I discovered the short stories of Doug Brown thanks to an interview of him a couple of months ago on the podcast Short Story Today (which I highly recommend), and I have since delved into his collection of short stories, My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some (Serif Press, 2023). What immediately struck me about Doug during the interview was his background, which is similar to mine. After a 40-year career in marketing and management, he is focusing on his passion for writing fiction. He also describes his formative years as a “feral youth,” which is a fitting description of my early years. Follow Doug on X/Twitter at @DougBrownFables.
- Your path to becoming a writer of short stories is rather unusual. Can you talk a bit about how you arrived at your current state as a writer of short fiction?
My path was basically college, grad school, career #1, marriage, parenthood, career #2, career #3, empty nesting, epiphany. In college I was one of those nerds who was good at English and math. I got my undergraduate degree in English with a quantitative minor and then went on to grad school. While still in college, I decided I needed to get some life experience before trying to write seriously. So I studied computer science and economics and went on to career #1 (ironically as “the numbers guy”). Then, I got lucky and married way out of my league and we had two pretty awesome kids. Career #1 went fairly well. I made it to COO/CMO of a mid-sized company. But by the time our kids were in high school, career #1 had basically run it’s course. I did that thing where you reinvent yourself. “If you didn’t have to worry about money, what would you do?” Career #2 was five very interesting years of beating my head against a rock. After five years, I had to start worrying about money. And then I surrendered to just collecting a paycheck for doing online marketing — career #3. By that time, the kids were done with school and had jobs and homes of their own. When the dust settled, I poked my bruised head up and realized I had the luxury of a steady low-stress job and a quiet house. That’s when my wife and I went to a backyard barbecue and we ran into the mother of a college buddy of mine. She said, “I remember you! You were the boy who wanted to write stories!” And I said, “Yeah. You’re right. I was the boy who wanted to write stories.” And my wife and I went home, and that night I said, “I think it’s time to write stories.”
- How did you become interested in writing short fiction? Do you have any plans to write a novel one day?
I’ve always enjoyed short stories. I wrote short stories in college. So when I decided to pick up writing again, it was the logical place to start. Everyone I ever read seriously started with short stories. When I started writing again two years ago, I spent about six months producing a very mixed bag of stories — some that are still favorites and some dogs. As I got up to speed, I became increasingly aware of the manifold flaws and occasional virtues in some of my earlier stories. I drew up a set of goals. I wanted to finish a dozen solid stories in the first twelve months. I wanted to get a couple of stories accepted. I wanted to put together a collection that fairly represented my sensibility. I wanted to find a publisher for that collection. Then I wanted to repeat that cycle and produce a second collection. I figured in the time it took me to produce two collections of short stories, I would have worked out my demons and settled into a pretty intentional, disciplined writing routine. In that time I thought I would have a fairly good idea what I was capable of and what I aspired to. I’d also have a good file of material to draw on and maybe some outlines or characters that I could work into a novel. At that point, if a novel seemed to take shape in my mind, I’d give that a go. But even then, I’d still be working on stories. I think it’s always good to have more than one project active at a time. But if the novel thing doesn’t materialize, that’s ok, too. One alternative form that interests me is the episodic dramatic series of short stories built on a set of related characters and related recurring locations. It see that such writing could translate into serial video content. It seems to me that’s the direction the market is leading. So I’ll see what direction I seem to be led in another year or so. Basically, the last two years of my life probably follow the course of most writers at the start of their careers. The only difference is that I have forty years of life experience to draw on.
- Your book, My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some, presents a broad, maybe even eclectic, variety of stories and genres, spanning horror, comedic, magical realism, and slice of life realism. Where do the ideas for your short stories come from?
I have a large vault of thoughts and ideas called life. I have forty years of hopes, fears, and regrets to draw on. I’ve lived through ten presidents, five or six “non-wars”, three serious recessions, five dogs, and two careers. But I think time does more for me than just accumulate ideas. For instance, at twenty-two, childhood is not terribly interesting but the angst of high school and college are very fresh. At thirty, your perspective is a little different. By fifty-five you have more nostalgia in the rearview mirror for ten-year-old you and maybe more regret about the choices of thirty-year-old you. You have a greater sense of the different people you were at those different ages. But where do the story ideas come from? I think they come from digging into the back of your mind and the pit of your stomach and pulling out those things that you’ve been carrying around all this time — opening up the bags you’ve been toting around to all the houses and jobs. It’s bravery, honesty, faith, and hope. The stories come from cleaning up the squirrels’ nests in your unconscious. I swear, no matter how many you get rid of, there always seem to be more to clean out.
- What writers have influenced you the most, and how is this influence reflected in your writing?
The first book I ever took out of the town library with my own library card was the collected stories of Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” etc.). It was a wake-up call going from reading Dr. Seuss in the school library to Washington Irving’s stories. That drove home the idea that we can be going about our daily lives with elements of ageless and timeless mystery all around us. The mystical and the mundane can occupy the same lane, so to speak. Other authors I read as a boy included Jonathan Swift and O. Henry. For many years, Swift would be my paradigm of creativity with passages packed full of meaning and wit. O. Henry was a model of pace and proportionality and plot twists in a short form. In junior high, Vladimir Nabokov replaced Swift as my model of what a fiction writer should be: weighty subject matter, beautiful lyricism in prose and poetry (and not even in a language he was born to!), dry humor, brutality toward his characters — a psychological nutcracker. Kurt Vonnegut showed teenage me that you can take a story seriously without taking yourself too seriously. E. E. Cummings rounded out my early high school years and opened my eyes to what could be said with a few syllables and some well chosen punctuation. At the height of my academic writing phase in college, I tried to model my stories after those of John Cheever and John Updike with their sophisticated New Yorker-style short stories that drew meaning out of the daily suburban commute or the ligatures of propriety. While I don’t really compare myself to them as a writer, I definitely look to them for permission to write stories that don’t end with car chases and gun fights. And then I read Flannery O’Connor, and she threw down the gauntlet. She brought me full circle to Swift, reminding me that all humor is at its heart deadly serious and all tragedy is at its heart diversion from our own troubles.
- What advice do you have for others wanting to write short fiction, especially those of us who are somewhat late to the game (like me, who is spinning yarns after a 40-year career)?
Specific to short stories, I would advise those wanting to write to hone their skills on a 5,000-word max format. That gets you used to working in a length that most people can read in a sitting and most editors have space for in their publications. It’s also good practice for being able to work in chapters if you aspire to write longer pieces. Practice creating meaning within that word count and you’ll start to recognize how much territory you need to cover in that word count to achieve your goals. In a larger sense, I’d say be brutally honest. Be committed to your writing. Be completely committed to each individual story while you’re working on that story. And go to those things in your life and in your memories that scare you the most or make you the most uncomfortable. Listen for the voices of your characters. Be courageous and trust that the chaos will not overwhelm you. (And have a couple of people in your life whose literary opinions you can trust to tell you if a story is utter crap.)
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Get a taste of Doug Brown’s style with “Dammit,” one of the stories included in his book My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some, as the story first appeared in the online literary journal BarBar.
Andy writes! 