The tension between creation and destruction unfurls through my writing. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been drawn to Joseph Campbell’s mythology studies, allured by the conjecture that we’re born into complicated puzzles of history and family. If only we understood our pieces, we could understand our lives. We could spin creative happiness and not scramble our lives into hash. How this works out in reality is, of course, far murkier. I began reading at a young age, captivated by the imaginative realms of Laura Ingalls in the Wisconsin Big Woods and Mary Lennox in a Yorkshire garden. Who were these other girls, and how did they navigate their worlds? By the time I was a teenager, devouring Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre, writing and reading had become my way of understanding myself and the world.
My journey began as my parents were enmeshed in their own stories, which involved a number of U-Haul drives from New Mexico to Colorado and, finally, to a New Hampshire white-clapboard village. A daughter of a Great Books professor, I studied philosophy and writing at Marlboro College in Vermont and earned a graduate degree at Western Washington University in Bellingham. In my twenties, my husband and I bought 100 acres in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and became maple syrup makers. I spent years peddling syrup at farmers markets, often with a baby on my back. In retrospect, I see the relentless work of agriculture and raising children shaped me profoundly and whittled away my starry-eyed illusions to see, in all its beauty and harshness, my piece of this world.
My first novel, Hidden View (Green Writers Press, 2015), written during my daughters’ naptimes, explores the isolation of farming in rural Vermont, and the toll farming extracts from a marriage. My second book, Unstitched (Steerforth Press, 2021), is a nonfiction composite of addiction stories in my small town Vermont community. My struggle with addiction braids into these portraits as I pursue the notion that disease is a dynamic spanning individuals and society.
In my third book, the novel Call It Madness, the millennial heroine, Avah Lavoie, believes her life has reached a dull dead-end. Then, unexpectedly, her estranged mother phones with news of her great-grandfather’s death. Avah sets out in her Toyota Matrix for an inherited ramshackle Vermont house. She’s fiercely determined to understand how her life was shaped by buried family secrets: a sawmill accident, a mother who overdosed, a missing father. This third book delves into my fullest range as a writer and a woman, digging at the thorniness of life while also reveling in the world’s serendipitous beauty.
Far enough along now in my life’s journey, I’ve embraced sobriety and extracted myself from an unhappy marriage. I’m employed by a lakeside Vermont town with its own fascinating stories, mother to two young women, and steadily writing the creative life I’ve always desired. In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes, “Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.” I consider myself fortunate to read and write. Disease might be a variegated interplay between individual and society, but, as its counterpart, art is a communal activity, too.
In 2020, I received a coveted Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant. My essays and fiction have appeared widely in The Rumpus, Memoir Monday, 101 Word Story, Vermont Almanac, Taproot, Vermont Literary Review, The Long Story, and The Seraphic Review, among other publications.
My story, “The Geese Fly South,” was awarded first place in Nine Muses Review 2024 prose contest. The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts awarded me a 2024 Fellowship — a gift of time and space and an artists’ community. I live in Hardwick, Vermont, a town of former granite glory, in a 100-year-old house surrounded by perennial flowers planted by strangers now long passed on. I’ve sown daffodils and peonies and rudbeckia in these beds, too, adding color and life.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Brett’s novel Call It Madness in 2026.
