Scope Note
The manuscripts in this collection will include both published work and pieces I loved writing but that never found a public home.
As any good finding aid should, I’ve provided some context about each entry, where and when it was published, where I was in my personal and/or my writing life when I wrote it. I am the author of all but one of the works included here; that singular work was written by my mother, Molly Connally.
Fiction
Novels, published stories, and works in progress
Breathing Room
This short story was written during a class I took at the New School in New York City. I was working in marketing at New York Magazine at the time and lived on 113th street between Broadway and Amsterdam, while my fiancé and future husband was in graduate school. The story reflects the itinerant life of the military family in which I grew up. Published November 1990. Sassy magazine. New York, NY
Pantomime
In the early 1995, my family moved to Germany and shortly after we arrived my daughter was born. The Bosnian War had been raging for three years, and the Dayton Peace Accords were in the news. People fleeing the violence of war had scattered across Europe. With a new baby and a toddler, I was grateful when a friend suggested I hire a Bosnian woman to clean my house. Years later, I still think about her. Published Spring-Summer 2014. The MacGuffin. Vol. XXX, No. 3. Schoolcraft College, Livonia, MI.
Dance Champ
After a spate of new stories in 2012 and 2013 about the abduction of young girls, I began to wonder what it might be like if one of those girls grew up and had a daughter of her own. I was a parent of teenagers myself at the time. This story was published in the online journal: r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal. The journal’s last issue was published in fall 2019. As of February 2026, it is still alive on the internet. Published 2015. https://rkvryquarterly.com/dance-champ-by-lori-eaton/
Goat Queen
For several years in the early 2000s and 2010s, I wrote grants for nonprofits in the Metro Detroit area. The city was nearing bankruptcy, ruin porn was the rage, Detroiters wore Detroit-vs-Everybody t-shirts, but in the in the semi-abandoned neighborhoods at the city’s outer limits, I met interesting people growing interesting things. I wound up volunteering for a time in a community garden; they kept a baseball bat handy in case one of the feral dogs that roamed the neighborhood became aggressive. Published Spring-Summer 2016. The MacGuffin. Vo. XXXII, No. 3. Schoolcraft College, Livonia, MI.
Museum House
Aging mansions are scattered across Southeast Michigan, built by the founding families of the automotive industry in the early 20th Century. Many have been turned into house museums: Cranbrook House, Meadow Brook Hall, the Edsel Ford Houses. The museum house in this story is nothing like any of those mentioned above. Published November 2022. The Viriginia Writers Club Golden Nib / Teen Nib Anthology 2022. ISBN 9798358750098. https://virginiawritersclub.org/Publications
Undertow
In the early 2000s, I interviewed Rolf Peterson, the lead researcher on the long running wolf-moose, predator-prey study that takes place each year on Isle Royal in Lake Superior. What I learned about the lives of the researchers fascinated me more than the wolves. That conversation, combined with the two years I lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as a teenager, shape-shifted over many years. Published 2022. Northern Virginia Writers Club 15th Anniversary Anthology.
Sisters Between, A Novel of the Beguines
This novel was inspired by a trip Molly took to Bruge, Belgium in the mid 1990s. She was fascinated by the Beguines, religious women who lived in walled communities particularly in the Low Countries of Western Europe during the 13th-16th centuries. After years of research and writing and with dementia beginning to take hold, she published her novel in November 2013. It can, for the time being, still be purchase in print on Amazon. The original manuscript is preserved here. Molly Connally died in November 2016. Published 2013. CreateSpace Independent Publishing, North Charleston, SC. ISBN 9781483970059. LCCN 2013906014.
Essays
Creative nonfiction, reflections on archiving and society
Archiving My Mother
I took an essay class at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Thanks to fellow Gotham students for pushing me to dig deeper. This is the essay that pushed me to consider my own creative life and what it might mean to archive it. The novel she wrote, Sisters Between, is included in the Manuscript Repository.
How I lost my sense of direction and found it again thanks to Rand McNally
Another product of the Gotham Writers Workshop on the personal essay.
Plays
10-minute shorts as seen in festivals and playwriting sandboxes
The Family Cactus
Produced as part of The Kitchen Plays, a playwrights showcase staged at a kitchen design storefront in Royal Oak, Michigan with showings Friday and Saturday, October 4, 5, 11, 12, 2013
Eating Cake
First produced at the Renegade Theater Festival, Lansing, Michigan. Three Short Plays: Thursday, August 19 and Saturday, August 21, 2011
Playing Basketball
First produced at the Tipping Point Theatre’s Sandbox Festival, June 2012
Vaccination
Boxfest Detroit, Who Wants Cake? Theatre, Furniture Factory, Detroit, MI; Aug 7-22, 2009
Make-A-Wish
First produced at the Sandbox Play Festival, Tipping Point Theatre, Northville, Michigan on June 20-22, 2014.
Minor Deposition
First produced at the 2015 Women’s Playwriting Festival, Two Muses Theatre, Ann Arbor, Michigan in February 20-22, 2015.
Joe and Mary
Commissioned for The Passion Plays, staged at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, Spring 2011