The Editor, Rebecca 'RJ' Brown's Bio

Rebecca Brown's first book Standing The Watch: Memories of a home death was first published in 2002, with a lot of help from her friends. She is now publishing a 2nd edition and working on several new books.

Rebecca has been a formal reviewer for more than 40 years -- first as liaison officer to the newly-formed Chicago Inter-Faith Council where she reviewed religious & inter-racial films & books destined for Hebrew & Sunday schools. & later for The Townsend Letter for Doctors, a newsmagazine written by doctors for doctors practising in alternative medicine.

Rebecca's early abilities in reading & writing were influenced by coming up behind three brothers. It was her father who introduced her to the London public libraries. In those days B4TV, reading was a vital form of entertainment & learning.

She was also blessed to sit at the knees of Mary Norton, author of Bedknobs & Broomsticks & The Borrowers series, when her Aunt tried out her stories on the children in the families.

At school, Rebecca's stories & essays won her her highest marks. She remembers never getting enough time in her English classes. She loved the weekly homework of reading a page of a dictionary & composing a story using as many words as made sense. Back then, the new American fad of ballpoint pens was prohibited, as too submitting her essays on the used manual typewriter her parents had given her, so she wrote in dip pen & ink, dyeing her fingers & cuffs blue.

Ever since she received a diary, complete with pencil, lock & key for her first trek off to boarding school, she has kept a journal of her thoughts & experiences. For a while Rebecca offered an email course on how to get the most fun & insight out of journaling.

Rebecca was gifted with a classical education where she became familiar with The Bard, learning his sonnets by heart & acting in his plays -- A Midsummer's Nights Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet & Richard III. Because of a lisp, she submitted to elocution lessons where she had to participate in poetry recitals, & attained Silver Medal level. She has since long lost the lisp &, unfortunately, developed a lead ear for poetry. For four seasons she was lead alto in the London Schools Girls' Choir & sang Handel's Messiah like a pro.

In order to take the British GCE “O” levels she studied C. S. Forester's The Ship -- Rebecca has continually used the observational skills she learned during that two year stint of myopic study. Besides the Hornblower series of which she was immensely fond, this author also wrote African Queen from which the movie was adapted which starred Humphrey Bogart & Katherine Hepburn.

After graduation, Rebecca attended art school for two years & then enjoyed a blossoming year in Portugal helping her mother's sister run a pension, until, despairing of finding a husband for her, her widowed mater enrolled her in secretarial school to: “earn your keep & keep out of trouble.” Rebecca's career began as a junior typist/clerk in London's commercial businesses. On her daily commutes she read bestsellers writing reviews for the love of it, sending them in letters to her friends.

Although she loved the English land & its history, as an adopted war orphan with no lineage, she rarely fitted in. This gave her a point-of-view of living among strangers, & with the end of a romance, she set her mind on emigration. Having been a member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement ever since Nelson Mandella, whom she met during is one speaking tour of England, was incarcerated in South Africa, she found she was a persona non grata in most of what was left of the British Empire. Then she remembered America, & after two years of scrimping & saving, living frugally in a “bedsitter”, working weekends at a laundrette to wash her clothes & waitressing in the evenings after her “9-5er”, she set sail on the Castel Felice for her new life.

Within months of stepping off the train in Chicago, Illinois, Rebecca was hired as secretary to the Director of the Midwest offices of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC -- Reform Judaism), & thoroughly enjoyed her first non-commercial workplace. It was the 1960s & very interesting times when the Civil Rights Movement marched into view, the first generation born into post-WWII suburban bliss (Baby Boomers) came of age, the draft for service in Vietnam was speeding up, women were offered The Pill & the Democratic Convention came to town.

Rebecca often took notes of the meetings between Rabbi Robert J. Marx, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Percy & Archbishop Cody. She was active in the marches through segregated neighborhoods, & counts as one of the jewels in her life that Dr. King knew her by name. In time she became administrator for the UAHC's year-round educational camp, the then Olin-Sang Union Institute, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

At the height of the epidemic of suburban runaways, Rebecca was asked to hunt for news of many a wayward teenager, & that's when she discovered the Counter Culture. She frequented The Seed newspaper, relished the poems of the street people & volunteered at the mystical oasis, Alice's Revisited, a coffee house on Chicago's near-North side. To find those youngsters she took training with the George's LSD Rescue Squad & connected with the Grace Lutheran Rescue Relief. That was the decade when she burnt her bra, expanded her mind & began her tenure as a mother. She devotedly wrote in her journals, discovering Feminism & the West Coast & reawakened her love of libraries where she taught her children to read. She also studied at Laney College in Oakland, California attaining degrees in Women's Studies & English Language.

When she moved to the Pacific Northwest, she trained as a volunteer Children's Advocate in the Jefferson County Domestic Violence Prevention Program where she created the Walk & Talk StepSon Safety Course. For nine years she earned her keep as Managing Editor of the Townsend Letter, which later, helped her launch her own magazine, WOLF'S Digest of Alternative Medicine, designed for a lay readership in which physicians introduced their branches of alternative medicine.

Then her Beloved's aging father had a stroke, & Rebecca's life changed again as her little family landed on a clear cut acre in a rain forest, ten miles from the mighty Pacific Ocean, where she homesteaded & cared for Poppa in the last years of his life, about which she wrote in Standing The Watch. When her Beloved introduced her to computers, he enticed her back into reviewing books by creating this website. She began writing her Thoughts about the land wherein she found herself, as well Editorials about her love for reading & writing, &, since 9/11, the War on Terrorism.

Rebecca's criteria for a good read are:
• Was the work articulate?
• How did it affect me?
• What did I learn?

Rebecca