On Saturday, July 18 from 2 to 4 p.m., Owego Free Academy graduate Brenda St. John Brown will host a book signing for her second novel, Lies We Live, at Riverow Book Shoppe located on Front Street in Owego, N.Y. St. John Brown graduated in 1985 from OFA.
When Brenda Gorski (now St. John Brown) graduated from OFA, she took a stack of spiral-bound notebooks with her, filled with scribbles, stories and enough half-formed ideas to fill a book. Or four.
Said notebooks moved around the world with her, but life and work didn’t allow for much writing time until she landed in London with her husband and young son.
“I worked with a U.S. based team, but was living in the U.K., which meant I had a lot of time on my hands between when my son went to school and the U.S. woke up. I surfed the web way too much until finally deciding I had to do something more productive with my time,” says St John Brown. “Writing felt like a natural choice and once I started, I was hooked.”
Her first completed novel sits forever in a file on her computer. She stated, “I actually had a publishing offer and I often wonder if I should have taken it. But, the blessing and the curse of writing is that every book you write feels more well-written than the last, and when I look back on that first book I’m happy to have written it, but also happy to leave it unpublished.”
Her second novel, however, Swimming to Tokyo, was picked up by an agent and published last July by Spencer Hill Press. The book has also been published in German by Egmont LYX.
St. John Brown spent two years teaching English in Japan and, although the book isn’t autobiographical in the least, she did use her experiences in Japan as reference.
She added, “Writing Swimming to Tokyo was a way to go back and revisit Tokyo and my time there. It’s an amazing place and an incredible culture and it’s no coincidence that my characters visit some of my favorite places.”
With her latest novel, Lies We Live, St. John Brown has ventured into self-publishing.
“I was thrilled to publish Swimming to Tokyo with Spencer Hill and I have a few other books in the works that I can’t talk about yet that will be published traditionally; but I wanted to learn about self-publishing and I’ve always found that the best way to learn something is to do it,” said St John Brown.
Lies We Live is categorized as women’s fiction / romantic suspense and is told mostly from the point-of-view of Ella, a 29-year-old novelist. There is nothing autobiographical in Ella’s story either, St. John Brown assures us.
Lies We Live goes live at all online retailers on June 22 and St. John Brown is working hard on its sequel, which she also plans to self-publish this fall – if the weather cooperates.
St. John Brown added, “We live in Northwest England now and it’s rarely sunny and warm, so when it is I feel like I have to really take advantage of that. As long as we have our usual rainy summer, I’ll get the sequel done on schedule. But if it’s nice, it might slide a bit.”
All the proceeds of this book signing go to the Family Reading Partnership Owego Apalachin.
Lies We Live can be found at the following: Amazon US, http://tinyurl.com/LiesWeLiveAMZ-US; Amazon UK, http://tinyurl.com/LiesWeLiveAMZ-UK; Barnes and Nobles, http://tinyurl.com/LWL-Nook; Kobo, http://tinyurl.com/LWL-Kobo; and iBooks, http://tinyurl.com/LWL-iBooks.
