ISSUES | spring 1994

Interviewer: Can you tell us about your background, your family, and early influences?

Brown: I think my beginnings as a writer were not unlike those of a good many others. I was feeling particularly cast out at a certain point. I was nine, and the writing was a comfort. We had just moved from one coast to the other and I was very lonely in a new school, so I started taking along a secretarial notebook in which I didn’t so much confide as create friends for myself, and play with language, right there on the playground where I thought at the time I was being ignored by the real kids.

“Theories of Illusion”
“After Sinead O’Connor Appears on “Saturday Night Live,” the Pope”
“Eggshell Seas”

Our lives in this town are slowly improving. When Trudi grew up, in the old reservation houses, the roads were dirt and the crab factory still wheezed along, ugly and reeking. In early summer the factory stayed open all night, and the damp dirty smell of the crab cooking in its steel vats blew off the ocean, all the way to Aberdeen, even beyond, for all I knew.

Almost twenty years ago on an early spring day in Missouri, I was outside with the children, wrestling Jack into his infant carrier in the front seat of the car while Stephen waited to climb into the back.

On a bench in the sun at the side of a playground in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Willow is tall, but heavyset, and her real name is Esther; she changed it way back in college and has felt silly about it almost ever since, but still secretly likes the sound.

“After the Random Tornado”
“Farms at Auction”
“Scanning the Range for Strays”
“But it was Water”
“Uncle Carl and the Art of Taxidermy”
“After Fifty”
“The Invention of Courage”
“The Songs of Country Girls”

When Henry Teeter first arrived in Santa Monica the only thing he wanted to do was sit on the seawall at the very end of Wilshire Boulevard and watch the sunset. At several times during his pilgrimage he thought he might never get to the West Coast, and so, once there, was content merely to sit quietry for a time. After seven days of heading due west from North Carolina he had truned south at Needles on the advice of a filling station attendant who thought that Henry’s old Chevrolet might have an easier go of it approaching the Pacific coast from the southeast.

For thirty years, until he retired, my husband stood each fall in front of his sophomore genetics class and passed out copies of Gregor Mendel’s famous paper on the hybridization of edible peas.

Halfway between our farm and town, on county Highway 15, the Creston place was a study in regal flatness.

Jack Kerchman, my old high school baseball coach, was a classic ball-buster, a lot like those Marine D.I.’s you see in old World War II movies. A Jew himself, “Mr. K” had a reputation for hazing the Jewish players that he thought were too soft. One of them was me.

Van Cleuve usually got the best women. It was a given. It started when he and Harry Durance and I were classmates at West Point. Harry and I would meet our Brooklyn or Bronx girls at Penn Station, but Van Cleave would usually vanish for a while and show up later with some pale blonde who you could just smell the money on. Some girl that would fix her icy blues on the view outside the cab window just so, and ride all insulated by her nickname and good fur.

We were just getting nouveau, “nuevo,” Marguerita called it when the boxes arrived. Silver and crystal, mink jackets to summer in storage, chandeliers, and there were french doors to be hung. “Das ist zu reich,” squealed Irma when the Oriental was unrolled. Here are the Wedgwood bowls, a security system, a marble-floored foyer where children sprawl playing jacks. Here is Graciela carrying a laundry basket saying something that sounds like a Spanish curse or a Spanish prayer.

“Elegy and Perisphere”
“In Memory of Primo Levi”
“Among the Joshua Trees”

“Revisionary Instruments”
“Triptych”