An Interview with Author/Poet Eve Brouwer
by: Donald G. Redman
 |
Eve Brouwer
Photo by Donald G. Redman |
Eve Brouwer’s thousand-watt smile and effervescent
personality lights up any room she enters. The former manager
of the national Chia Pet television campaign – yes, that Cha-Cha-Cha Chia Pet –
Eve has been a professional writer since 1980, first as a newspaper reporter
then later as a writer for public relations and advertising
firms. Today, she resides in Covington, Louisiana,
where she continues to write, this time for art.
Her published works include short stories and poetry which
have been recognized by the New Orleans Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, and by Louisiana Inklings. Eve was recently named as the 2012 St.
Tammany Parish Literary Artist of the Year and she serves on the board of the
Northshore Literary Society and helped organize Poets Alive!. She earned her B.A. at Loyola University in Chicago and her Master of Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago.
The Redman Writing Project
recently caught up with Eve for an interview...
RWP: What were your earliest writing experiences? Did you
write for the high school newspaper and did you keep a journal? Did you enter
any writing or poetry contests in school? What did you do to foster the writing
bug?
Eve Brouwer: I think
I’ve always had a strong creative instinct.
I don’t know if that’s something that’s inherited or acquired. My father was an artist: he played acoustical guitar, painted, and
wrote. My mother is a voracious
reader. My sister and I could not help
but love art, music and literature, especially literature, anything to do with
words—talking, reading, writing, acting. Anything I did to “foster the writing
bug” was inadvertent, merely a natural, everyday activity.
RWP: At what point did you decide you
wanted to be a writer? Was there one teacher, one influence or was it just an
accumulation of events?
Eve Brouwer:
It was an uncomfortable event that put me on the path to writing. In seventh grade, in the Chicago Public School
system, I had a wonderful teacher who was enthusiastic and kind and
sincere. When our standardized test
scores came in, she was thrilled to see that two of her students had scored
literally off the chart in the verbal section of the standardized test the CPS
system was using at that time. She
singled us out, Loretta and me, and, in front of the whole class, asked us what
we wanted to do when we grew up. The
question had never before occurred to me.
Loretta said she wanted to be a lawyer.
All I liked to do at that time was read, so, thinking of the great
literature I was just beginning to discover, I said I’d like to be a
writer. Later in life, when I found
myself wishing I had pursued less nebulous and more lucrative goals, I thought
it would have been wise if I’d just copied Loretta’s answer and followed her
into law!
RWP: How did you get your first start?
What was your first published piece?
Eve Brouwer: I submitted a piece, “No,
I’m Not Dutch,” to a national, religious magazine, The Banner. The article was
about the experience I’d had as a student, in the 1960’s, at a private,
suburban, faith-based high school that had been founded by immigrants from the Netherlands. Chicago at that time was—and perhaps it
continues to be—comprised of ethnic groups who insulated themselves, were
definitely not part of America’s “melting pot” mystic: my parents—he of German descent, she of
Italian—had in large part broken free of their ethnic bonds and expanded our
family’s horizons; but my sister and I were being raised in a small Italian
enclave on the city’s west side and she and I towered, although we were each
only about 5’4” tall, over most of the neighborhood’s Neopolitans; it was a
shock, then, on the first day of high school, to find myself suddenly short . .
. and dark! But I was, in fact, a shrimp
in a sea of tall, fair, blue-eyed, very curious students who, it appeared from
their questions, could not believe a non-Dutchman had entered their midst. As
you would expect, the point of the article addressed the meatier differences
underlying these superficial ones.
RWP: Tell us about your poetry:
Eve Brouwer: My sixth-grade teacher accused me of
plagiarism when I wrote this poem about autumn:
The falling leaves, colored
leaves,
Floating to the ground in a
frolicking breeze,
Covered with brown, red and gold,
Making way for the winter cold.
Of course I had not copied it. But I felt bad that I was accused. So now, as I’m answering your questions, I’m
thinking maybe that experience soured me on writing about nature. But perhaps I’m being melodramatic here. Still, in any case, I don’t write about nature.
I write about the metaphors in the objects and in the
activities of our ordinary, day-to-day lives.
Although I attempt to create layers of meanings, my goal is for the
pieces to be understood and enjoyed at any level, perhaps merely as stories,
perhaps as stories with meaning.
“The Tarantella,” for
instance, while ostensibly recounting a day in the lives of a
multi-generational family, is actually speaking of the challenges we all face
in trying to balance and blend traditional values and customs with the
relatively-new freedoms and opportunities to be found in contemporary society:
As the hours
passed,as we workedthat March dayin that hot
kitchen,the matriarch
told stories,told tales,of a long ago
sister-in-law who . . .did not like to
cook!Who would rather
work in her garden!!Or write poems!!!Or paint
pottery!!!!Or go to parties!!!!!Than prepare
meals for her family.“Hmmmm,” we three
murmured,eyes assiduously
averted,hands occupied,mincing garlic
into submission,focusing
energies,funneling
talents.Hot tomatoes
concentratingin and onthe contents of the pots.
Another poem of mine, “First Ladies,” a narrative piece,
tells the tale of four friends, each of whom was married in 1963 and divorced
in 1976. But it places their personal
events in the larger context of the upheavals of those tumultuous years:
The world turned and skewed, and,
through curious eyes,
we viewed askance
political revolutions.
Through amazed eyes,
we read, titillated,
by a sexual revolution.
With guilty consciences, we stood in line,
signed the children into pre-school.
Minute cracks in our solid veneer
let longings in,
let the Ms.’s hook their fingers toward us,
let the Ms,’s beguile us thus.
They kept their own names,
Wrote their own vows,
Took their own bows.
RWP: Most writers will tell you that
there is a particular time of the day they feel they are most creative and do
most of their writing. When do you do the bulk of your writing?
Eve Brouwer: I write in the morning, when
I’m the most alert and fresh. I keep
paper and pen on my nightstand and write my first drafts in longhand. Sometimes I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite
in longhand but usually I’ll key an early draft into the computer and continue
on from there.
RWP: What is the most difficult aspect of
writing for you?
Eve Brouwer: Wondering if my work is
effective, if it has a style of its own, if it’s too naïve or too obscure, if I
should be doing it at all.
RWP: Is there a person you turn to
for support or to critique your writing before publication?
Eve Brouwer: I have to mention what a great support my husband, Randy Cronk,
is. What I especially value is that he reads everything I write and
makes comments and even re-reads subsequent drafts.
As you can imagine, this hands-on
type of encouragement is invaluable. Having someone believe in you and in
your talent is good. Then when they actually put in this kind of time and
effort, it's fantastic!
RWP: What are your interests?
Eve Brouwer: Conversation and culture. I like sitting
around in restaurants, drinking wine, talking interminably, growing wittier by
the glass. I also love movies, especially foreign and independent films. St. Tammany Parish Library is a wonderful
resource. And I like opera. I appreciate the simulcast productions that
the NY Met makes available to us at the Stadium 14 movie theater in Covington.
RWP: What are you writing today?
Eve Brouwer: Aside from a number of individual poems and a
few short stories, I’m working on two projects:
selling my novella, My Grandmother
Danced, and co-writing a nonfiction book, with my sister, based on correspondence
between our parents during World War II.
o
My Grandmother Danced is about how we reach out to the world,
how we celebrate or shape or bury significant events, perhaps as wonderful
memories, perhaps as deeply-held secrets that we will forever keep hidden, even
from ourselves. More specifically, it’s the story of the repercussions that
follow when a naïve, exuberant bride happily accepts her father-in-law’s
invitation to dance with him at her wedding reception. However, the structure of My Grandmother Danced is rather unusual,
perhaps, I worry, too unusual: each
chapter is a poem, which, for marketing purposes, I’m no longer identifying as
poems but am now describing as “brief, lyrical chapters.” This terminology change is primarily due to
responses similar to that of an agent who, upon hearing the word poem, refused
to look at even the first page and said something like, “I never read
poetry. I didn’t study it in college. I don’t understand it.” I was shocked. Aren’t nursery rhymes our very first literary
love!
o
The
second project is the book I’m co-authoring with my sister, Phyllis Pals, who
is also a writer: our father was
second-generation American, but he’d learned German from his grandparents and
so found himself assigned to the POW camps in Fort Collins, Colorado. His letters are fascinating as a unique
window into the psyche of the Nazi prisoners and also as an incisive commentary
on the cultural and societal norms of the 1940’s. We’d like to include photos of paintings done
by one of the prisoners and given to my father.
A particular favorite is of me, copied from a photo my father carried
with him. My understanding is that the
prisoners made their own paints using vegetable oil that they colored with
substances found in nature. As is
obvious, we are still researching our facts.
RWP: What advice would you give to novice
writers or even those unpublished writers still slugging it out?
Eve Brouwer: Interact with writers as much as
possible. Listen to others and also tell
others about your craft. Whether you’re
published or not, identify yourself as a writer. Join literary groups and attend
conferences: in the St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, area, I especially recommend the Northshore
Literary Society and the local chapter of the Society of Children’s Book
Writers and Illustrators and Covington’s
Poets Alive!
List five of your favorite poets and or
authors:
o
James
Thurber
o
Thomas
Hardy
o
Marcel
Proust
o
Ha
Jin
o
Emily
Dickinson
o
Jon
Krakauer
List ten books you’ve read that you’ll never
forget:
o
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
o
The Ox Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg
Clark
o
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
o
When the Crocodile Eats the Sun, Peter Godwin
o
Berlin
Diaries 1940-1945, Marie
Vassiltchikov
o
Edie: American Girl, Jean Stein
o
Blooming, Susan Allen Toth
o
As Always, Julia, ed. Joan Reardon
o
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
o
One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty
o
The Little Red Guard, Wenguang Huang
o
Herself Defined: H. D. and Her World, Barbara Guest
Oh oh, maybe that’s more than ten!
RWP: What are you reading right now?
Eve Brouwer: Well, I have followed my own advice and have
joined the type of social and study groups where I meet a good number of
writers. That said, I also am a person
who wants everyone to like me and wants to please everyone . . . so, I’m
currently very busy trying to catch up and read books of authors I know. I want to be able to say, when I run into
these authors, “I read and enjoyed your book!”
These are some of them (and I really did like them!):
Cuba onMy Mind by Katie Wainwright;
Davenport’sVersion by John Gery;
Unless a LoveBe Free by Jerilyn Willin;
Dancing onGlass by Pamela Ewen Lott;
The Beachat Herculaneum by Susan G. Muth;
AmySigns by Rebecca Willman Gernon;
Mattersof the Heart by Mary Culver. And I’m
just now starting two more:
Mercury Falls
by Robert Kroese and
Finding Faith in theCity Care Forgot by Teena Myers.
RWP: Where can people find your work and
where can they follow you?
Eve Brouwer: Two of my pieces—a poem, “The Tarantella,”
and a short story, “Gloria,” are included in
Louisiana Inklings: A Literary Sampler, an anthology that is
available electronically through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
A non-fiction book I especially liked contributing to is The Mad Cow Crisis: Health and the Public
Good, edited by Scott Ratzan.
RWP: Thank you.
Copyright 2013 Donald G. Redman. All rights reserved.
The idea of testing out Kleon’s method for creating
poetry has been lying dormant for several years, but on a whim one recent Sunday
morning, I scooped up the freebie newspaper off the driveway and brought it
inside to attempt to create poetry from a news article.
