Rosellen Brown: “I was nine when words began to serve their extraordinary purposes for me.”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of American novelist and poet Rosellen Brown, born in Philadelphia in 1939. Her novels include Tender Mercies (1978), Before and After (1992), and Half a Heart (2000), which tells the story of a white, Jewish woman who is reunited with the biracial daughter she abandoned during the sixties.

Her family moved around a lot when she was a child, and Brown began reading writers like Turgenev and Dostoevsky. She said, “I was nine when words began to serve their extraordinary purposes for me: I was lonely and they kept me company, they materialized whenever I called on them, without an argument or a competitive leer.” Brown, who is white, taught at a black college in Tougaloo, Mississippi, during the civil rights era, and began to write politically charged poetry.

She said, “I still write for the same reason I wrote when I was nine years old: to speak more perfectly than I really can, to a listener more perfect than any I know,” and “Writing, getting something down on the page, is a gratification that, like a child faced with a candy bar and an empty stomach, I have trouble postponing.”

Brown has published eleven books – novels, short stories, poetry, and essays.