Jason Brown received his MFA from Cornell
and was a Wallace Stegner fellow and Truman Capote
fellow at Stanford.
He has won many fiction prizes, and you can find his work
in publications, such as The Best American Short Stories,
Harper's, and The Atlantic.
He is currently at work on a novel.
Jason Brown taught my first fiction writing workshop.
Initially, the most fascinating thing about him was his shoes.
Whether he wore shorts or a suit jacket,
his shoes were always a pair of bright red crocs.
I became fascinated by these shoes.
While I learned techniques to bring readers directly
into characters' heads, I also learned that a bit of color
can make any outfit interesting.
As this semester continued, however, I
did begin to pay more attention to his words
than to his wardrobe.
I learned a lot from Jason Brown's lectures,
but I really became impressed with him
after I read his collection of short stories driving
the heart.
Because I became captivated enough to read the whole book
in one long sitting and could envelop the characters
experiences into my own, I knew that my professor
not only understood but embodied the devices
he was trying to teach.
Brown has recently published another collection
of short stories, Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work.
These short stories all set in or near Vaughn,
a small New England town followed
the lives of the usually extraordinary townspeople.
And like the red crocs, each story
unveils something startling in an otherwise direct setting.
Jason Brown writes with a vividness
that allows me to see his characters and settings not
only at critical moments in the plot
but also at lazy river floating times,
or hand-holding in the library times, or baking cookies times.
No matter how big the action gets,
the characters are always bigger.
They could be your neighbor, your grocer, even you.
Vaughn may be a small town, but each of these stories
incorporate a shock of red.
Though he may not be wearing his crocs tonight,
I'm glad to present Jason Brown.