Karen Brichoux

The daughter of American missionaries, I was born in the central Philippines. Most of my childhood was spent reading or forcing the long-suffering family pets to act out the plots of books I'd recently read. At one point, my parents worried that I might be living too deeply in the world of my imagination. It turns out they were right.

When I came back to the US for college, I did the typical amount of floundering about, trying to determine what subjects might interest me for a lifetime. Everything interested me, and I could never answer the question “What do you want to be?” without a measure of sarcasm over the idea that “being” something was somehow equated with “doing” something. Still, guidance tests had revealed a natural predilection for verbal and mechanical skills, which had caused my high school counselor to suggest English literature or, if that didn’t interest me, perhaps becoming a car mechanic. Oddly, no one suggested mechanical engineering, probably because I had managed to fail Algebra I the first time I took it.

After stints as a secondary education major, a theater major, and a humanities major, I ended up getting a dual degree in English literature and European art history. Graduation didn’t help my confusion, and I went on to graduate school for my MA in European history, where I focused on the social/political/religious history of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France.

While working toward a PhD in European history, which had now morphed into nineteenth-century social/political history combined with political, labor, and feminist theory, I began the painful process of re-examining what I thought I was doing as opposed to what I actually was doing. I had been writing stories all my life, but every high school and college writer is told that no one, no one you understand, ever becomes a published author, despite evidence to the contrary in all bookstores. During this painful process of re-examination, I decided that evidence was better than hearsay, so I wrote my first book and naively assumed that awards and editor requests meant I was going to be published by tomorrow or, at worst, the day after. I left graduate school and began writing full time, thanks to the incredible support of my spouse, who never stopped believing in me even when it became obvious I was not going to be a published author tomorrow or even next week. Two years, four manuscripts, and 174 rejections later, I caught the interest of an agent who caught the interest of a publisher, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Writing is, in many ways, a reversion to childhood. I still spend most of my time reading and living in the world of my imagination, but the furry house mammals are happy to report that I no longer enlist their services in acting out plots.