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An adopted WWII child, R. J. Brown came up in England behind three older brothers. It was her father who introduced her to public libraries and she's been a reader ever since. She attended Eothen boarding school in Surrey for which she was given her first diary, and then Queensgate School for Girls in London, graduating with GCE ‘O' levels. For four years she was Lead Alto in the London Schoolgirls Choir and sang before the Queen in the Royal Festival Hall.
At St. Martin's School of Arts and Crafts she majored in sculpture and calligraphy and joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement where she met Nelson Mandella, then marched to protest his incarceration. While out for lunch around Tottenham Court Road she was offered five quid by a barker to enter the Old Scala theater which was full of screaming girls as a portion of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT was being filmed.
RJ's widowed Mater so disliked art school life she shipped her off to Portugal for six months to be a maid for one of her sisters. Then she brought RJ home and enrolled her at the Marlborough Gate Secretarial College where she graduated with topnotch diplomas, left home to live in a flat in Earls Court with other graduates and "temped" until hired as Export Secretary for a 200 year-old distillery. When it was dismantled in a hostile takeover she decided to see the world. Unwelcome in what was left of the empire due to her anti-apartheid work she went to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and in August of 1965 set sail for New York. After an overnight train ride to Chicago, Illinois she signed in at the YWCA and went on job interviews arranged by the Vera Sugg International Placement Bureau.
That winter, when the family she was a live-in nanny for offered her a month's vacation in the then raw ski resort of Vail, Colorado, she quit her industrial job and never regretted it. Back in Chicago she got a call from her oldest brother's wife whose sorority friend's brother was looking for a good secretary. RJ was accepted by Rabbi Robert J. Marx, the Director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Midwest), a leader in the Civil Rights Movement who often hosted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was in town. One of her duties was to review books and movies with inter-racial and inter-religious themes designed for church and temple students.
Two years later she transferred to the staff of the UAHC's Institute Camp near Oconomowoc, Wisconsin where she met the Holocaust survivor and author, Elie Wiesel. At that time, suburban baby-boom teenagers were running away to Chicago and camper parents began asking her to find them. Her searches took her into the Counter Culture which she eventually joined, volunteering at Alice's Revisited, The Seed newspaper, Grace Lutheran Runaway Recovery Program and George's LSD Rescue Squad. She burnt her bra, gave birth to her children, expanded her mind and became a partner in a secondhand bookstore along Lincoln Avenue, sewing clothes to earn her keep.
In 1979, fed up with commune life she went west with her children to the Bay Area where she discovered food co-ops, alternative schools and the Human Potential Movement. To earn her keep she started a cleaning company and attended Laney Community College in Oakland where one of her stories, CHICAGO 22, was published in their quarterly catalog. She started keeping a journal and earned degrees in English Composition and Women's Studies.
After visiting the Pacific Northwest she moved to Port Townsend, Washington where she continued cleaning and took training as a Children's Advocate for the Jefferson County Domestic Violence Program. There she ran weekly groups and created the Stepsons Walk and Talk Safety Course.
She was offered the Managing Editorship of Jonathan Collin, MD's TOWNSEND LETTER FOR DOCTORS, a position she held for nine years taking the hard copy publication from a 32 page newsletter to a 144 page illustrated magazine.
She encountered the Women's Spiritual Movement, took training in making frame drums, midiwifing over 200. She joined WomanFest which met in lodges around Lake Crescent, Long Dance which gathered for several days over Summer Solstice high in the Olympic Mountain wilderness, and WOW—Wild Olympic Women who sewed spectacular quilts to raise money for endangered salmon.
In 1993, with her children grown and flown she met and married D. H. Brown, moved to Sequim and started her own magazine, WOLF'S DIGEST OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE, designed to introduce other forms of healing to patients. When the economy went south they moved to a clearcut in the West End of the Olympic Peninsula where they built their octagon cabins and took care of David's aging father, Lincoln Brown.
In 1998 they created RebeccasReads.com, an award-winning book review website devoted to the love of reading and writing for which RJ wrote essays about her life in Thoughts of a Rural Woman as well as editorials about current events and the craft of writing.
The next year, Lincoln, at age 89, was given just three months left to live. When he chose to return home to die, her husband and she, with the help of a crew of home health nurses took care of him.
In 2002, she published her first book, STANDING THE WATCH: Memories of a Home Death, about the last days of her beloved Poppa.
In 2006, the labor of running RebeccasReads had so exacerbated her Vietnam Veteran husband's war-related illnesses, they retired the site.
In 2008, RJ published the second, expanded edition of STANDING THE WATCH: The Greatest Gift. She now writes for the SENIORS SUNSET TIMES and manages Big River Press which published her husband's first suspense novel HONOR DUE(2007). She is at work on her first Sally Sees cozy mystery, THE DEAD HUSBAND.
Birth Place: London, England
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