Lazaridis engages Thayer students during author visit

Best-selling novelist and noted essayist Henriette Lazaridis offered a comprehensive overview of the writing process — as well as the passion that underlies it — as this year’s guest writer of the Benelli Writing Center’s Visiting Writer Series. 

The only child of Greek expat parents, the Boston-area native visited Thayer Nov. 4. She addressed an Upper School assembly before visiting a number of English classes throughout the day. She discussed the nuts and bolts of writing — creating characters, determining narrative distance, establishing conflict, etc. — but also compared the life of a writer to the life of an athlete, as both lives require the courage to push oneself to – and sometimes past – the limit. 

“So what you actually need to do, even in the most challenging conditions, is to sit tall,” Lazaridis told Upper School students during the assembly. A competitive masters rower, she explained that the term means that rowers should counterintuitively adopt an open, confident posture even when their atavistic instincts are telling them to crouch down and literally protect their internal organs. Other sports, she said, offer similar analogues, from a skier skiing down the fall line to a runner leaning into the stride. Ever the writer, Lazaridis poetically but accurately defined the act of running as “a sequence of arrested falls.” The key in all these things, she said, is moving past the doubt and fear. 

And Lazaridis has done her best to practice what she preaches. Her love of storytelling led her to earn degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania; she then taught English literature for 10 years at Harvard University before quitting to realize her dream to write full-time. Since that time she’s written three novels — The Clover House, Terra Nova, and Last Days in Plaka. In May of 2024, after her novels were published and she’d raised two children, she founded a small publishing house, Galiot Press. That’s in addition to her essay writing and her work running the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. 

A Rhodes Scholar who takes that trust’s exhortation to “fight the world’s fight” seriously, Lazaridis told students that, after some internal struggle, she now believes she’s doing just that as a writer. 

“In the end, I’ve made peace with the idea that a novelist fights the world’s fight,” she said. “People who do creative work fight the world’s fight because, in the case of fiction, it comes from two things, empathy and curiosity, which are actually the same thing.” 

Upper School History Faculty and Benelli Writing Center Director Karen Jersild, who founded the Benelli Visiting Writer Series and has run the series ever since, thanked Lazaridis for engaging so thoroughly with Thayer students. 

“I’m excited that students had the chance to meet a writer with such a breadth of talent,” said Jersild. 

Thayer’s English teachers were equally impressed with the visiting author’s sincere interest in Thayer students and their creative writing. 

"In her work with several classes, Henriette readily engaged students in the art of storytelling, first discussing the elements of fiction and then introducing a fun, creative writing activity,” said Upper School English Faculty Joe Pelletier. “This visiting-author event was one of the best in recent memory."

Upper School English Faculty Jaci Sanford agreed. 

“Henriette's lessons were wonderful,” she said. “Her insights into the creative process, the craft of writing, and the significance of narrative perspective were enormously helpful. I so appreciated how she encouraged our students to explore new ideas and approaches in their writing.”