Ask the Author: Laura Catherine Brown
Answered Questions (5)
Laura Catherine Brown
For me, nothing is better than meeting other writers, both personally and through reading their work. It’s through being a writer that I’ve met other artists and creatives in all fields. If I were not a writer, I would never have experienced the magic of a residency, where you get a studio to work in and meals are provided and there are painters and poets and composers and sculptors and choreographers and playwrights and fiction writers and multi-media artists, all engaging with their own work. Another best thing about being a writer is that nothing is wasted. No matter what happens: tragedy or triumph, grief or joy, conflict or harmony, separation or reunion, you can write about it. Writing gives purpose to my life, making form out of chaos.
Laura Catherine Brown
Trust yourself. Go where the energy is, even if it feels weird and even if you think nobody else will be interested. Find good readers. This will take fortitude and energy. You can tell a bad writing group or a bad reader if you feel defeated, drained and fruitless after a discussion about your work. A good writing group or a good reader will excite you about possibilities, make you feel frightened as if you’re on a precipice and the ground has crumbled beneath your feet but you’re stimulated and wide open. Be resilient. Let yourself be sparked by ideas and language and possibilities you don’t understand. Read widely and deeply and constantly. Persistence is everything. Let writing become a way of making sense of your world, of finding shape for your chaos. There is an expression, a vitality, a unique experience where your particular intersection of personal history and larger society converge. You are the only one standing at that intersection. Only you can tell your story. Have faith. Trust yourself.
Laura Catherine Brown
What are you currently working on?
I’m writing a novel, this one told in the first person, about a New York City artist, a painter, who has to earn a living and winds up with a day job as a graphic designer in a financial institution. The novel opens during the financial crisis. Polly Jamson is 35 years old and fears that time is running out for making her name as an artist. She leaps at an opportunity when a hedge fund manager expresses interest in her work, and she becomes entangled in his chicanery, which she’s not blind to. She enters into a transactional relationship with him as her ambition overrides her moral compass. Success comes at a steep price. Imposter syndrome plays a part. She’s forced to reconcile the disconnect between artist success and creative fulfillment. While it’s not autobiographical, it feels, thematically, like my life.
I’m writing a novel, this one told in the first person, about a New York City artist, a painter, who has to earn a living and winds up with a day job as a graphic designer in a financial institution. The novel opens during the financial crisis. Polly Jamson is 35 years old and fears that time is running out for making her name as an artist. She leaps at an opportunity when a hedge fund manager expresses interest in her work, and she becomes entangled in his chicanery, which she’s not blind to. She enters into a transactional relationship with him as her ambition overrides her moral compass. Success comes at a steep price. Imposter syndrome plays a part. She’s forced to reconcile the disconnect between artist success and creative fulfillment. While it’s not autobiographical, it feels, thematically, like my life.
Laura Catherine Brown
I try to write every day. I write in a journal. I was always a journal scribbler but what really jumpstarted me on “journaling” (I hate the verb) was Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way, which I’ve done twice over the past fifteen years. The morning pages became for me, an essential tool; a repository of ideas and observations, of verbal exercises and dream recordings. If I’m stuck in an aspect of my novel, like a scene that feels static or a character who feels one-dimensional, I will free-write in my journal for 3 pages or more if the spirit hits, and the key, I think, is typing the free-writes into my computer, which makes them official and illuminates what I’ve done. Otherwise the gems get lost in all the handwritten pages. I feel far less free composing on my laptop. The journal is like a sketchpad for a visual artist, a place to doodle and have fun. If I’m really stuck, I will open an old journal and cull bits of narrative richness and language and life. I don’t need a prompt to write in my journal though these are valuable sometimes for discovery. I do try to expand beyond my own feelings and reactions; and try to record dialogue and situation and images in a sensory, language-rich way. I like the music of words. There’s nothing more boring to me than to go back through old journals and see that once again, I’m anxious and beleaguered and afflicted with aches, pains and inflammation.
Laura Catherine Brown
I read an article in the paper about a woman who carried her daughter’s baby to term. Grandmother Is Mother Until Birth, I think was the headline. This was last century, as they say, in the mid 1990s. The concept stayed in my mind because the article was bare-bones, and focused on the technology, not on the characters, which gave me space to wonder how it would be for a daughter to need her mother in this way, how would it feel to be so indebted? I wondered what kind of person the mother was. Was she devoted, or domineering? Perhaps both? This situation, a mother-daughter surrogacy, while not as currently commonplace as surrogacy in general, has since occurred numerous, maybe countless times. Surrogacy, in general, despite the incredible expense and medical intrusion, and despite the upending of normal daily lives and bodily integrity seems so common now, we barely acknowledge it. At the same time, it seems like a dystopian fantasy. When I read the article in the 90s, surrogacy was a rare enough occurrence to appear on national news. I drew on my own life, too. I had not particularly wanted children, but I found myself in my late 30s, having fulfilled a dream of publishing my first novel with Random House, thinking maybe motherhood was possible. I had a loving husband and a good job, why not children? Growing up, I’d been instilled with the belief that children were a trap and a curse, but I began to realize in my 30s that children were a gift, and that I did not have to repeat the chaos of my own upbringing. Also, I had lived through two earlier baby booms among my friends, neither of which I’d wanted any part of. The first happened after high school graduation when many of my classmates married and started families. The second happened after college some years later. Both times, I had zero interest in joining the motherhood tribe. My life was unsettled, unformed, and I was single. But this third baby boom was the now-or-never people who’d put off their childbearing for career or graduate school or any number of life’s detours. Many friends who got pregnant around this time had actually been trying for several years, and finally it happened. So, my husband and I stopped trying not to get pregnant. When nothing happened, we visited fertility specialists and took workshops. We tried IVF and failed. Ultimately, we could not have children. I came to terms. But it was during this “trying” time that I was writing this book, and I think writing helped me make sense of the emotional turbulence, the grief and feeling left out of life. Writing gave me a focus that wasn’t revolved around follicle stimulation, ovulation and sperm motility. It allowed me to feel that the long, arduous, expensive journey had not been a complete waste of time and money, and that I was more than an abject failure of a woman. I was a writer, a creative person, someone who might have something to say. What I learned through the medical journey is that even with all our technology and scientific breakthroughs, at the heart of conception and birth is a mystery and a miracle. Why does a woman who couldn’t conceive for years, finally, after numerous IVF procedures, become pregnant and give birth to a daughter? How is that she subsequently becomes pregnant again without any medical intervention? There are theories about how the body learns on a cellular level. But no one really knows. So, I wanted also to convey the mystery, the animal nature of all of us, the ancient fertility rites and belief systems we all collectively carry.
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