I first met Laura Catherine Brown at the KGB bar, where she
shared the spotlight with two writers I'd already interviewed for the site, Anna Maxted and Molly Jong-Fast.
As Brown read a scene from her debut novel, Quickening, in which
Mandy, a young college freshman coping with the unexpected death of her
father, impulsively goes down to Queens with a man she barely knows, I
decided I would need to interview her as well. And so, a few weeks later, we met
for a late lunch at the Coffee Shop in Union Square...
RH: How long did you work on Quickening?
LCB: It took about seven years. I switched the point of view
several times. It started out first person present. Another draft was
in third person present, then third person past, until finally it
seemed to work in the third person somewhat immediate past. Once
I got that--which took many years--it seemed to flow much easier. I
had created the right space in which to tell the story.
RH: Because of the mid-'80s setting, I get the feeling that it's a
story that's been with you for quite some time.
LCB: I felt the need to write it. When I graduated from the
School of Visual Arts, I was a major in graphic design, and I really
thought that's what I would do--I would love it and it would be
creatively fulfilling. It didn't take me long, working in an ad agency,
to realize that while graphic design was a craft, my heart couldn't be
in it because it was work for someone else. Then writing became
where I put my creative energy.
RH: Had you written much before that?
LCB: I wrote on a personal level. I wrote poetry, I had a
journal, but I'd never taken it seriously. It never seemed to be
anything...I was concerned with earning a living, and I thought that if
I followed that path, I'd be homeless. So I never did.
RH: Once you started to take your writing more seriously, when
did you start applying for the residencies?
LCB: It was far along in the process, actually--in the last two
or three years of writing the book. Those were so essential to my
writing. I encourage anyone who wants to write to apply to them,
even though it makes it less likely that I'll get in again.
(laughs) Being away, in an environment where everyone else
is also away, working in the creative moment, is just wonderful.
Everything is taken care of for you, and the creative process is
honored. It's really difficult to come back; you definitely go through a
debriefing period of depression, asking yourself if anybody cares
about the creative spirit.
RH: How far out of town have you been for these fellowships?
LCB: The last one I went to was in Wyoming, which was
wonderful. I've also been to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia--in
fact, I've gotten to see lots of places where I wouldn't otherwise go.
Lake Forest, Illinois, for example, or Lake Superior, in rural
Minnesota. So I've been pretty far out.
The longest I've stayed was a month. Most of them are two weeks.
I'd love to stay for more than a month, but I still have to figure out
how to work them in around my vacation time from work.
RH: As you mentioned, you're also around many other people
working on their creative projects when you go away.
LCB: Visual artists, writers...you run into people doing things
you'd never imagine doing. It's a very open space, a supportive
environment. There's a lot of encouragement. When I see what the
visual artists are doing, I always feel, "Oooh, how do you do that?" I
think the same thing happens when the visual artists see what the
writers are doing. It's not competitive, it's not like a workshop and
there's no critiques.
I haven't met any writers at these fellowships who I've later seen
published, but...at the Ragdale Foundation, for example, there was a
shelf with books that previous residents had worked on while they
were there, and I was amazed to see how many writers I respect and
admire were on that shelf. Mary Gaitskill, for one. It's like, "Wow, she
was here, and now I'm here, too."
RH: Who are other writers you admire?
LCB: I love Tobias Wolff. Thomas Mann. And Denis Johnson.
Margot Livesey. Ian MacEwen, who I'm reading at the moment. His
writing is just so crystal-clear and focused, such beautifully crafted
sentences. And I haven't read Chekhov lately, but I have his works
on my shelf, and I feel like I should read them again. His short
stories are just amazing in terms of their depth and complexity.
RH You take on very difficult territory in this novel. How hard
was it for you, as a first time writer, to get the more
emotionally explosive scenes down to a point where you
felt satisfied with them?
LCB: It was more difficult for me emotionally just to write the
book. The most difficult section for me was probably the death of
Mandy's father, simply because while I was writing the book--about
a year before I finished--my father died. And a lot of that emotion
went into the book. He had actually been diagnosed with cancer
earlier and I didn't do a lot of writing during that time, and so when
I came back to the book, a lot of things got reworked to deal with
that... The other material wasn't as hard.
RH: When you're writing about the subtle types of abuse that
Mandy suffers from her mother and her lover, it takes a lot
of work to make those scenes honest, to remove any traces
of exploitation.
LCB: Right. When I was writing about the abuse, I actually had
some sympathy for the mother. She had nobody in the world; nobody
understood her or listened to her. So she took it out where she could,
and that was on her daughter. Writing that was--I hate to use a
psychobabble word, but it was empowering. You hear about father-
daughter abuse, but there are probably a lot of women out there
without power who try to get power wherever they can, and so
maybe mother-daughter abuse is more common than we think. It's
not about female as victim, male as abuser. It's about human beings.
RH: Similarly, Booner doesn't set out to abuse Mandy--but the
way he acts towards her is the only way he knows how, in
his confusion, to act towards her.
LCB: Exactly. He's not a bad person. From his experience, with
very little to go on, this is how people relate to each other. That's
what I was really interested in--how do people manage to transcend
those limitations and connect for a while. He did offer her love,
however flawed, and that was what she needed at that time. In
earlier drafts, Booner was far less sympathetic, and I had to work on
that.
RH: Have you started your next novel yet?
LCB: I've started something. I'm still working with human relationships
and family dynamics. It's always fascinating to me, and very primal.
