Devin Elizabeth Browne {autumn 2006}
I was born in 1983 in Pasadena, CA, my mother's seventh and final child, and raised not too far from there, where the San Gabriel Valley gives way to the San Fernando in a small suburb named La Canada. I left at 18 and spent five years living in: Ann Arbor, MI, Tullow, Ireland, Colorado Springs, CO, Berkeley, CA and Otto, NC. This last year, I moved to Silverlake into a cooperative eight bedroom house (plus two large closets, a basement, a front porch, a back patio, and a front lawn all used as bedrooms), finally experiencing what I had lived on the periphery of most of my young life.
previous schools attended and educational experiences: Last fall, I graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a Bachelor of Arts in English. I was 22 years old. It would be the first time in my life as I can remember it where I would not only NOT be in school, but I would also have no set date where I would be needing to go back to school. You might think that with all of these years in school, I might have dozens upon dozens of educational experiences to share with you. This is, sadly, not the case. There's only one truly relevant experience I want to tell you about, as far as my formal education goes and this is it:
I spent what would have been my junior year in college studying abroad as so many college students do and like most of these programs, it was expensive and most of us were white and it was limiting in these ways but I appreciated it for what it was and I am grateful for the clarity that it left me with about the world. I went with a program that specializes in comparative travel and so we spent six weeks in five different countries--England, Tanzania, India, New Zealand, and Mexico--studying globalization and grassroots resistance to globalization. We stayed almost exclusively with families in villages and slums and cities. There were no exams. There were no formal classrooms. We simply studied the place we were in by being a part of that place, the seaweed aquaculture in Tanzania, the fight against the dams in India, the resistance of genetically engineered food in New Zealand. It was a year in which everything felt to me to be in context. I kept hearing the same story over and over again: the small farmers in England and New Zealand who were competing against federally subsidized industrial agriculture, the Maasai and Adivasi and Maori and Triqui wanting indigenous autonomy *and* the right to modernize and assimilate on their own terms; privileged environmentalists wanting to conserve and protect land vs poor farmers and peasants needing to use land for their survival.
By the time we reached Mexico, the twenty-two of us students were actively anxious about what we should do when we returned-- we could, say, start our own organic farm and CSA or we might start our own NGO or our own publication or maybe we might revolutionize public transport or maybe we'd lock ourselves to a bridge to protest the war in the middle east. In the midst of this grandiose plan-making we met a man named Cesar Anorve, soft-spoke, shy, and very, very short. He stood behind composting toilets as a political statement and an environmental necessity and he wrote comics in his spare time.
Cesar had been a friend of Ivan Illyich, a hero of many of the kids I was travelling with. This was very exciting to us. We asked about him. We wanted to hear an Ivan Illyich story.
What we were told is that a few years ago, a group of Americans much like ourselves came to Ivan and pleaded with him for the same sense of answers that we were about to ask Cesar.
"What should we do?" they asked him. "We want to help. Tell us what we should do."
Ivan was not a man that often gave answers, Cesar said. In fact, this is the only time he can ever remember Ivan answering anyone.
"Go home and live with your neighbors," he said to them and that was all.
I had not wanted to hear that I should return to Los Angeles and try and make a home for myself, and yet this is exactly what I did and still try and do and this is one of the many, many reasons that I want to attend Sundown Schoolhouse: I want to know who I am living with in LA, I want to learn how to create with them, and I want be a part of making LA a more hospitable place.
significant professional and creative experiences: My best creative experiences are collaborative. I very much struggle with finding a balance between the solitary, private nature of writing and the communal effort I love in producing something of meaning. The highlight of writing for LA Weekly wasn't actually the writing: it was the weekly pitch meeting on thursdays, where 12 or so writers sat around and thought aloud about all that they were seeing in the world that might be a story worth telling. One of my sisters, Britt, is in the process of starting her own printing press, The Paper Moon Project. Her first publications will be little zines, designed by her, the text written by me. I loved creating a co-op in Silverlake. We found all of our furniture on the side of the road, the seeds for our garden from a donation program through seeds of change. When I left Silverlake this last June for a few months to go and live with an oral storyteller on a trout farm in North Carolina, I attempted the role of community historian and documented the history of the house and its members. I included photographs and artwork of other roommates and wrote the text myself, then bound it using a vintage California cookbook. (see the section about my interests and ambitions for more on this... I think (hope) most of my creative experiences are yet to come).
tell us about yourself, what are your interests, influences and ambitions? My mom had all seven of her children in just over ten years; my dad planted a fruit tree in our backyard for every baby my mom had. They planted plum for me. We were enough children to field a softball team, perform musicals for my parent's anniversaries often choreographed to the music of Olivia Newton John (my sister Megan's favorite musical artist for quite some time), have marathon marco-polo matches in the swimming pool, live together dressed in our mom's old maternity clothes outside, all summer long. We were very, very close.
We had no other relatives my parents kept in contact with. We knew none of our neighbors. We were, in many ways, our very own community.
I try now in my life to surround myself with this familial sense, I try to always keep myself in the context of a community. I am very interested in finding models of co-housing and cooperative living that are a bit more sustainable than the co-op I lived in last year. (We had a turnover rate of 25 people in 9 months).
All else that interests me comes in the context of this first, of community. What I know of freelancing right now feels very
fragmented: writers send emails from their own rooms in their own cities to publications in New York or Boston and there is only dialogue between writer and editor and then its published and the only opportunity for dialogue from that is in the "Readers Respond" section of the magazine the following month. I want my writing to be accountable to a community and rooted in a real place.
So my main interest, as you've probably guessed, in in writing. I have known since I was a very small little girl that I should grow up to be a writer. My mom used to catch me engraving the furniture with my stories. When there was no furniture, I wrote all over my legs and arms. I wrote and wrote and wrote. There was a time when I gave it all up and pretended my path was in environmental science but I think this lasted all of a single semester and I soon returned to what I've always known I should do, which is to write stories.
My writing is almost always based in what's happening in the world, as opposed to what's happening in my own head, unless, of course, you count my journal. I rarely write fiction. I like long-form narrative nonfiction, memoir, environmental writing, personal essays, self-published zines. I am still finding my writing heroes. I rarely left home this last year without a copy of Joan Didion's The White Album. I love George Orwell. I like Aurandati Roy. I like Ted Conover, also. He never separates himself from subject and often spends a year living his story--as a prison guard, a hobo, a taxi driver--before writing it. Right now, I'm reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz, completely falling for LA.
I am also interested in... BICYCLES. I love my bike and feel, honestly, that I would not be able to live in LA had I not discovered a way to ride through it. I am learning how to play old-time fiddle, every song I know is pre-1920, foot-stompin' mountain music. My favorite fiddler is John Salyer, from Kentucky. I love gardens. My favorite one in the LA area is the farm in Pomona. It is the only permaculture site I've ever been where I feel as if I am actually foraging for food. And there are such beautiful oak trees there. I love backpacking. I just got back from four days in Jennie Lakes Wilderness by Kings Canyon National Park. I am still in wilderness withdrawal, not even able to take off the parking pass from my car and I've been back for days. I love gymnastics though I'm no match now for what I was at eight. This is ok. I just signed up for my first ever trapeze class.
why do you want to attend the Sundown Schoolhouse? The Sundown School seems in many ways to be a little too good to be true. I have spent the last year in LA looking very hard for anyone--anyone--willing to talk to me and let me learn from them. LA is an easy place for me to get lost in. The journalists and editors I met were mostly very busy. So were most of my bosses at the various part-time jobs I held. It is very exciting to me that I might get to learn from the instructors I saw listed on the website (and the other students) who are confronting what it means to be an artist both as an individual and part of a larger collective.
I also want to come to the Sundown School to meet everyone else that is coming to The Sundown School. This is not to say that I see The School as some kind of alternative to the personals section or that I am looking to spend four months standing around at a social hour, only to say that I have realized, rather recently and rather fervently, that what I most need at this point in my life is to know and connect with others who are struggling, as I am, to express themselves and their experience in the world with words. (or whatever their medium may be). These are the neighbors I want to live with. I want to learn a little more at The Sundown Schoolhouse how to make Los Angeles home.
How did you hear about the Sundown Schoolhouse? It came to me via the internet. I was reading a zine on one your instructor's websites and within a few clicks, I was here. I read the school's mission statement and then the biographies of the instructors and then downloaded the application immediately. I've never even been to your geo-desic dome and it already feels like home.