{"id":35993,"date":"2018-05-19T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=35993"},"modified":"2025-02-21T09:10:47","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:10:47","slug":"rebecca-brown-the-willow-springs-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/rebecca-brown-the-willow-springs-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 84: Rebecca Brown: The Willow Springs Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Found in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>84<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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May 19, 2018<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

POLLY BUCKINGHAM, J. NEWELL, GENEVIEVE RICHARDS, DANIEL SPIRO, & LEONA VANDER MOLEN<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH REBECCA BROWN<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Rebecca<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>84<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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TO READ REBECCA BROWN’S WORK <\/strong>is to be led by a minimalistic and incantatory voice into a world simultaneously familiar and peculiar. Brown\u2019s stories\u2014true and fictional\u2014are imaginative, obsessive, witty, often dark, and always brilliant. Through her exploration of themes such as violence, youth and aging, loss, and human connection, Brown is a master of blurring the lines between genres. In a review of Brown\u2019s most recent book, Not Heaven, Somewhere Else<\/em>, for the Seattle Review of Books<\/em>, Paul Constant writes, \u201cAside from \u2018genius,\u2019 the other word I would use to describe Rebecca Brown is \u2018elemental.\u2019 Brown isn\u2019t just a genius at words. She\u2019s a genius at the invisible forces that bind words together. It feels dangerous and exciting, like if she puts her big brain to it long enough, she could completely rewrite the story of who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebecca Brown is a writer, artist, lecturer, curator, journalist, and performer. Her body of work includes collections of stories and essays, a modern bestiary, a memoir in the form of a medical dictionary, a fictionalized autobiography, a play, and a libretto for a dance opera. Her books include Not Heaven, Somewhere Else<\/em> (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018), American Romances, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs, The Terrible Girls <\/em>(all with City Lights Books), and The Gifts of the Body <\/em>(HarperCollins, 1995). Some of her books have been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Italian. Her work has earned several awards, including the Boston Book Review Award, the Lambda Literary Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, two Washington State Book Awards, and a Stranger Genius Award. She has also earned grants or fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Hawthornden Castle, and the Breneman-Jaech Foundation. Her altered texts and installations have been exhibited in the Frye Art Museum, Hedreen Gallery, Arizona Center for Poetry, Simon Fraser Gallery, and Shoreline Art Gallery. Her work has appeared in magazines and journals in the USA, UK, and Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met with Rebecca Brown in her cozy Seattle writing studio, surrounded by books, windows, and endearing mementos, like her Edgar Allan Poe statuette, on a sunny Saturday morning. She showed us photos, gave us books to hold, and invited us into a little slice of her life while we talked about queer literature, collaboration, invisible illness, faith and rituals, violence, and Julian of Norwich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LEONA VANDER MOLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You often write about experiences in fiction that are very close to home. I was wondering how you decide what genre you bring memories into and how that works when you\u2019re writing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REBECCA BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s mostly not a decision. Figuring out what something is in terms of genre or even in terms of theme for me comes pretty late in the process or retrospectively. But certainly in my earlier books there\u2019s this urge to write something, wondering, what is this, and sort of figuring out the shape it\u2019s going to take. My book of essays, American Romance<\/em>\u2014most all of those pieces someone asked me to write about something. There\u2019s a piece in there called \u201cMy Western\u201d about western movies and my father. Someone said, \u201cWrite something about movies or write something about the way movies see us.\u201d  So I started writing about westerns, and it was like, oh wait a minute, I\u2019m not just writing about westerns, I\u2019m writing about my dad. So that came in gradually. I did a talk about E. M. Forster somewhere and then someone else said, \u201cCan you write something about Aspects of the Novel<\/em> for us?\u201d So I\u2019m writing about E. M. Forster and all this other stuff came up. I\u2019m also writing about student\/teacher relationships, and I\u2019m writing about illicit love. So it kind of comes in sideways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m also profoundly or puritanically moral: if you\u2019re going to call something a memoir\u2014like the famous story of Isabel Allende where she turned three sisters into one, that\u2019s really significant\u2014just say, \u201cI\u2019m making this shit up,\u201d right? Or if you look at the classical novels like Joyce or Hemingway, they\u2019re novels that are based on real life. Anyway, if I\u2019m going to call something nonfiction, I want to be really clear about what\u2019s nonfiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GENEVIEVE RICHARDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So would you consider yourself to be a purist when it comes to truth in nonfiction? If it\u2019s nonfiction, it\u2019s 100 percent true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would say more like 90 percent. The squirrel story that appeared in The Stranger<\/em> happened right here in the studio. But in the story that appeared in the paper, it looked like it happened in the house. I\u2019m not going to say that\u2019s fiction. Really, who cares? But I\u2019m not going to say I spent three years in prison when I spent three nights in prison. You know, that James Frey thing. I actually had this profound moral dilemma more than twenty years ago. My book The Gifts of the Body, <\/em>about being in homecare, is very closely based on my life. But some characters are composites or invented; the arc I made up. In the book, the girl\u2019s boss, who\u2019s a straight woman, gets AIDS. That never happened in my real life. So that\u2019s a novel. But at one point somebody wanted to publish it in translation if we could call it a memoir. I\u2019m like, would I do this if it could be translated and get lots of sales and money? And I couldn\u2019t. And then, fortunately, the decision was taken away from me because they didn\u2019t want the book anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s so much going on now, especially in American writing, about authenticity. We\u2019ve lost respect for the imagination or the craft of, \u201cOh my god, someone really put that together beautifully.\u201d It\u2019s like, how bad was your life, rather than what kind of artful truth can you get from it. So I\u2019m old fashioned on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I do look at directly in nonfiction is memory. In the story \u201cA Child of Her Time\u201d in American Romances<\/em>, there\u2019s a scene where the girl, it\u2019s me, is talking to her mother: \u201cOh I remember this, I remember this,\u201d and her mother\u2019s like, \u201cNo, that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d It was so important to me, but she\u2019s like, \u201cWell that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d Why do we make memories certain ways? In an essay in The Stranger,<\/em> there\u2019s a scene where I\u2019m saying something, and my wife is like, \u201cThat\u2019s not what happened.\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cWhat?\u201d and she\u2019s like, \u201cHoney, that didn\u2019t happen.\u201d I\u2019d made up in my mind that I\u2019d done this really stupid thing, and she\u2019s like, \u201cThat didn\u2019t really happen. You felt really bad, but you didn\u2019t do that stupid thing.\u201d Dealing with the issue of why we tell ourselves certain stories and what are the stories we want to project to other people is interesting to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DANIEL SPIRO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Gifts of the Body<\/em> has a really interesting structure. I\u2019m wondering how you came to that structure\u2014if it emerged organically as you were writing it or if you had it in mind when you started out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organic sounds like it just kind of came together. But putting that book together was so hard. I worked as a homecare aid, a bunch of people died, and then I got a writing fellowship to go away to write another book that I proposed, but while I\u2019m away I\u2019m writing letters to Chris, to whom I am now married, about all these memories of people who\u2019d died because I\u2019m away from Seattle and I\u2019m not with my buddies in our grief. I\u2019m like, oh I remember this time, I remember this time. And it\u2019s like, oh god, shit, I\u2019ve got to get to work on my book, and all I\u2019m doing is writing about these AIDS people. So I started thinking, why don\u2019t I make them little stories? Some of them were in the first person, some were in the third person, some were present, some were past, some of them were kind of shaped like . . . there\u2019d be an incident, like the incident of the guy with the bath and the water, and there\u2019s this long, lyric passage of water and lakes and birth and then back to another narrative thing about this guy and then this long, lyric thing\u2014so really a different kind of shape\u2014before we had the words \u201clyric essay,\u201d boys and girls. And then it was like, I think I want to make a book. How do I make a book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do after I\u2019d written a bunch of stuff. And then at some point I had to make decisions, because this chapter is so good in third person and this one is so good in first person, and you can\u2019t have it both ways. It was really important for me to have unexpected people get AIDS, like an old white woman from transfusion and a young, white, straight, married woman. And have that surprise of death. Because we all think, oh yeah, beautiful, young gay men die, oh that\u2019s too bad. And then the New Testament\u2014which is my religious practice, Christian\u2014the New Testament has this thing about the gifts of the spirit. The gifts of the spirit are peacefulness, et cetera. But this is about the gifts of the body. This is like living in the body. So that\u2019s how the structure came up. The chapter titles are like a devotional book in the New Testament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of people are like, \u201cOh my god they just flowed, it must have been so easy.\u201d Oh no no no no. But no. You have no fucking idea. Because you want all the backstage stuff to become invisible. You have to make it seem inevitable through labor. The Terrible Girls <\/em>is in some ways structured similarly. It\u2019s not a collection of separate stories, but you could read each chapter separately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VANDER MOLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of The Terrible Girls,<\/em> and also The Children\u2019s Crusade <\/em>and a couple other books, you do this narrative style where you have one character addressing a \u201cyou\u201d the whole time, and sometimes it\u2019s to a very specific character, like Stan in The Children\u2019s Crusade<\/em>. How do you see that working in your books? Why do you choose that narrative style?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not decisive. Some of the pieces I wrote when I was a graduate student, and they were just obsessively written. They started as these obsessive interior monologues directed at this one person, \u201cHow could you do this to me?\u201d The first one, where that really kind of happened, was called \u201cForgiveness,\u201d and it starts, \u201cWhen I said I\u2019d give my right arm for you, I didn\u2019t think you\u2019d ask me for it, but you did.\u201d Obviously it\u2019s metaphorical, but at the time I was really asking, \u201cHow could you do this?\u201d In the wisdom of forty years, it\u2019s obviously not a one-sided thing. It wasn\u2019t like, I\u2019m going write something in accusing second-person and really convey abjection. I\u2019m going to write a letter that I\u2019ll never send. I was getting a lot of this stuff out to this person or about this person. It was eruptive, not intentional. And then it kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Really it\u2019s about intimacy, right? In The Children\u2019s Crusade,<\/em> she\u2019s looking for her brother and at some point he\u2019s gone, but she\u2019s still addressing him in her mind. She\u2019s looking for the lost boy, whatever that is. It\u2019s really about longing to connect or communicate with a specific individual and then expands to ask, what are you really asking for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My latest book, Not Heaven, Somewhere Else, <\/em>is structured like that. My publisher put \u201cstories\u201d on the cover. \u201cStories by Rebecca Brown.\u201d And then a couple friends said, don\u2019t do that because people will dip in and out. The second American edition of The Terrible Girls<\/em> they renamed \u201ca novel in stories\u201d so that people wouldn\u2019t just dip in and out, but read it from the start to the end, right? How do you indicate that without saying this is a novel, when it\u2019s not? I think we\u2019re going to call this new book a \u201ccycle,\u201d like a song cycle or a story cycle. The last piece of the cycle is a second-person narrative address. At the end of the book, this is a directive or it\u2019s an imperative or it\u2019s an intimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POLLY BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you speak to collaboration and having art in your work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m looking around to see if there\u2019s any result of that. I wrote a libretto for a dance opera, where we\u2014the dancer, the composer, and me\u2014all went up to Centrum for four days to hash this thing out. And I\u2019ve done work with visual artists. Some of these books over here are books of mine. This little book collaboration I did with a painter friend of mine, Nancy Kiefer, was translated into Japanese last year. And there is an issue of a magazine called Golden Handcuffs<\/em>. The editor, Lou Rowan, asked Fay Jones for some studies and then invited writers to respond to these visual works of hers and write about them. And here are these bookscbefore they were called \u201cerasures\u201d I was doing the same thing, but I called them \u201ccut and paste.\u201d And this is a whole book, The Mortals,<\/em> where I painted on every page in the book after picking out words to say what I wanted. That was shown at the Frye Art Museum and Hedreen Gallery and different places. I love working with other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VANDER MOLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You do a lot of hybrid work. Obviously, all genres are fair game with you. Is there anything you haven\u2019t tried but want to try? I didn\u2019t even know you did poetry, until I found some poems online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s so weird\u2014I never think of myself as a poet. There was a period a couple of summers ago that I was in a fucking state, and so somehow, I ended up writing a sonnet a day for a week or so, and I had this great feeling of, \u201cWell, that\u2019s something I\u2019ve never done!\u201d And in this new book there are a lot of pieces that are short lines\u2014they look like little quatrains, so I guess they\u2019re poems. I did a sort of one-woman performance show at Northwest Film Center several years ago. It was really fun. There are at least two more books I want to do. And maybe a third. I\u2019ve got these four essays about the seasons, and I would love for them to be a little book. Or maybe they\u2019d be part of a book of essays. I\u2019m working with Matthew Stadler, who does Fellow Traveller books, on a collection of essays to come out next year. He\u2019s an amazing editor, thinker, and friend. I can\u2019t wait to be part of his list. Roberto Tejada is also working on a book with him to come out next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. NEWELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think of a structure where you start writing and then things piece themselves out and you have to bring them all together, that seems like The Dogs<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t feel like you wrote it linearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At. All. The opening of the book is, \u201cOne night I saw a dog in my apartment.\u201d Okay. So the night I saw the dog in my apartment in my mind, up on 17th<\/sup> and Madison, was in 1985. Between \u201985 and \u201998, that was always the next book I was going to write. I was like, I\u2019m going to write this book of the dogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took so many shapes, and there were hundreds of pages. For a long time it was this travel narrative on a bus. And the dogs were driving the bus, and they were going through the desert and the mountains. It was hundreds of pages of stuff, like all this research on dogs\u2014Italian dogs and Renaissance and English dogs. Just tons of shit. I edited so many versions of that book. And then it got smaller and smaller and smaller and I had all these little pieces I was trying to put together of this narrative. I\u2019ve read a lot of medieval literature. I really like the medieval Christian visionaries, the insane, physically and mentally violent images. And that\u2019s the shape of this book. This book is not a novel. It\u2019s not a road trip. It\u2019s not \u201con the road with the dogs.\u201d But that took years on and off. And I had boxes of drafts of a long bus trip on the road with the dogs book. You wouldn\u2019t recognize it. So that came really retrospectively, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then at some point, like The Gifts of the Body <\/em>or Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary<\/em>, in the final shaping of the chapters, oh my god, this vision in which words were illustrated came, and once that was there I was like, now I know how it fits together. So it was a very long process. And when it really finally clicked, it did. But there were certainly many times before it that I thought, it\u2019s clicked, but it really hadn\u2019t yet. But I do think the final shape now is the right one. And these pieces weren\u2019t written in order. The chapter about \u201cI did not kill the child in the garden\u201d came about two thirds of the way through the writing of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEWELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of people have tried to dissect that book in terms of allegory, and everybody seems to get a slightly different meaning out of it. I was wondering how you felt about that, and then a follow-up question, how do you feel about dogs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, we have cats, as you know, and we have squirrels. Dogs are fine. I love playing with them and seeing them on the beach. But we don\u2019t actually have a dog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allegory is such an interesting idea. Historically, when you tell an allegory, it\u2019s because you can\u2019t say something directly, like, let\u2019s go have sex. So many of the Christian allegories are about penetrating the rose garden with your lance and your spear. Highly imaginative literature is about opening things up for us. I wasn\u2019t exactly sure what the dogs were. Is it me fighting with God? Is it me hating God and God hating me? Is it living with depression? I\u2019ve lived with severe clinical depression, and it\u2019s like, you\u2019re in or you\u2019re out of it. Is it that? There\u2019s part of the book that\u2019s clearly about being a female with a female body in a male world\u2014you know, a woman is a bitch, a dog, and then how does that relate to men being wolves? All of that, the religious side of it, the medical side of it\u2014what is it? It\u2019s the sum of all those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my experience in my apartment, it wasn\u2019t a psychotic break. It was just like, oh shit. I wasn\u2019t crazy. I knew something bad was going on in my head, I was aware something was fucked. But I wondered, why was it this big, black dog? Then dogs kept going in my imagination. I wasn\u2019t actually seeing things, but I felt like<\/em> I was seeing things. The mystics actually write really well about modes of perception, seeing bodily, seeing spiritually; they understood it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Churchill was also a depressive, and he saw black dogs\u2014that\u2019s what he called his depression, black dogs\u2014and, um, Kafka had black dogs and mice, and in the Catholic church there\u2019s an order of preachers started by and named after Saint Dominic, also known as the domini canes<\/em>; i.e., the Dogs of God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing about allegory is that it can be read so many different ways. That complexity really appeals to me. People have different views of it, and that\u2019s great. Even if they\u2019re completely off the ledge with it, I\u2019m like, whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve taught \u201cThe Girl Who Cried Wolf,\u201d and students all have different interpretations. One\u2014and it connects to The Dogs<\/em>\u2014is that it\u2019s about psychiatric illness. And how it\u2019s invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An invisible disability. And specifically with \u201cThe Girl Who Cried Wolf,\u201d the phrases \u201cthere, there, it\u2019s fine\u201d and \u201coh honey, the rest of us aren\u2019t upset.\u201d And it\u2019s like, I know. I know you\u2019re not upset, just patronizing, as if invisible disabilities don\u2019t exist. \u201cThe Girl Who Cried Wolf\u201d is in Not Heaven, Somewhere Else<\/em>. For a while I considered \u201cThe Girl Who Cried Wolf\u201d as the title of the book, but with that title it would have leaned more towards fairytale and violence, and I wanted it a little quieter. Now the title seems really right for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the thing about allegory, it should open up possibilities, and not say, \u201cBing! You got it, that\u2019s it.\u201d I went to a reading one time and there was this one person who read one of my stories, and I just couldn\u2019t believe her interpretation, and I was like, hmm, wow, thanks, I guess? But if you put it out there, to a degree it\u2019s yours, but to a degree it\u2019s not. Again though, it\u2019s really flattering that people read your work and think different things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VANDER MOLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a lot of your books you put your characters through hell\u2014literally take their arms off, sores just won\u2019t heal, bleeding all over the bed. There\u2019s a lot of assault, including sexual assault, and I was wondering how you chose certain actions to happen to characters and how they furthered the story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a violent imagination. We live in a really violent culture. And I think also as a woman\u2014you know there\u2019s this thing that women aren\u2019t supposed to express anger\u2014I think some of that writing comes partly from holding in anger, partly from imagining anger as a way of getting through something. But again it\u2019s not a choice. Where did the image of pushing the person down the disposal come from? I don\u2019t know. Where did the image of pulling the walker out from the old lady and stepping on her face until she died come from? I don\u2019t know. But clearly there\u2019s something in me that\u2019s got an extreme imagination and sometimes that violence is extreme\u2014and something about physical violence expressing emotional pain, emotional violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an interplay between what\u2019s interior and exterior. I just read that piece about the kids playing war, \u201cTrenches,\u201d and in some ways it\u2019s a commentary, certainly, about the world in which we live, and on the other hand, it\u2019s all interior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right, right. Kids! And the sort of ease with which, dear God, the violence, we don\u2019t even think about. There\u2019s torture. Like every single fucking movie I see, there\u2019s a torture scene. When did this happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VANDER MOLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you worry it will turn people off from your work? A lot of times the actions are working in the story really well, but readers might have a hard time with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are so many books out there, and very few people read. And if they don\u2019t like your work, they\u2019re going to read something else. Obviously my work isn\u2019t for everyone, but whose is? The only people forced to read your work are students. I get a little worried when I think, for example, about this new book: It\u2019s a little too weird for these people, a little too Christian for these people. Maybe I should just publish twenty copies of it. I can\u2019t really read this out loud there, and if I\u2019m reading with so-and-so, this would upset them, and this is a little bit too woo-woo. . . . That\u2019s the place where I am in my life. It\u2019s like, you\u2019ve written all these books and you\u2019ve kind of made some money, but not really. I\u2019m still teaching half-time. Didn\u2019t get the big reviews, didn\u2019t get the big grants. Hell, I could\u2019ve written different kinds of books, but actually I couldn\u2019t have. Because people say, \u201cOh those books are so easy to write,\u201d and it\u2019s like, no, you go try to write a well-done, mainstream, well-plotted, character-rich book: that\u2019s hard. And they\u2019re different kinds of skills. Just because you can do one thing, doesn\u2019t mean, \u201cOh, I could write something if I just lowered my standards.\u201d One, it\u2019s not lower standards, and two, it\u2019s really different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VANDER MOLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned with The Dogs<\/em> that you had this image of a black dog in your apartment and how that really inspired you. Were there any other occasions where you were inspired by something outside of yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple times. Sometimes I\u2019ve had things like, I hear a sentence, and I don\u2019t know what it is or what it means, and I just follow that sentence. Like that sentence, \u201cI did not kill the child in the garden,\u201d which clearly has a rhythm to it, but also it has this mythic, like, woah! What\u2019s that? \u201cOne night I saw a dog in my apartment\u201d\u2014same kind of thing. And in a book that I would like to finish and have be my next book, I remember being at the gym one time and I saw this little picture in my head of me on a raft on the Nisqually River. And then I wrote a story from that. A lot of times I\u2019ll hear a part of a phrase and it\u2019s very aural and it\u2019s very rhythmic and like, what is that? What is that? I just try to follow it. Not that you can call up or demand that kind of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was wondering about that relationship with readership and publishing. Because you\u2019ve published with a lot of really interesting, cool presses. I\u2019m thinking the London presses\u2014Brilliance Books, Picador, Granta Books\u2014and City Lights and Seal Books, and I know you did handmade books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And my next publisher is Tarpaulin Sky, which is basically one guy, a former student. Small press guy. Here are some of his books. And he has this print magazine. They\u2019re beautifully done books. A really interesting list. But you\u2019re not going to find them in bookstores. There\u2019s so much interesting publishing going on. And so much publishing that I have no interest in at all. So who do we write for, who reads this, how do we access these books? It\u2019s a funny thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the agents I sent my work to said, \u201cI love your work, it\u2019s really beautiful but I can\u2019t make money. I can\u2019t represent it, but you might think of sending it to City Lights.\u201d So I sent it to City Lights. This was the early \u201990s. The editor there was a woman named Amy Scholder, and she said she had been looking for a lesbian writing interesting work for years. There was a lot of lesbian writing around, but it was much more mainstream, traditional storytelling. She was really interested in my formal stuff and the emotional violence. They did like six books of mine, and then they turned this last one down. So then I sent this manuscript to probably four or five different people. I have an agent of record, but I\u2019ve placed my last books on my own\u2014the books don\u2019t make much money. I do read a lot of small presses. And having been involved in this world for thirty-five years, I\u2019ve met different people, and there\u2019s certain lists I really like. Do you guys know Dorothy Press? Phenomenal. Run by Danielle Dutton in Missouri. She publishes two books a year. Most of the books are by women, and it\u2019s a beautiful, beautiful list. I sent it to them. I sent it to Hawthorne Books in Portland. Lovely woman there, Rhonda Hughes. And they all had great reasons for rejecting my book. And I\u2019m like, \u201cMakes total sense, let\u2019s keep in touch, love you guys!\u201d It doesn\u2019t kill me. I\u2019ve published a bunch of books already, and I\u2019m sixty-three. So I just send it to presses I\u2019m interested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEWELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The queer lit genre has become almost segregated; in bookstores it has its own section, its own shelf. Do you think it\u2019s necessary for it to have its own section, or do you think it can be included in the wider genre of fiction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a lesbian writer in the \u201970s, there was no section. There was no nothing. So we had gay and lesbian bookstores because they weren\u2019t in the mainstream. And then they were in the mainstream, but only in a certain section. It\u2019s so much more open now that there are actually queer characters in mainstream books in a way there weren\u2019t before. Alan Hollinghurst can get some national book award or National Book Critics Circle Award, and he\u2019s gay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anytime you\u2019ve got hyphenated literature\u2014Black-American literature, Chicano literature, women\u2019s literature, queer literature, Northwest literature\u2014on the one hand, it makes it less than<\/em>, hyphenated means less than. And on the other hand, you go in a bookstore, and you think, I want to read something by a Northwest writer. Sometimes the sectioning really helps. \u201cMy grandchild is coming out and I want to read a book about transgender youth. Is there a section for that?\u201d \u201cYeah, here you go, Grandma. Here\u2019s some books to bring home to your transgender grandkid.\u201d So it can definitely go both ways. But as a lesbian who was writing lesbian work in the early \u201980s, that work wasn\u2019t in the mainstream for a long, long time. On the one hand: \u201cone of the best African-American writers of our time\u201d\u2014is someone going to say that about Toni Morrison? No, Toni Morrison: one of the best writers in America, or one of the best writers in the world. But you also want to have something where it\u2019s just like, I don\u2019t have to read through 500 titles before I come across one title by a Chicano author. So you say, \u201cIs there a Chicano author section?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember in the early \u201990s when I was teaching at the extension at the University of Washington. I was an out lesbian and, at that time, the only out gay person teaching. At one point, somebody dropped the class because she was like, \u201cI\u2019m not here to learn gay literature,\u201d and I was like, \u201cOkay great, you probably don\u2019t want to be here, that\u2019s fine.\u201d But then there was this incident in the class. A young lesbian says, \u201cI just want to write literature. I don\u2019t want to be categorized,\u201d and I was supposed to say, what? You think I wanted<\/em> to be categorized? As a lesser-than, hyphenated writer? I would say to adult people in this class, \u201cLet me see a show of hands of people who\u2019ve read. . . .\u201d And then I named like ten gay and lesbian authors, and nobody in the class had read any of them. They were like, \u201cI would read that,\u201d like they had nice intentions and didn\u2019t want to not read books by gay people, but I was like, \u201cBut do you?\u201d I\u2019m just saying what the reality is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other side, I teach at the university up here, and I\u2019m the only lesbian person on the faculty, which is fine\u2014it\u2019s a small faculty\u2014but, over the course of the semester, about two-thirds of the way through the semester, there will almost always be at least two really thoughtful, nice, straight, white guys who come into my office and will be like, \u201cSomeone called me out. . . .\u201d They won\u2019t say it, but they\u2019ll really be asking, \u201cDid you find this portrayal of this woman offensive?\u201d These straight white guys have not been hyphenated\u2014they\u2019re just targets in academia these days. So I end up actually working with a lot of these poor men because I\u2019m able to assure them that in these particular projects, no, you\u2019re not being offensive just because you are a guy writing about a woman in some of your work. Like, if you\u2019re writing a story about the real world, there\u2019s probably going to be different kinds of characters in your story, right? They\u2019re not all going to be Mother Teresa. It\u2019s just a really tricky time about, um, more \u201cidentity-er than thou.\u201d It\u2019s a really, really tricky time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SPIRO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mention your religion a lot. I was wondering how your faith plays into your writing process. I\u2019m Jewish and it plays a central part in my writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think both Christians and Jews, from what I know, and maybe people of other faiths, have ideas about the word and the flesh. And the idea of the living word and storytelling and action, the necessity of passing these stories down, is profound. It\u2019s profound. And God is that which we can\u2019t see, so we have to tell stories. God has been around longer than us, so we have to use the stories of our ancestors to perceive this kind of divine mystery. Story-carrying and story-making and word and imaging is really a piece of that. I\u2019ve been reading this book Walking on Water: Reflections of Faith and Art <\/em>by Madeline L\u2019Engle. She\u2019s such a good writer, and I think whether one is a person of faith or not, the thing about the responsibility of the writer in the world and the importance of writing is that it is an act of faith. You write stuff, and one, maybe you\u2019ll never finish it; two, maybe no one will ever read it; and three, you may be self-indulgent. But you just do this thing as a way of self-knowledge and interaction with the world. I\u2019ve been able to think about making art and trying to be aware of the divine as tied up together. With The Gifts of the Body<\/em> and with The Terrible Girls,<\/em> there\u2019s this thing of taking a body out of the ground. There\u2019s a bearing and lifting up a lot. And with The Dogs,<\/em> there was a child lifted out of the ground and placed in a river and going towards the light. Those images happen a lot in Christianity; there\u2019s a lot of drawing on imagery of light and water and darkness and burials that has always been really important to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About six years ago, I was fully received into the Roman Catholic Church. Obviously, there are things I disagree with about the dogma of the mainstream Church\u2014Catholics don\u2019t have female priests, there is doctrine against gay marriage. There\u2019s the awfulness of the sex abuse crisis and cover-up. All of that is there. But I guess it\u2019s kind of like being an American. Am I pro-Trump? Am I anti-immigrant or a white nationalist? No. But I stay in America despite that crap and for the good stuff. Chris and I are lucky to have found two very progressive Catholic parishes. And for me the notion of storytelling, going to Mass to hear one story from the Old Testament and one from the New, it\u2019s like hearing the old stories again. It\u2019s like a reading and then dinner together after. And saying we\u2019re trying to come talk and eat together in peace and mercy\u2014it\u2019s just profound. There\u2019s things like going to the altar, a really simple thing, but something happens there that I don\u2019t understand but that is good. The big stuff in life we don\u2019t really understand, we just have it and are grateful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think the occult nature of Catholicism attracted you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know, some of the rituals I really love. And certainly the necessity of ritual. In our community recently, we had three funerals right after the other. It was brutal. Fucking brutal. There was one young person who was disabled, a ninety-four-year-old woman who had a great long life, and a sixty-four-year-old who just fell over\u2014boom\u2014from a heart attack. And we all gathered there, and we all had the meal, and the priest sprinkled the water, and there was the incense, and we were just all like, okay, here\u2019s stuff we don\u2019t understand. We\u2019re really sorry, and we\u2019re going to say the prayers we\u2019ve been saying for 2,000 years, and we will see you in heaven, or not, but we will remember you in this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everybody dies. But in a community with sacraments, it\u2019s not like they just die, and we go home and watch TV. We come together, and we say the old words and water and wine and song. One thing about structured religion is having other people to help you along. Of course, the downside is having other people tell you what to do, you know, don\u2019t be gay, don\u2019t be a woman, have this kind of sex but not that kind, all that, which I guess a lot of structures have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there was something about it, you know? I love classical music. I love classical art. That\u2019s very Catholic, all of that western culture stuff, and then once a week, I go to a hospital and I take Holy Communion with people. Most of these people are in trouble\u2014I mean, they\u2019re in the hospital. But they want this, and they want to be with their family and say the old words they know. It\u2019s this profound thing\u2014we\u2019re going to hold hands and say the words and eat this little thing together, that kind of ritual. There\u2019s something bigger than us. Some people don\u2019t think so, but I do. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s something greater than heaven or earth, as the philosophy goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SPIRO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you have rituals when you write?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not really. I don\u2019t write every day. I have long periods where I don\u2019t write, months of not writing. I forgot this, but my friend asked, \u201cDo you remember two years ago when you said you were done writing?\u201d And I said, \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cAnd how about a year ago?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d I always think I\u2019m done writing and then something else comes out, but no I don\u2019t have any rituals with my writing. I have conditions that are better for the writing. I have this studio, and Chris is retired now, but when she was at work, I had this very open head space. I\u2019m just very porous. I\u2019m very aware when I\u2019m not the only one in the house. Last week I was in my office on campus on a Friday and there was no one around. It was perfect. Solitude is good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SPIRO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there any biblical stories you draw inspiration from again and again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just literally and simply the story of bringing people back to life. People are dead and they come back. I think of it a little like the downside of bipolar depression, the feeling of, \u201cThat\u2019s it, I\u2019m done, no more\u201d\u2014the idea that there\u2019s life after death, and then asking, was I really that dark? What was I worried about? This chemical lifting of light after dark. And the story of Jacob wrestling with the angels\u2014it\u2019s like, who are you? I can\u2019t leave until I know this thing. Who are you, who am I, what\u2019s the name?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another story that\u2019s incredibly troubling for me is the story of Abraham and Isaac. If you love me, you\u2019ll kill your son for me, and it\u2019s like, no way! If that\u2019s the kind of god you are. It\u2019s really hard for me to wrap my head around that, but I know it\u2019s a story of faith. But don\u2019t ever ask somebody to do that. There\u2019s this book, New Animals, <\/em>by Nick Francis Potter from Subito Press. They do really great work in Colorado, and there\u2019s this story in there called \u201cOops, Isaac.\u201d The angel in the story shows up and tells Abraham, don\u2019t do it. In this story, the angel gets lost on his way to Isaac, \u201cOh, sorry, Isaac.\u201d It\u2019s great\u2014don\u2019t give the wrong angel the job, cause he\u2019s like, \u201cSorry! Sorry!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also the story of Paul: he goes from being really sure and really right and pure and turns around like, \u201cOh what have I done? I\u2019ve got to stop persecuting people.\u201d And he doesn\u2019t become perfect, he is still kind of awful sometimes. And the one with Jesus at the well and the Samaritan woman\u2014they were so flirtatious. What kind of water do you have? What kind of water do you want? What are you doing here? You\u2019re not supposed to be here. Well, neither are you. The whole idea that Jesus abdicates the role of being a big Jewish patriarch, a man with a wife and a bunch of kids and a father of a nation. No, for him family is going to be not a wife and biological kids but people who try to be merciful and kind and good to one another; a family of kindred feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHARDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You said that one of the stories you\u2019re most interested in is bringing the dead back to life. I had a question about the moral issues you face whenever you want to write about deceased people in your own life. You\u2019ve said you\u2019re a purist\u2014obviously, you don\u2019t want to make up lies. If you write about the living, you\u2019re able to send them a copy and get their consent before it\u2019s sent out and published, and they can say, \u201cTweak this. I don\u2019t want people to know my jean size.\u201d But if they\u2019re deceased, they can\u2019t do that. How do you come to terms with that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a great question. I\u2019ll just use a couple anecdotes. In The Gifts of the Body<\/em>, when I started doing the AIDS work, I totally went not as a writer. Partly, I went into that work because I was sick of writing and the writing world. But one of my clients found out I was a writer and he was like, are you going to write about me one day, and I\u2019m like, no, this is not what I do. Not what I do. But he was like, are you going to write about me one day? Are you going to write about me? So in some ways I felt like he was commissioning me, and the book is partly dedicated to him. I really tried to honor all the people there and not be smarmy about any of them, and it was fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote a story called \u201cThe Widow\u201d which is in The Stranger<\/em>. It\u2019s about a woman who dies of cancer and her husband doesn\u2019t know what to do. It\u2019s a really sad story. My best pal died many, many years ago and her husband had said to me, \u201cIf you ever want to write anything, please do.\u201d As I\u2019m writing this thing, I asked him if he wanted to read it, and he was like, \u201cI trust your writing, but if you want me to read it I will, whatever you want to do.\u201d It wasn\u2019t just the story of my friend dying; it was a story about loss and grief and friendship and love. It\u2019s called a story, and the names are changed. But that\u2019s all. Same thing with writing about my mother. That book, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary<\/em>, began after my mother died. I did the eulogy at her memorial service, and then my family, who was there, said, can you give us a copy of the eulogy, and did you write anything about when you were taking care of your mom? And then we made this book. When the book was published, my mother\u2019s sister and her husband\u2014she really loved her sister\u2014came to the big opening, and we gave them a copy of the book. It was a real family thing. And so I feel like I try to do that honorably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was writing about them and I was writing about me, but I was also writing about the experience, what happens to someone after people die, what you remember and what you don\u2019t remember. To the degree that I\u2019ve been able to ask people, I have, and I think otherwise I\u2019ve tried to honor things as much as I can and not just tell tawdry stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve put a lot of my grief about my mom into that book. And there was also a kind of retrospective forgiveness of my father, who was not a bad man\u2014he didn\u2019t beat me or abuse me or anything\u2014he was just a troubled guy not cut out to be a husband or a dad. This book is about embracing and forgiving him and getting beyond that. It\u2019s really helpful to not suppress-contain, but to hold-contain grief. Art as a container for grief can be really helpful. Different friends have said, \u201cI read this book a year after my mom died, and it helped.\u201d Or, \u201cI read this after my friend\u2019s mom died, and it helped me understand my friend.\u201d And that\u2019s good that it can do that. That\u2019s good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d love to hear more about the level of mysticism in your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you know the name of the first named woman who ever wrote a book in the English language that we know is written by a woman? Not anonymous, but the name of the woman who wrote the first book in the English language? Julian of Norwich. 1374. Her book is called Revelations of Divine Love in Sixteen Showings.<\/em> She was living in Norwich. She has a profound illness for three days. They think she\u2019s dead or almost dead. And she has sixteen visions. And then she just describes them\u2014what I was talking earlier about the mystics, bodily seeing, spiritual seeing, mental seeing\u2014she talks a lot about that. She\u2019s really psychologically adept about levels of perception and awareness. And she\u2019s also really bodily. She describes being sick, and paralyzed, and hot and cold, and then she has these sixteen visions, in the course of a day, like May 9, 1374, or around then. And they\u2019re all of Jesus, Jesus bleeding, Jesus whatever, so they\u2019re graphic and gory. She writes little visions of what she saw and then she writes a whole chapter about what it means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whole thing about bodily violence, physical violence, and sexual violence: the mystics are all about that. They\u2019re really about the body as a site to try to describe what\u2019s going on in your mind. The violence of your mind is described as getting your head cut off. Or having things gouged into you, or having flowers blossom out of you. Right? That stuff is hugely important to me: Julian; John of the Cross; Catherine of Sienna; The Cloud of Unknowing<\/em>. They\u2019re just these bodily, intense, deep images that are trying to describe the ineffable. That which cannot be named.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I turned sixty, I flew myself to England for a week by myself to see Julian\u2019s church, and when I was received in the Catholic Church, I took the name Julian as my confirmation name. I wrote the people at the Children of Norwich church\u2014there\u2019s a little nun\u2019s house next door\u2014and I said, \u201cI want to come to your church. Can I come hang out with you?\u201d It\u2019s this big sixteen-room place, and it was me and one nun. And I\u2019m like, \u201cSo, can we watch TV?\u201d The church at Norwich, where Julian wrote this book, is still there. Basically, it\u2019s like a hole in the ground, and they say they built a church around it. I was in the church every day, and one day I closed the inside door behind me, and plaster fell off the outside door. Gasp! Oh my god! Of course, I stole the plaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, that stuff is tough to describe. For me, it\u2019s one of those things about religion versus philosophy, or even psychology. In philosophy and psychology you get the idea that they believe they can explain things. And religion ultimately goes back to, \u201cActually, we can\u2019t explain this. Therefore, we have mystery, therefore we have ritual, because you really can\u2019t explain this shit.\u201d That\u2019s the appeal to me. To just acknowledge we won\u2019t get it. There\u2019s something we won\u2019t get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s interesting in what you\u2019re talking about, and when I think about like Joseph Campbell, or the Greek notion of psyche, is that it\u2019s so male-dominated. But you\u2019re talking about female practitioners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exactly, and particularly in Christianity, the men were the scholars, so they were in the monasteries, they were reading the old texts, and there was this blossoming of females outside the men\u2019s academy, having their own separate female world of education and music and language, because they weren\u2019t studying the scholastic stuff. And Julian\u2019s really big on the motherhood of God. She talks about Mother and Father God, and she talks about the blood from Jesus\u2019s side as actually like a mother giving milk. They\u2019re really about the nurturing-ness of the body. Really profound, whole thinking. Great stuff. She didn\u2019t believe in hell. She couldn\u2019t wrap her head around a god who would send anybody to hell. Theologically, she\u2019s ultimately an optimist and had this profound experience. Her big line is, \u201cAll shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plus, she wrote this one book in her life, but she wrote it twice. It took her twenty years. I can get behind that, right? You live in a fucking cell alone, writing this same book twice\u2014Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHARDS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lived to be really old, too. The back of the book says she\u2019s like seventy-two?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BROWN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was old for back then. Yeah, yeah. On the other hand, she probably didn\u2019t smoke or drink or have bad sex or anything, you know? No nasty boyfriends or girlfriends, just like, lived alone with a cat. Chillin\u2019 with her cat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TO READ REBECCA BROWN’S WORK is to be led by a minimalistic and incantatory voice into a world simultaneously familiar and peculiar. Brown\u2019s stories\u2014true and fictional\u2014are imaginative, obsessive, witty, often dark, and always brilliant. Through her exploration of themes such as violence, youth and aging, loss, and human connection, Brown is a master of blurring the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":1679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35993"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36800,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35993\/revisions\/36800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}