Douglas Brown
My first recognizable purpose was to write. As a kid growing up in suburban Philadelphia, I just wrote to write.
I was editor of the Spider Web in sixth grade at Haverford Friends School. I got to print the pages with a mimeograph machine. 1964. I remember the smell of the ink and some great excitement of duplicating whatever students had entered for the magazine. It was pure magic.
I took creative writing at boarding school and won the Atlantic Monthly 1970-1971 Creative Writing Contest for High School and Private School Students Merit Award for a short story called “The Edge” and Honorable Mention for a poem called” High School”. Queried by the Exeter instructor, Frederick Tremallo, as to why I write I told him I wrote to “Give something to somebody”.
At boarding school I was the Editor of the Literary Magazine, Pendulum, and got to put my own stuff in. And my girlfriend’s stuff. She was (still is) a really good illustrator.
After working in Montana for a year building lodge-pole fences and barbwire enclosures, spending all my money on a redhead, I took creative writing at Cabrillo Junior College with Kirby Wilkins. 1973? I recently discovered a story I wrote in his class which he wanted to submit to the then En-Compass or Compass Cabrillo Literary Magazine. I don’t know if it got published.
In 1998 a poem I wrote, “Strangers in a City”, was published in Fresh Hot Bread, a Palo Alto poetry magazine.
In 2014 I got a poem published, Los Angeles, Garbanzo Literary Magazine, Volume 4.
Now I have one book on Amazon “The Path of Dreams”. It is about justice, time travel and love.
I put my poetry and short stories on Poetry Soup.
Douglas Brown