If you lie down in a field, she will find you there is a stunning and shattering memoir of Brown’s mother’s life, which was brutally distorted by the spectacle of her murder.
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris’ life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown’s youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family’s oral history and tell us who she was.
Bio:
Colleen Brown is known primarily as a sculptor. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is her first book. Colleen created visual artworks related to the book at the Ranger Station Gallery. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver and an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has participated in recent exhibitions and events at Western Gallery, Bellingham; Shelfed, Vancouver; Hedreen Gallery, Seattle; Airbnb, Seattle; and The Apartment, Vancouver. Brown is the recipient of a 2016 Portfolio Prize. She is living in Maple Ridge, BC, as a 2023-26 Artist in Residence.
Colleen
My mother’s chair was blue. It was her reading chair, her place. I had to be invited to join her there and behave if I wanted to stay. We sat together in the afternoons when no one else was home. Her day chores were done, and she could rest before cooking dinner and I was tired enough to sit quietly. When Mom wasn’t in the chair, it functioned as a surrogate. It rocked and squeaked when it rocked. When Laura got home from school, I could sit on my sister’s lap in the chair while she practiced being a mother, a surrogate pile-up.
The chair was upholstered in a frieze fabric with a leaf pattern. Thinking of the material gives me a faint body dysphoria because the memory of tracing the recesses in the design is so vivid, but that would only be possible with small fingers. Frieze patterns are made of tight loops of nylon that tick past a fingernail with reassuring regularity.
Laura
The doorbell rang early, before we had breakfast. The snow was fresh and high, let’s say a foot of snow. Mom answered the door, engulfed by an oversized, white terry towel bathrobe. She found a gigantic, baby-faced policeman on the other side of the door, without gloves or a coat. He stood on our concrete stoop while the cold streamed passed my mother and into the house. We could not hear what he said from the living room, but he bowed his head and spoke quietly; he looked polite. Mom looked -not polite- which was unusual enough to be frightening. She folded her arms. Her lips got small and straight. The policeman gently tapped her hand with a piece of paper, trying to entice her to take what turned out to be the summons for Jimmy’s unpaid parking tickets. She remained folded.
Our cat surprised them both by scooting past their legs and out into the snow. Mom and the policeman stopped to watch. Mom looked up first and pressed her advantage.
“Well? Go get the cat,” she scolded.
He ducked his big head and backed off the stoop. The cat made its way through the snow in a series of graceful leaps, making a trail of holes. The policeman crouch-ran after it.
Mom closed the door on the policeman and our outdoor cat.
Jim
Do you remember Mom’s car? She had a pale yellow Chevy Impala. Mom had a little difficulty driving sometimes, particularly on the country roads. One time she got stuck and didn’t want to call home, so she tried to get out herself. She moved the car from forward to reverse and back again. And she forgot to take her foot off the gas when she changed gears and completely snapped the transmission shaft like somebody had cut it straight through with a knife. Dad wasn’t too happy.
Another time, she called me and said, I’m stuck. Can you come get me? So I brought the tractor, and when I arrived, I saw the Impala was sitting with its nose down in the ditch, right angles to the road. The rear wheels were up in the air, and you were outside the vehicle picking wildflowers as if nothing had happened.
Sometimes the nature we feel in Emily Carr’s cathedral of trees turns around and lights our homes on fire. Everywhere we look, there is a little bit of nature. That’s what we like about it; it’s always there for us. A patch of grass, alpine lakes and lightning are all in the same category. When our environment turns on us, it is shocking and tragic and indigestible.
Serial killers and churches, bank line-ups, musicals, Labour Day also share a broad category. Humanity is everywhere you look. We expect our human landscape to be stable like the horizon and have sense to it, like a story.
I have few memories of my mother, but I have not forgotten her. The process was much more active than that, not forgetting but selective removal. I have attempted to willfully excise her death from her story. In that process, because the spectacle of her murder overwhelms the entirety of her perfectly human and unremarkable existence, I lost my mother as a way of creating meaning.
My mother’s death must be held separate for her life to exist as a story. Violence has narrative pull. Our culture uses it constantly to propel a plot along, to pump up the drama, provide thematic weight. Reporters used my mother’s death to engross readers in death porn and provide emotional weight to op-eds, for think pieces on mental health, forgiveness and justice and as an excuse for creepy sound effects in true crime dramas. All of this posthumous theatre occludes the life. Myself, family and friends are not immune to this pull. To see a life unrelated to violence, all of her before, is a struggle of storytelling.
When I was young, I decided not to allow the way my mother died to overshadow her life. Among other things, this seemed proper and respectful – put another way, morally heroic. It was also a way of preventing her murder too near my mind. Everyone around me was performing some version of this survival algebra.
This psychic maneuver required a very particular kind of speech about her. It required short, declarative, indisputable sentences. “Your mother loved the rain” was my favourite when I was little. “She was tender with her children” is one I currently hang on to. These words are so broad they carry almost no content. It is the prosody of the delivery that is everything. The phrases are both forcefully squeezed out and, at the same time, escaping. The body the language is coming from goes inert and rigid with concentration. Every aspect and resource of the person is concentrated on managing the gap where this speech act emerges.
“Your mother loved the rain” is not a description of a person. It is a warning buoy on the edge of an absence. There is no iceberg, just a dangerous cavity in the sea.
- Publisher : Radiant Press (Oct. 3 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 120 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1989274943
- ISBN-13 : 978-1989274941
