Your Own Man You grew up in a violent milieu of hardscrabble contact sports with limited padding, and that extra-athletic world of fighting with other boys singly, or doing so in groups, as you and your friends did on weekends when you’d pick fights with the farmer kids coming into the city to meet girls. …
Bristling and Posturing No one at Harry Spence Elementary would have uttered the words “tough” and “Rick Brown” in the same sentence, not even after that game-winning catch in sixth grade and all that it opened up in terms of athletic potential. For out of all the opposites in that Armour hot dog jingle, the …
Toward Boyhood I’ve been seeing you a lot as I’ve grown older: your eyes, looking back at me in the rearview mirror of my car. They’re my eyes, of course, but you’re there, in them, somehow. When I see those cold, blue-gray irises, they seem to embody you far more than me—so much so that …
Secrets The few consistent stories hold that Grandpa, carrying the name William Elmer Brown, was born in Palestine, Illinois, on November 3, 1889. Grandma Brown, who claimed the maiden name of Thompson, always maintained that she was born in Pleasantville, Iowa. According to family talk, they met on a farm in North Dakota and were …
A World from Nothing My two earliest memories come as flashes. You are prominent in both. In the first, I am two years old. You have carried me up the long and steep staircase to Grandma and Grandpa Brown’s apartment on the north-side of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The stairwell is dark. It is an old …
Seeking: June 2006 The light is on, but you are not at your usual spot: the stool at the breakfast bar next to the kitchen. Of course, it’s like that sometimes. I’ve seen it before, looking from my car into the front picture window on other nights when I’ve surveilled you. You may have gone …
On the morning of December 17, 1981, I checked into an inpatient treatment center for alcoholism. I was eighteen years old. That night, after supper, a vanload of fellow patients and I attended an AA meeting, my first, in the cavernous basement of an old Episcopal church. Scared, ashamed, beaten down by recent experience, I …
A cold wind blew on the morning I chose to write like Ernest Hemingway. It pressed against my chest as I walked from the back of my house to the open garage and knew that it was not a day for spending time outdoors without a jacket. It was a wet, heavy cold and I …
Actwerks Café is gone now. It disappeared with the nineties, as did so many other things. The space where it buzzed for a time on East Hampshire Street in Milwaukee now houses a Sicilian restaurant. The locals love it. But COVID-19 is devastating small gathering places, changing the way we interact with friends and strangers …
Rick Brown is a landlord who much prefers to write. He earned a Master of Arts in History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. His work has appeared in Hippocampus, On the Seawall, The Dillydoun Review, and elsewhere. Recently, he completed a book-length nonfiction manuscript, his first, titled, …
Rick Brown Writes 