The Books of R. J. Brown

R. J. Brown's Biography

R. J. Brown, an adopted WWII orphan, came up in England behind three older brothers, & remembers sitting at the knees of her aunt, Mary Norton, as she tried out her stories: BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS & THE BORROWERS series.
       She attended Eothen boarding school & Queensgate School for Girls. For 4 years she was also Lead Alto in the London Schoolgirls Choir.
       At St. Martin's School of Arts & Crafts she majored in sculpture & graphic design. Off Tottenham Court Road one lunch break, she was offered five quid to enter the old Scala Theatre, filled with screaming girls where a portion of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT was being filmed. She ushered evenings at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street where foreign films were featured each month. She joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement helping with mailings & meetings where she met Nelson Mandella, & later marched on the South African Embassy to protest his incarceration.
       After 6 months in Portugal cuz her Mater so disliked the influence of art school, RJ returned to London, studied at the Marlborough Gate Secretarial College, left home to live in a flat with other graduates & "temped" until hired on as Export Secretary at Sir Robert J. Burnett's 200 year-old distillery. When it was dismantled in a hostile takeover, RJ decided to see the world.
       Unwelcome in what was left of the British Empire due to her anti-apartheid activities, she went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, was accepted, & set sail for New York just before her 22nd birthday. She passed the Statue of Liberty by dawn's early light nine days later & boarded an overnight train for Chicago, Illinois where the Vera Sugg International Placement Bureau had interviews for her. Her first job was in a horrible industrial advertising firm, where she learnt they'd taken advantage of her immigrant naivete.
       Meanwhile, she bunked in a cell at the NearNorth YWCA until she answered a notice on the bulletin board for someone wanting a live-in nanny for their 4 children. This family, come December, offered her a month's all expenses paid vacation in the then raw ski resort of Vail, Colorado.
       Back in Chicago she got a call from her oldest brother's wife's sorority sister whose brother was looking for a good secretary. Rabbi Robert J. Marx was the Director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Midwest, & a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, often hosting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. RJ also reviewed books & movies with inter-racial & inter-religious themes. Later she transferred to the UAHC's Olin-Sang Union Institute, a year-round camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin where she met the concentration camp survivor & author, Elie Wiesel.
       At that time, suburban baby-boom teenagers were running away en masse to the Windy City & camper parents began asking her to find them. Her searches took her into the Counter Culture, which she eventually joined, volunteering at Alice's Revisited, The Seed newspaper, Grace Lutheran Runaway Recovery Program, & George's LSD Rescue Squad. She became a partner in a secondhand bookstore on Lincoln Avenue, sewed clothes to earn her keep, gave birth, burnt her bra, & expanded her mind.
       A decade later, fed up with commune life, she went west to the Bay Area where she cleaned houses, discovered food co-ops, alternative schools, Laney Community College (Women's Studies & English Composition) & the Human Potential Movement... until she visited the Pacific Northwest.
       In Port Townsend, Washington, she cleaned houses & businesses while training as a Children's Advocate for the Jefferson County Domestic Violence Program. She ran weekly groups for children of abused mothers, & created the Stepson Walk'n'Talk Safety Course. Then she was offered the Managing Editor position at the TOWNSEND LETTER FOR DOCTORS, taking it from a 32 page newsletter to a 144 page illustrated magazine.
       She joined the Olympic Peninsula Women's Spiritual Movement: trained in frame drum making, midwifing over 100; WOMANFEST out of Port Angeles, which met in lodges around Lake Crescent; LONGDANCE out of Sequim, which camped over Summer Solstice in the Olympic Mountains, & WOW (Wild Olympic Women) out of Chimacum, who sewed spectacular quilts to raise money for endangered salmon.
       With her children finally grown & flown, she met & married D. H. Brown  & started her own publication, WOLF'S DIGEST OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE, a plain English magazine for people interested in other forms of health care. Meanwhile, coached by her husband, she studied for citizenship & was sworn in in Seattle to the glee of family & friends.
       After Poppa Brown suffered a stroke & required daily care, they moved into the West End rainforest where they built their octagon cabins & relished life far from the madding crowd.
       In 1998, they created www.rebeccasreads.com, which became an award-winning book review website. 6 years of this labor, conducted on a dialup connection, so exacerbated her Vietnam Veteran husband's war-related illnesses, they retired the site. 2 years later it was acquired by Irene Watson out of Texas, who revived it in a different format.
       RJ's first book is the memoir: STANDING THE WATCH: The Greatest Gift about caring for Poppa at home in the last years & days of his life.
       Her first work of fiction is THE DEAD HUSBAND: A Sally Sees Cozy Mystery set in Port Townsend, based around a housecleaning heroine.
       Now a grandmother, R. J. Brown writes for the Seniors Sunset Times, publishes her husband's suspense/action Citizen Warrior series (HONOR DUE, HONOR DEFENDED) & is at work on her next mystery as well as RAIN FOREST LIFE: Sketches From A Northwest Home.

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