Sweet Briar College Magazine - Fall 2018

THE ARTS
GETTING TO KNOW
CARRIE
BROWN
Brown is the author of seven acclaimed
novels, most recently “The Stargazer’s
Sister,” which won the Library of Virginia’s
2017 People’s Choice Award — and
a collection of short stories. She has
won many awards, including a National
Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the
Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for work
by an American woman writer, the
Great Lakes Book Award and, twice,
the Library of Virginia Award for fiction.
Her short fiction and essays have appeared
in many journals, including Tin
House, The Southern Review, One Story,
Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review
and The Oxford American.
sbc.edu
When President Meredith Woo
launched the College’s centers of
excellence, she knew they would need
talented and dedicated leaders. It is perhaps
no surprise, then, that she tapped
longtime faculty member Carrie Brown
as director of the Center for Creativity,
Design and the Arts.
Brown grew up in New England, but
because of her father’s job, she also
spent some of her childhood in England
and Hong Kong. She attended
Brown University as an undergraduate
and completed her Master of Fine Arts
degree at the University of Virginia.
She’s now lived at Sweet Briar longer
than she’s lived anywhere else, and her
work as a novelist is rooted on the College’s
campus. She worked as a journalist
for many years but began seriously
writing fiction when her husband —
John Gregory Brown, director of Sweet
Briar’s English and creative writing program
— accepted a job at Sweet Briar in
1994. Brown published her first novel,
“Rose’s Garden,” four years later.
Though her first novel didn’t appear
until 1998, she actually wrote her first
fiction in middle school, when she and
her classmates were given an assignment
(“Not a very imaginative one, I might
add,” she says) to record the events of
their daily lives in a journal. “My daily
life was pretty dull,” Brown admits, “and
before long I began to make things up
in order to liven up my entries. This
made the assignment far more entertaining
for me, but my anecdotes grew
increasingly dramatic, and eventually
my parents were called in to school, and
my imaginative excesses were discovered.
Now everyone in my family thinks
that’s a funny story, which I suppose it
is — I made up some pretty outlandish
stuff — but in some ways, even though
I’d always loved books, it was also my
first serious taste of the pleasure of
invention. I’ve wanted to be a writer
ever since.”
That long-ago assignment may have
seemed boring to the young Brown,
but she seems to have taken the idea to
heart, perhaps helped along by some
advice Henry James once gave to an
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