Finding The `Gifts' -- Rebecca Brown Writes Her Own Success Story

Success is usually measured in dollars, except in the arts, where financial roulette is the rule. Rebecca Brown is a successful writer. Her fifth book, "Gifts of the Body," earned her awards and praise last year, and all of $7,000.

For her success is something else: being able to write, to see what she has written being read, to hear from readers that what she writes affects them. For a long time she despaired that it would never come. Now that it has, she tries to give other writers the support she went so long without.

While her Siamese cat, Max, prowls her study, Brown writes spare, nearly poetic prose. Like good ballet, her writing may look simple, effortless, but anyone who has written seriously knows the discipline required to distill a concentrate of emotion and meaning free of verbal clutter.

Seattle Times Book Editor Donn Fry wrote that the events in "Gifts" "have the straightforward simplicity of diary entries but the artful shape and thrust of the best fiction."

Brown's fiction starts with bits and pieces of reality and flies on from there. The main character in her first book is the daughter of an alcoholic Navy pilot. It is fiction, but it began with little stories she wrote examining her relationship with her own father, a military man who moved his family from Navy base to Navy base in California, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Spain.

Her most recent book, "Gifts" began by chance with a letter she wrote to her partner. Brown had worked as a home-care aide. She eventually left the work, partly because she kept getting close to the people she helped, and it hurt to watch them die. She wrote a letter about the death of one of them.

Then she wrote more. The words pushed aside another project and kept coming until they became the book that last year won a Governor's Writers Award and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association's award.

As for the money, "If I really wanted to make money, then the way to do it would have been to have gone back to school and become a stockbroker."

Money's not the thing. Brown is a straightforward kind of person. She wears jeans and shirts nearly all the time, doesn't fool around with makeup or new hairdos.

She lives a bear's life in reverse, foraging for dollars in the fall, winter and spring, retreating to her den in the summer. She lays on financial fat teaching in the University of Washington's Extension program and writing book reviews.

Nice life for a writer, but it took some doing to get there.

Riding out the rocky years

Brown had a youthful eagerness to take on the world when she signed up for the pre-law program at George Washington University. As a lawyer she could save migrant workers or oppressed women. But a scholarship took her to a girls' prep school in England, where she spent what would have been her freshman year in college. Writer's heaven, she calls it. That year pointed her firmly toward writing, which before had seemed self-indulgent.

A couple of degrees later - bachelor's in English literature from GWU and a master's in writing from the University of Virginia - Brown moved to Seattle, where she had friends, and she wrote.

Rejection after rejection piled up. While friends and family members built careers, Brown had a job pushing paper through a copy machine, and she had a sheaf of self-doubts.

"Here I was, intelligent, educated, white, American, articulate, all the things you need to succeed, and I was working temp jobs for $5 an hour. What was wrong with me?"

Brown applied to the Seattle Arts Commission for a grant. A dozen grant applications, a dozen no's.

"I had several rocky years of pretty serious depression and drug and alcohol use and self-destructive behavior," she says.

"There was a very conscious point . . . when I knew, `If I stay in Seattle, I will die. I will either commit suicide or inadvertently do that.'

"It's so arbitrary how people can judge your work. A number of people said to me, `You can't write. You're a terrible writer.' It just crushed me."

"Part of me felt like maybe they are right. Maybe I can't write."

Something had to change.

Finding a haven

While her work was ignored at home, a small English publisher printed a collection of her short stories, "The Evolution of Darkness," in 1984. Notice for the collection led a large English publisher to publish her second work, a novel, "The Haunted House," in 1986.

Europe became her haven. She moved there that year and things began to change.

"I went to church a lot in London. I fell in love with the story of someone who dies and comes back to life. I realized, I don't have to stay dead. There is life after misery."

She spent four years in England and Italy, writing, learning and being appreciated. In Italy she was allowed to stay at the Browning mansion, as a resident curator. She returned to the Seattle area each year to work a while before returning to Europe with her savings to write.

Eventually, she says, "I came back from Europe because my money ran out and because I didn't want to be an expatriate anymore . . . I missed America."

She came back and got involved, volunteering with the Chicken Soup Brigade, working in the Fremont home-care program. She took the UW Extension gig that she still has.

The books published in Europe and new work began appearing in the U.S.: "The Haunted House," in 1990, "The Children's Crusade" in 1991, "The Terrible Girls" in 1992, "Annie Oakley's Girl in 1993."

When notice finally came, she used it to help others. Friends recall her donating her fees from readings, though she didn't even own a car. (She finally bought one a couple of years ago, a very old Datsun that's blue beneath the pigeon poop, and which looks like a miniature version of her study, full of stuff: Gumby, the Virgin Mary on the dash. Mostly it sits while she walks or takes the bus.)

She bought a word processor recently, but still picks up a pencil. She loves the mechanics of sharpening it, or filling her pen, and writing. "I love getting ink on my hands."

Brown has become a mentor to other writers in what she calls "a really exciting community that didn't exist in the '80s, that's quite separate from the `mainstream' arts funded community."

Stokely Towles, a writer and former student of Brown's, says it is a community she is largely responsible for creating. She organizes readings to benefit Red and Black Books and introduce promising writers, and, says friend and poet Red Reddick, is "committed to writing not just as a profession, (but) as a passion."

Some of this is Brown's reaction to the support she couldn't find for herself. "They didn't let me in their club, I'm going to be part of making a new club."

Reaching beyond writing

She balances community with her own work. Each Thursday night she feeds people at the Family Kitchen at St. James Cathedral, gaining a "feeling of use, hearing other people's stories, being part of a community."

But like a lot of writers, she says, "I really need to spend most of my time alone."

Brown and her partner, Chris Galloway, live on Capitol Hill in a storybook blue house with a neat little white fence. Behind the house is a garage they have transformed into a writer's study.

Light filters though two large stained-glass windows with images of Catholic saints - St. Helen on one, St. Anthony of Padua on the other. Brown, raised as a Protestant, is crazy about Catholic icons - statuettes, rosary beads, crosses are everywhere. She knows minute details about obscure saints.

She knows the current rock scene, too. She plays the electric guitar and once dreamed of being a rock star. She says twentysomethings are pretty accepting of a 39-year-old who still loves taking in concerts.

Then there's writing. Books are everywhere. Her knowlege of writers and writing is vast. Posters of Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein keep watch on her study.

"My work is to write the best book I can and to help create community.

"And when I die and go to heaven, God will say `What have you done?' I will say, `Well, I turned people on to these writers, I organized these readings, I helped so and so . . . .' "

"Gifts of the Body" is being translated into Norwegian, among other tongues, and in October Harper Collins will publish a new collection of Brown's short stories, "What Keeps Me Here."

She says the stories are about "people in painful situations, people in real despair who have to ask, do I stay here because I love misery or because I have faith things will get better."

In one story, "Faith," the answer is that maybe something good will come from misery. For her, it did.