Colleen Brown’s book, If you lie down in a field, she will find you (Radiant Press, October 2023), is an absorbing, eye-opening, and heart-wrenching memoir in fragments, conversations, and memories of her mother’s life and murder by a serial killer. It’s also about the impact violence has on memory and storytelling and how persistent contact with the justice system affects individual needs for a narrative that can make sense of a life. On this Power Q & A, we ask Colleen about the perhaps not-so-obvious challenges of writing this story.
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Q: A story of this nature is bound to encounter resistance, beyond the usual writerly self-doubt. What was the most significant roadblock you encountered while writing this book?
A: There were a few different kinds of resistance along the way.
The first is common to anyone trying to express personal tragedy. A lot of social learning is committed to how, when, and where you are allowed to express trauma. I know my siblings and I were told in different ways not to speak about my mother’s death. My sisters and I were accused of lying at different points in our lives and, more commonly, threatened by being understood as weak and needful. There is always a sense that speaking about tragedy will hurt the listener, and so you are trained to save other people from your grief. The first breakthrough for the book occurred when I told a co-worker about my mother’s murder, and to my surprise, she laughed and said, “Wow, you really have a good story there.” After I got over the shock, I realized I felt great. I didn’t hurt her. I could speak.
At the core of the book is an ambivalence. The first coherent sentence I wrote was, “...because the spectacle of her murder overwhelms the entirety of her perfectly human and unremarkable existence, I lost my mother as a way of creating meaning. “ The book is driven by a desire to express and cleave my mother’s life from her death. To sunder her before from her after, I had to hold both in view.
As the writing continued, I experienced a lot of confusion in understanding my duty toward the person who confessed to my mother’s murder. People were offering very confident and totally contradictory advice. A visit to the Artists Legal Outreach Clinic clarified things for me. At one point, I blurted out a question about my moral obligations, and the lawyer working with me was very clear that legal advice and moral advice do not intersect. This really straightened out my thinking. The book was altered to follow the rules and adhere to my own sense of obligation to a person and a perpetually open legal case.
Colleen Brown. Photo: Zed Payne.
More about the book:
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris' life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown's youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family's oral history and tell us who she was.
More about Colleen:
Colleen Brown is known primarily as a sculptor. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is her first book. Colleen created visual artworks related to the book when she was the Artist in Residence at the Ranger Station. Colleen is one of the current Artists in Residence in Maple Ridge, BC.