite one, she must decide whether possibility means anything if she never chooses which life to live.ANDREA
ANDREA is inspired by the true story of Andrea Spinelli, an Italian photojournalist who lived for ten years with inoperable pancreatic cancer after initially being given only weeks to live. During that time, he walked thousands of kilometers, wrote about his experience, and became the subject of medical research. This short serves as a proof of concept for a larger feature about his life, focusing on resilience, friendship, and what it means to keep moving forward when time becomes uncertain.

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BLOCKED

After a painful breakup leaves Nina Bell blocked on every platform, the sharp, impulsive LA marketing manager finds one place her ex can’t make her disappear: a forty-foot billboard. What begins as a spectacularly petty attempt to be seen goes viral overnight, and strangers soon start asking Nina to broadcast the messages they never got to send. With her best friend Tess, she turns the phenomenon into BLOCKED, a rapidly growing business built around unfinished conversations, heartbreak, grief, and everything people wish they could say.But as BLOCKED grows from an accidental viral moment into a national platform, Nina discovers that giving people a voice comes with consequences. When one campaign crosses the line between expression and harassment, she’s forced to confront the ethics of the company she created—and the deeper reason she created it in the first place. To save BLOCKED and finally move forward, Nina must learn that being heard doesn’t require forcing someone else to listen, and that sometimes closure is the last message you give yourself.

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DOMINO

Emma Rinaldi is a meticulous designer who believes every outcome can be improved with enough preparation. But when a string of infuriating delays causes her to miss a dream job interview just before the office erupts in flames, Emma becomes convinced the setbacks saved her life.She begins tracking every inconvenience and what happens afterward, slowly turning coincidence into a system for making decisions. At first, the pattern seems to work. Then Emma starts surrendering opportunities, damaging her career, and abandoning the people she loves whenever life appears to place an obstacle in her path.Her obsession ultimately forces her to confront the event that made uncertainty unbearable in the first place: the death of her mother, and Emma's lifelong belief that one different choice could have saved her.To move forward, Emma must accept the one answer she has spent years trying to avoid: she will never know what would have happened.

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NO SAINTS IN LOS ANGELES

Emily March is a talented, blocked novelist living in Los Angeles under the long shadow of Vivian Vale, the brilliant, infamous author who mentored her into the literary world. When Emily discovers that language from her unpublished work appears in Vivian’s celebrated comeback novel, the accusation detonates online - helped along by Jake Oliver, Emily’s ex and a prominent literary critic building a book about power, influence and creative theft. Emily refuses to become either Vivian’s victim or Jake’s evidence.Instead, she publishes her own account and unexpectedly becomes the center of the story she was trying to escape. But Jake’s book reaches beyond Vivian: buried in his files is a private chapter from Emily’s past that she has never consented to make public. As careers, relationships and reputations collide, Emily must decide what it means to tell the truth without surrendering ownership of her own life.

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NEPENTHE
^{Based on a true story}

In late-twentieth-century Italy, a fiercely independent young activist falls in love with a Southern airman and slowly finds herself trapped in a violent marriage that survives escape, reconciliation and decades of institutional failure — until her adult daughter's desperation forces her to confront the difference between surviving a family and saving one.Maria doesn't simply have to “leave an abusive husband.” She has to understand how the woman who could identify injustice everywhere else learned not to identify it in her own home.

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^{ANGELS & NIGHTMARES}
The Shared Sin

Angels & Nightmares begins as an intimate mystery about a young woman who cannot remember her childhood and expands into a psychological conspiracy thriller about the ownership of memory itself.Sharon Wakefield has always known facts about her childhood without truly remembering the experiences behind them. When the arrival of a young man named Gabriel begins triggering violent physical reactions, nightmares and fragmented images, she starts questioning the version of her past given to her by her family.With the help of her half-brother Jason, Sharon eventually uncovers the truth: as a child, she endured severe trauma and was enrolled in an experimental program developed by Dr. Gretchen Swan. The treatment was intended to protect traumatized children by severing the connection between painful memories and the emotions attached to them.Instead, it fractured Sharon’s autobiographical memory.The very people who believed they were protecting her — including her mother — participated in taking away her ability to know her own past.Gabriel’s name becomes the accidental key that begins breaking through the conditioning.As Sharon fights to recover what was taken from her, the mystery widens beyond one girl, one doctor and one family.The experimental work did not end with Sharon.Other patients exist.Records have disappeared.Private interests are involved.And the technology used to suppress traumatic memory evolves into something far more dangerous: the ability to manipulate ordinary memory, identity and eventually emotional response itself.Across the series, Sharon’s search for her own history becomes a larger fight over who has the right to alter a human mind — even when the stated goal is to protect it.At the center remains the question that began with Sharon:If someone takes away the memories that hurt you, how much of you disappears with them?

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Purveyor of Renown
Influencer

Who's the first influencer? Are we sure it wasn't a Purveyor of Renown actually?
When Genevieve has a vision of the future, she sees influencers and their world. Determined to recreate it although without technology, she pioneers live beauty tutorials, selfies, and viral trends spread by letters, pigeons, and horseback. Is she the real first influencer?
Lorenzo, a brooding philosopher, finds her ridiculous—until he falls for her against his will. But history isn’t kind to women like Genevieve. After the Council of Trent, she’s erased from history.
Centuries later, Chiara Ferragni finds her lost journal and keeps it to herself. Influencer culture begins; but was it Genevieve’s all along?

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One Night

"One night, one city, one man. Then what?"One Night is a provocative and deeply personal drama that follows a woman as she navigates a series of encounters across different cities, each man revealing another layer of her psyche. It’s not about romance—it’s about the messy, beautiful, often painful ways we seek connection. This is a story of sex, self-destruction, and self-discovery wrapped in the electric pulse of different metropolises.Think Fleabag meets Before Sunrise, but with a darker, more intimate dive into the unspoken thoughts that define modern love and identity.^{This project includes mature themes, including sexual assault. The subject is handled with sensitivity but discretion is advised.}

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Christmas: Unscripted

Tired of happy endings in Hallmark movies? We gotchu.After a spectacularly disastrous Christmas dinner ends with her childhood best friend blaming her for failing to stop his now-defunct marriage, fiercely independent creative director Elayne Parker decides she’s done letting other people dictate what her holidays—or her life—should look like. The following Christmas, she escapes alone to Everpine, Wisconsin, a picture-perfect town seemingly engineered by the holiday-movie industry.Her plans for solitude quickly collapse under communal dinners, snowball wars, mysterious town traditions, and Jack Mercer, a charming bookstore owner with his own complicated relationship to home and expectation. Just as Elayne begins enjoying the Christmas she swore she didn’t want, her remorseful childhood friend arrives in Everpine to apologize, sending the town’s romantic imagination into overdrive.Caught between family expectations, an unexpected connection with Jack, and her own tendency to decide what other people’s choices mean, Elayne discovers that happiness isn’t about choosing solitude or romance—it’s about having the freedom to write the ending herself.

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All that is

On the eve of leaving Los Angeles after years of chasing a writing career, novelist Lauren discovers an impossible Point beneath an old chair that allows her to enter imagined worlds. When she steps into the setting of her own unfinished novel, she meets Julian, a character who has continued living beyond the pages she wrote.As Lauren becomes increasingly drawn to Julian and to alternate versions of the life she might have had, the boundaries between realities begin to collapse. Forced to confront her obsession with finding proof that she chose the “right” life, she must decide whether to disappear into infinite possibility or return to the uncertain, unfinished life that is actually hers.

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ANDREA

ANDREA is a short biographical drama and proof of concept inspired by the life of Andrea Spinelli, who was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer and given only weeks to live. Rather than allowing the prognosis to define the time he had left, Andrea began walking — using movement as resistance, purpose, and a way to keep choosing life. What was expected to be a matter of weeks became ten years.Designed as a proof of concept for a larger feature, ANDREA captures the emotional core of his journey: the refusal to surrender identity to illness, the quiet discipline of continuing forward, and the extraordinary life that can exist inside a supposedly finite amount of time. The short introduces the tone, character, and central philosophy of a broader story about mortality, resilience, friendship, and what it means to truly live when time is no longer something you can take for granted.

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Want to get in contact?

Every great story starts with a spark—an idea, a question, a what-if.
If something in my work spoke to you, let’s connect.
Whether you’re here to collaborate, produce, or simply exchange ideas, the page is open.Let’s create something worth remembering.
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About me

I’m a storyteller who's exploring the intersection of psychology, emotion, and human transformation. My work often blurs the line between the real and the surreal — grounded in truth, elevated by imagination.Growing up and moving frequently all around the world, taught me how deeply environment shapes identity. My stories explore what happens when inner truth collides with external expectation — whether through trauma, resilience, or reinvention.I’m based in Los Angeles, developing projects that bridge emotion, psychology, and spirituality and I'm open to collaboration, representation, and meaningful creative partnerships.The stories I write are simply reflections of the question I live by: what happens when the soul remembers what the mind forgot?

EXTENDED TREATMENTS    PODCAST     BOOKS

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My Books

I’ve written several books in English and Italian, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, and philosophy. Each one explores transformation, consciousness, and what it means to be human. Writing is how I make sense of chaos—how I turn emotion into something that speaks back. Every story I create carries a piece of that journey.
My books are available worldwide through Amazon.

Fiction

Psychology, Sociology,
Travel Memoir and Memoir

Self-help | Bilingual |
Reflection

Where words meet design
and
technology learns empathy

I turn complexity into clarity through storytelling and content design,
building brand voice and social content that connects with empathy and intent.

Here are a few use cases from my recent work. Just start scrolling...

THE LATEST
Reimagining a technical blog for X.
The brief:
take "SWE-Bench Failures: When Coding Agents Spiral Into 693 Lines of Hallucinations" and turn it into X content that resonates, thread, standalone posts, or a mix, my call.
So I built a campaign: a narrative thread, meme posts, and trend-jacked moments, each with the strategy behind it.
Take a look.

Redefining the voice of Verizon’s AI Assistant through updated conversational standards.

Challenge:
The existing conversational guidelines were fragmented across teams and written for legacy, scripted chatbots, not for adaptive, generative systems. As Verizon evolved its AI capabilities, the Assistant’s tone, structure, and empathy rules needed to reflect a more natural, human-like communication style while staying on brand and compliant.Approach:
As the Lead Content Strategist and POC assigned to the Design Team for the Verizon Assistant, I led a full audit and rewrite of the Verizon Assistant Conversational Guidelines.
I consolidated linguistic principles, tone frameworks, and error-handling standards into a cohesive, scalable system. The new guidelines introduced
1. Tone layers that adapt to user emotion, intent, and context;
2. Protocols for sensitive moments (billing issues, etc);
3. Response architecture models that balance brevity, clarity, and warmth.I collaborated with design, legal, and NLP engineering to validate examples through real conversation data and A/B testing, ensuring the framework aligned with both brand and ethical AI principles.Impact:
• Created the unified standard for all conversational products under the Verizon AI ecosystem.
• Improved response consistency and user trust metrics across 3+ business units.
• Established the foundation for tone training within the GenAI Playbook.

Redesigning how millions interact with Verizon Assistant through generative AI.

Challenge:
Traditional chatbots rely on rigid scripts and can't adapt to users’ tone or intent.Approach:
As the Lead Content Strategist and POC assigned to the Design Team for the Verizon Assistant, I led the design of a scalable conversational framework.
I built the VZA GenAI Prompt System: a modular prompt and tone library enabling adaptive, brand-aligned responses.
Partnering with data science and engineering, we trained the LLM on real user sentiment to fine-tune empathy, context handling, and personalization.Impact:
• We designed the CSAT that measured the work, and the pilot came back at +23% user satisfaction.
• Became Verizon’s internal master Playbook for Gen AI.
• Set new standards for ethical, human-centered AI at scale.

Designing voice, naming, and tone for new features like After Dark and Bitmoji Drops, while redefining Snapchat’s content standards.

Challenge:
Snapchat's late-night engagement feature, After Dark, and its Bitmoji Drops product needed a cohesive tone that balanced fun, spontaneity, and brand authenticity. At the same time, internal writing guidelines were overly technical, filled with platform jargon that didn't reflect the approachable voice users loved.Approach:
As the Lead Content Designer, I partnered cross-functionally
with Product, Design, Legal, and Localization teams to name After Dark and establish its core voice identity. I crafted playful in-app prompts and notifications designed to drive organic participation while maintaining transparency and brand alignment.
In parallel, we audited the existing guidelines — overly technical, jargon-heavy, off-voice — regrouped, and rebuilt them around a principle-based system that mirrored our user-facing tone.
The new framework emphasized:
1. Plain-language clarity;
2. Consistent tone
modules for different contexts;
3. Brand personality scalable across new features.
As the content design team, we set the voice that other teams, including social and marketing, leaned on when carrying features like After Dark to a wider audience.Impact:
- After Dark name and tone successfully adopted across launch campaign and in-app surfaces.
- The voice and naming system became the reference social and marketing teams used to carry After Dark's tone into campaign and community channels.
- New internal content system became the standard for future feature launches.

intermezzo

Enjoy a pre-scripted conversation with Laura's Digital Assistant:

Designing voice and UX copy for Alexa’s new features and building scalable messaging guidelines for the Personality team.

Challenge:
The Alexa design team had never worked with a dedicated UX writer before. Copy across multiple flows lacked clarity, consistency, and a unified tone. There was also no centralized repository for messaging guidance, making it hard for designers to maintain Alexa’s voice across experiences.Approach:
As the Senior UX Writer on the Alexa Personality team, I partnered with PMs and UX designers to refine most flows for the Alexa App, improving clarity, pacing, and visual hierarchy. I made sure utterance consistency existed across screens to align with established VUI patterns and I created UX writing guidelines and messaging scenarios for future writers and designers, mapping screen levels and personality features to standardized tone and structure.I also participated in the Alexa Hackathon 2022, proposing Alexa Talk2Me: a "toggleable" conversational mode designed to support users through grounding and talk therapy techniques. I wrote the full VUI script and led a small team of designers through concept development.Impact:
• Refined and standardized UX copy across multiple Alexa features ready for launch.
• Delivered the first UX writing guideline framework for the Personality team, still used as a reference for new writers.
• Alexa Talk2Me entered concept development with VUI designers.

Rebuilding the TikTok for Business Help Center and chatbot content strategy to make self-service support simple, human, and scalable for advertisers worldwide.

Challenge:
The existing Help Center was fragmented, redundant, and difficult to navigate; articles overlapped across regions and lacked consistent tone or UX hierarchy.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s customer-support chatbot relied on hardcoded responses that didn’t reflect advertiser intent, resulting in user drop-offs and low CSAT scores.Approach:
As the Senior UX Writer and Lead Content Strategist, on the Product and Monetization team, I led a dual-track effort:Help Center Overhaul: Audited and repurposed hundreds of articles into a single structured knowledge system, simplifying the IA and rewriting content for global consistency in TikTok’s fast, visual style: concise 60-second guidance videos and simplified articles.Chatbot UX Writing & Strategy: 1. Partnered with engineers, PMs, and data analysts to map user intents and create a structured response library. 2. Wrote and categorized conversational answers based on real advertiser queries, guiding users through topics like account setup, billing, and campaign management. 3. Introduced tone calibration layers and handoff triggers for escalation to live agents. 4. Built a taxonomy that connected intents to Help Center articles, enabling seamless transitions between chat and content.Impact:
• Streamlined and unified the Help Center content ecosystem across markets.
• Reduced content duplication and support friction for advertisers.
• Established the foundation for TikTok’s conversational support framework, now integrated into the Business site’s global chatbot experience.

To learn more about me check out my bio section, to review some other forms of strategic writing (newsletters, social media posts, etc) check out this LinkedIn Page and for anything else feel free to ask me or check out my main LinkedIn or Behance Profile.

I'm Laura and I build stories that think and make you think.
Sometimes they become interfaces, sometimes they become systems. Sometimes they show up on a screen. Sometimes they show up in a sentence, in a book, or in a newsletter...I’ve written for digital assistants, helping machines talk so they can sound more human (Alexa and Verizon), I've helped brands feel young writing for their end users (TikTok, Snapchat), and I've supported companies grow and expand globally (eSalon, Vizion Solar, and others) writing their whole database of content.
My work lives somewhere between creativity, design and psychology — where words shape behavior and tone becomes trust.I make words work harder, and smarter, because behind every button, every chat bubble, every single line of copy, there’s a person who needs to make sense of what we build... for them.

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Lyrics

I write what doesn’t get sent. The message typed, deleted, typed again. I write the quiet between two people who almost said it... I write it all.ASCAP-registered lyricist
for artists, film, and television.I care about the fracture in a voice, the memory that lingers too long, the moment before someone leaves. Every line has to feel lived in. Every word has to mean it.

Recent Collaborations

PostMan - Lyricist and Co-writer

WRITING FOR

Selected Lyrics

Peripheral – Intimate / Alt-Rock
Peripheral.
Like a missed goodnight, or two, or three.
A “look at the moon” message left unsent.
Like frozen moments in time, shared with the world, not between us.
A silent scream, like gasping for air in the wind.
Like the subtle difference between “enjoy seeing” and “miss seeing” …you. Me.
Peripheral.
Like just pretending. Reminding myself, once again, nobody will ever know what a smile, mine, can hide.Rain – Mournful / Cinematic
Cracked ground learned patience under a sky that forgot how to answer,
days stretched thin, without a scent
To bring me home, to feel like home.
Then Rain.
Softly invigorating.
Not loud. Not urgent. Not a storm.
A melody through the air;
Patiently waiting…
then just flowing.
Thirst dissolved its armor,
roots leaned in, no questions asked,
Old wounds dying to be watered.
Again.
Not a rescue: no one’s saved,
Yet. No promise in the distance.
Just new sounds for those ears deafened by the drought of the past years.
A deep breath, the music of fresh... rain.

Available for co-writing, lyrics-only collaborations, and commissioned work.
Based in LA, open to remote projects.

Interested in collaborating?
Get in touch.

• Check out more poems and lyrics style text on Instagram

Nightnight at laura's the podcast

Podcast · Narrative Storytelling · Interviews · Behavioral ScienceCreator · Writer · Host · Interviewer · Creative DirectionNightnight at Laura’s is a podcast about everything and nothing — and the everything hiding inside the nothing.The show began with a simple instinct I’ve had for most of my life: I notice things. The way someone reacts to an accent. The language we count or dream in. A sentence that lands differently than it was intended. A song that appears in your head at exactly the right moment. A stranger who says something small and unknowingly opens a much larger door.Then I pull the thread.An ordinary experience can lead into psychology, language, identity, neuroscience, grief, relationships, music, spirituality, belonging, or the strange ways human beings try to understand themselves and one another.That is the backbone of Nightnight at Laura’s.THE CONCEPTEpisodes usually begin somewhere personal and specific: something that happened to me, something I noticed, a question I couldn’t stop thinking about, or a conversation worth having.From there, the story expands.Sometimes I follow it through behavioral science or research. Sometimes the episode stays entirely inside lived experience. Sometimes I invite another person into the room and let their story change the direction of mine.The goal is never to lecture. I want the listener to feel as though we are sitting together late at night, talking about one thing until we suddenly realize we have been talking about something much bigger all along.The result is part personal essay, part storytelling podcast, part curiosity experiment and, occasionally, part very unqualified philosophical crisis.Which feels accurate.THE FORMATNightnight moves between solo narrative episodes and intimate conversations with guests.The storytelling often follows a natural emotional arc: a real moment, the meaning I initially attach to it, the questions it creates, whatever I discover when I look deeper, and the place where that very personal story becomes recognizable to someone else.Research appears when the story calls for it. So do psychology, linguistics, culture, memories, profanity, Italian expressions, strange coincidences and the occasional existential detour.The voice stays intentionally conversational. I am interested in what happens when ideas normally discussed in clinical, academic or abstract language are brought back into ordinary human life.SELECTED STORIESThe Perfect Match
After learning that I was a rare bone-marrow match for a stranger with leukemia, I immediately agreed to donate — only to discover that my own medical history prevented me from doing it. A story about helplessness, reframing, the instinct to help and what happens when showing up is no longer entirely within our control.There’s Coach and Coach
A conversation with my brother Francesco, a volleyball coach working within Italy’s national-team pathway, about talent, failure, resilience and the enormous influence one adult can have on the way a young person learns to see themselves.Eleven
Eleven episodes into a podcast built around observing everybody and everything else, I finally introduced myself. Writing, languages, careers, wrong turns, dreams that change shape, and a lifetime spent noticing things and passing them on.Ode to Music
An exploration of sound, memory and the role music has played throughout my life — from academic work and language to grief, identity, survival and the songs that somehow find us before we know why we need them.WHY I MADE ITI have spent much of my career moving between disciplines: writing, psychology, language, technology, storytelling, holistic work and creative projects that rarely stay inside one neat category.Nightnight at Laura’s gives all of those parts somewhere to meet.It lets me use research without losing emotion, tell personal stories without turning them into diary entries, interview people without reducing them to résumés, and explore complicated ideas without pretending there is always a clean answer at the end.Mostly, it gives me a place to do what I have always done naturally: notice something small, ask why it matters, and follow it until it becomes a story.Because sometimes a coffee order is a coffee order. And sometimes it turns out to be an entire episode about being human.Created, written and hosted by Laura GagliardiListen on Substack →
Or wherever you listen to your podcasts!!! Spotify? Apple?

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