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| News from PEN Northwest: Emma Brown |
“What did you write?” is the first question people ask when they hear I holed up in a cabin for the better part of a year. In answering, I always stumble. The words I wrote have mostly faded. What remains is a faith I’ve never had before—faith in the craft of writing itself, and in my ability to find both stories and the voice with which to tell them.
I was a little terrified when I rumbled down the road to Dutch Henry in the middle of April. It wasn’t the prospect of living among cougar and bear that scared me, nor the rattlesnakes and upcoming aloneness. I was cowed by the fact that I didn’t know what sort of writer I was, or wanted to be, and that I would soon have no excuses for that not-knowing.
Before my season on the Rogue, I was a teacher whose essays were the product of moments stolen from real life. Now, real life had become a writer’s fantasy: a series of unbroken days, a bottomless pot of coffee, a stack of yellow legal pads, and a permanently inspirational view from the desk.
The gift of time and freedom was by turns marvelous and petrifying. I picked pie cherries from trees in the homestead garden and danced barefoot in the late-evening summer sun. I chopped stovewood, weeded the strawberry patch, and hunted down invasive thistles. I wrestled with self-doubt and the stubborn plot of a bad novel. More than anything else, though, I walked off into the woods.
Dutch Henry sits within a gentle fold of otherwise steep country that’s laced with game trails and poison oak and more trees and flowers and low-lying sharp bushes than I will ever know. It sits eight hundred sweaty vertical feet above an ever-changing green river whose banks are dotted with osprey nests and cougar scat, and whose water offers a cool refuge in the heat of July.
The Rogue and its tangled forest offered me a calm I couldn’t find at my desk. Walking off into the woods and into this calm was a source of joy during my months of aloneness; it also, as much as writing daily and reading widely, was how I learned how to be less petrified than thrilled about telling stories for a living.
Emma Brown was the 2006 MDB Resident at the Dutch Henry Homestead on Oregon's Rogue River, which extended from April into October. A Stanford graduate and former wilderness ranger in Idaho, Emma will be attending the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley this fall.
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