SOURCE: Brown, Rosellen, and Missouri Review. “An Interview with Rosellen Brown.” Missouri Review 17, no. 1 (1994): 91-115.

In the following interview, Brown discusses her current writing projects, the pros and cons of writing a best-seller, and politics in her writing.

[Interviewer]: Can you tell us about your background, your family, and early influences?

[Brown]: I think my beginnings as a writer were not unlike those of a good many others. I was feeling particularly cast out at a certain point. I was nine, and the writing was a comfort. We had just moved from one coast to the other and I was very lonely in a new school, so I started taking along a secretarial notebook in which I didn't so much confide as create friends for myself, and play with language, right out there on the playground where I thought at the time I was being ignored by the...