For more than forty years, Rebecca Brown has been writing and publishing novels, stories, and essays. She was the first writer in residence at Hugo House, and co-founder of the Jack Straw Writers Program. Along with previous director of Frye Art Museum programming, Mary Jane Knecht, Rebecca curated and hosted a series of quarterly ekphrastic  readings at the Frye in 2007. 

Rebecca's newest book Obscure Destinies drops Nov. 11. It is out through Fellow Travelers/Publication Studio. The launch party will be that day at 3rd Place Books with Ryan Boudinot and Brekan Blakeslee.

Rebecca also has another book tcoming out this year. "My Animal Kingdom"  will be released Dec. 6. The book is being published by Frizz Lit, a new literary press created by former editor-in-chief of The Stranger Christopher Frizzelle. The release party for "My Animal Kingdom" will be on Dec. 6 in the afternoon at The Sorento Hotel. 

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I loved Obscure Destinies. You’re so stark as a writer. The prose feels so densely empty.

It’s a spare writing style. Especially in the memory piece. The piece called the widow. In a couple of my other books I was very intentional to use almost monosyllabic words to calm you down. I wanted the story to appear like you were looking through glass or water. Not like you’re looking through art. There’s a lot of artifice in making it look not artificial. I don’t want people to think of  form or language as much as be swept up by the characters.

There’s definitely attention to the craft . I like that the writing doesn’t call attention to itself.

I want it to sound unaffected and like someone is telling a story or you’re watching a documentary movie made with a loving eye. But at the same time every piece in that book is just reworked a bazillion times. That teacher story I probably tried to write it for 20 years. It’s the illusion of transparency. I want it to be transparent but it wasn’t easy to write -- at all.

The stories have this devastating quality to them because the writing is so stripped.

Yeah, It’s kind of bare bones emotion but how do you get to it without being shrill or melodramatic. It’s kind of this accumulated quiet. Hopefully.

You really don’t seem concerned with you seeing everything exactly how you see it.

I definitely want a porosity in the prose that welcome the reader into having their own experience. I use a lot of details -- you can see some things but actually not very many. Like the main guy in the first story basically what you know about him is he irons his slacks and that he’s a clean dresser. But it’s not like the writer is saying he’s 6 foot 1 with auburn hair with intellectual glasses -- those kinds of specifics aren’t what I’m trying to get at. But I am trying to get at details that stick with you about a character -- that you can identify, but you’re not overwhelmed by trying to be realistic in all the details.

For me as a reader. I have a hard time fully imagining things and it’s really easy to lock into your work because it’s not trying to guide me through.

There’s a later scene in that first story where the kids have graduated from high school and there in a bar. And there’s this girl, and you don’t know much about them except she’s cute and throwing back g & ts. It’s about which actions do I want you to pay attention to. And how those specific things point to something inside the character.

Are you actually building characters? Is there a writing process around building characters?

I certainly don’t have a process that I’m aware of. Certainly in this whole book ‘Obscure Destinies’ all the stories come out of memory and personal experience, but like the first one is fictionalized and characters added and time compressed. Where as the second one is very close to real life. And then in the play the characters are somewhat abstracted -- not two dimensional but they each represent things -- ’m not trying to get fully rounded psychologically realistic characters in that play, as much as I’m trying to get people  that represent different ways of being in family, or different ways of being in grief. But I don’t have a method of how I always try and describe a character’s psychology or physique or habits or whatever. I write into the story not from ideas.

How does it turn from idea to story.

For me, like we were in grad school together. And there’s a lot of discussion of theory and how to achieve something or how to affect -- and I don’t think about any of that stuff when I write. Writing for me is like an emotional impulse -- either trying to figure something out or trying to get something off my chest. Or in the case of this book there were stories in my personal life that affected me deeply and I wanted to make them into something. I wanted to remember these three people who died and talk about what I learned from them or what they gave to me. So the crafting of it was how to make stories out of memories and emotions.

Does that emotional impulse start vague and then you figure it out? Or does it start as people floating through your memory and then it gets intertwined.

Like in the first story -- it’s about these gay teenager kids in Texas in the 70s And they kind of do or don’t know their gay or whatever. I lived in Texas and I didn’t know I was gay yet but some people knew they were gay.  And we had this teacher that was very important to me. And I learned about his closeted life later.  I got so much from this teacher. He opened my mind. He gave me so many books to read and music to listen to, and he was just an incredibly important man in my life. He died before he should of. I’ve been telling Chris for years that I have to tell this story.

The  second one is about my best friend who died. Her husband asked me to write the obituary and then he  said if you ever want to write about her you totally have my blessing. So tat story was really  about honoring her and honoring friends and chosen family.  So it’s like making a scrapbook for people.

That ties to this thematic aspect of the book. It feels like you’re saying goodbye.

Yeah -- I mean -- I’ll be 70 in a few months and it’s not like ‘oh my god I’m dying.’ I’m in good health  but life looks different now. And as that last essay talks about, my mother died when she was 69, and so this has been like ‘woah I’m getting a lot of extra time here.’ I want to be aware of people and remember their stories and I want to live with more awareness. You and I have talked about the importance of how your sobriety  just opened up whole ways of receiving the world and being more aware of everything and just getting more use out of time, right? And there’s something for me about aging and seeing the vulnerability of people around me and thinking like about how we’re not here forever. It’s just -- gratitude and awareness that we’re not here forever.

I think that gratitude and awareness  comes through. You’re not coming at this as someone who is sad. There’s this beauty of what your representing that makes the stories more heavy more than what is happening in them.

They are sad stories. They’re all about people dying. But at the same time they’re all love stories. Like these kids growing up and knowing they kept in touch with each other and love each other. That an adult saw them and cared for them and loved them. Or in the story of a group of friend helping this woman die of cancer there’s so much love in this room around this dying woman. And because it’s a death we’re all pretty present. Nobodies bullshitting much because there’s no time to bullshit.   And the play is about the two different survivors trying to figure out how to say goodbye but also trying to learn to be different with each other. There death stories but there love stories too. Not like romantic, but deep love. 

An ever present love for what life is.

Yeah. And for regular old  individuals. Love of your friends and neighbors.

Which is a lucky place to land on in your head. No bitterness or snideness. This happened and its terrible but its also lovely.

I would love to be that loving and mature and stuff, and hopefully the book doesn’t have any snarkiness or bitterness. But that’s not to say -- in my life -- I’m bitter about some things, things piss me off -- but  I’m trying to not have that be what makes me up in the morning or what I think about when I go to bed. I’m trying to think about the good stuff.

Of course all the negative happens bit ultimately its about that return. If you can at least return to some sort of gratitude in the day that accumulates

It really does.

I’m glad this book can exist in your long line of books.

Me too. At the very end of the book there’s sort of lines of just images that the book ends with -- there’s stuff like -- making spaghetti with my wife, a waterfall, a cat on my lap -- but there’s one reference to somebody saying ‘thank you’ when I give them a glass of water. It’s like the simplest thing in the world -- a stranger saying ‘ thank you.’ And that’s what I want to do. I want to be the stranger or not stranger that says thank you to everything.

This book is definitely a step in that direction.

This book has existed in slightly different forms for a number of years but what’s actually being published is different than what I sent out a couple years ago. It’s gotten slimmer and tighter and closer to what it wants to be. I’m glad its taken this time to get to this. I’m just glad I’m publishing books rather than slimming down to no words at all.

Let’s talk about the other book you have coming out this year, My Animal Kingdom. It’s beautiful to go from death and love and grief and end on this list. Animal Kingdom is itself a list.

Exactly. It’s a list of type of animals. There is stuff in there like illness and concerns of mortality but

there’s also humor and sweetness and affection and forgiveness. It’s not so heavy. It’s not a silly book, but it’s not a heavy hard book.

My Animal Kingdom feels free. I think that comes from the heavier book.

There’s a real fluidity to the prose in ‘My Animal Kingdom’ that sails along. Certainly the experience of writing most of it was much more straight forward, rather than the gnarled how to make this sentence work and what do exactly do I want to say.

There was less thinning out than in ‘obscure destinies’?

The writing came more quickly. The two pieces that existed before, and sort of became the impetuous of the book, were essays I’d written for The Stranger. So there’s a journalistic colloquialism to it. There’s just an energy to the writing that was very different than ‘obscure destinies.’

How did you end up with 2 books being published.

‘Obscure Destinies’ I wrote years ago. I sent it out to my previous publisher and they were like ‘everyone dies in this book.’ And I didn’t want to fight -- it wasn’t a fight -- but I just didn’t  want to shop around and explain to someone as much as have someone go ‘I get it.’ And through this weird circular thing, a fellow who had been publishing with a group called Publisher’s Studio was in Seattle, and a block away from me. He asked if he could publish something of mine. He was a great editor to work with. He really got what I was doing. He as very very useful in revising that essay. 

And then Christopher Frizzelle who was my editor in the Stranger who commissioned the two long piece in “My Animal Kingdom” was like ‘I want you to do a book.’ He really liked these two particular essays. He also said ‘I’d love you to write a book my mother can read’ because all my books are heavy or dark or emotionally creepy. So I was like I don’t have to be so dreary and depressing. There are pieces in there that I had always wanted to do something with but didn’t know what to do with it. It was a great package at the right time and I was ready to write for it.

That’s so lucky.

It is. And they’re both like long standing relationships of twenty or thirty years. I’m actually going to speak about that at a conference soon -- writer’s friendships. It’s like your gang down at CAM and Reed and Amy and Emily -- x years ago you were students and now you’ve got books and you’re doing activities around the community and organizing thing. You are creating your own literary world that’s expanding beyond you.  At this point in my life to come back home to these old friends who’ve been around writing and publishing in different ways. It’s kind of sweet.

You don’t know what you’re building until that’s what’s built.

Exactly. I don’t know when you started unpoetry if you were like “I’m going to build’ but you just kept inviting people and people became friends and interested in one another’s work. You were just working hard introducing people to one another.  It’s long term walking together.