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J. Thomas Brown

 

Member profile details

First name
J. Thomas
Last name
Brown
 

Personal information (200 word limit for Bio, please)

Pen Name
J. Thomas Brown
Personal photo
Bio
Place is an important part of my writing, whether that world no longer exists, or comes into existence in the future. When I was young my father had the wanderlust and moved our family up and down the American East Coast, to Sweden and England, and back and forth in between. We lived in some unusual dwellings; the miller’s house at an old gristmill, a barn, an Olympic gold medalist’s home on the Isle of Lidingö in the Stockholm Archipelago, an English manor in Kent, and an old Pennsylvania fieldstone house that George Washington used as an infirmary.

After working a few years in the biomedical field, I applied for a top secret clearance to work as a customer engineer in a facility that designed spy satellites. The background check must have driven them crazy. I had moved seventeen times by my mid twenties. Somehow I got the clearance and the position. The technology was dazzling, but after a few years my opinion of the American military industrial complex was changed when the Berrigan brothers threw blood on the entrance gates there and I stopped to talk to anti-war protestors. I left and went to work in the IT field where I wrote technical papers during the day and short fiction at night and on weekends. Satellite imaging from my PC now is an important tool to visiting hard to get to places like Xinjiang, the Outer Hebrides, and Hong Kong, or to find archaeological looting holes in the remote places of the earth.

When I had a family of my own I toned the moving dromomania thing down. We moved from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to Richmond, Virginia, and stayed. Now I am serving as Associate Editor and Web Manager for the Virginia Writers Project, a 501(c)3 quarterly journal publishing creative writing, visual arts, and regional Virginia histories.

I’ve finished the draft of a speculative fiction novel with a working title of SPLICE: The Immortality of Jared Hallie. A biohacker with an inherited learning disability reinvents the future. His gene editing discoveries, enhanced by AI and intelligent bacteria, defeat death and suffering, but he must escape prosecution from practicing medicine without a license by starting a new country in the Scottish Hebrides.
 

Website and social media (please include "http://")

 

Chapter Information

VWC Chapter (if any)
Richmond
 

Speakers' Bureau

Speaker Area(s) of Writing Expertise
  • Craft
  • Fiction (long form)
  • Fiction (short form)
  • Non-fiction (creative non-fiction)
Other Topic(s) of Expertise
historical fiction, short stories, poetry
 

Poems, Novels, Plays, or other Works

Work 1 - Title
Land of Three Houses
Work 1 - Genre
(Fiction & Literature) Historical Fiction
Work 1 - Cover
Work 1 - Description
William Sterner’s story begins in the late 1700’s on the Tohickon Creek in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, during the period known as The Rage for Wheat. His quest to build a fortune based on wheat leads him to Livorno, Tuscany, during the Napoleonic wars where he meets the Enlightenment salonnière, Madame de Staël. Join him on his journey home to The Land of Three Houses.
Work 2 - Title
Saint Elmo's Light
Work 2 - Genre
(Fiction & Literature) Literature
Work 2 - Genre (Other)
Collected short stories of J Thomas Brown
Work 2 - Cover
Work 2 - Description
The blue-violet light of St. Elmo’s fire, caused by a molecular tearing apart of electrically charged plasma in the air, is brightest in the area of highest curvature such as at the ends of pointed objects like ship's masts and lightning rods. The thirteen stories in this collection are concentrated in this electrically charged area of high curvature where phenomena are more intense.
Work 3 - Title
The Hole in the Bone
Work 3 - Genre
(Fiction & Literature) Science Fiction & Fantasy
Work 3 - Genre (Other)
speculative archaeological fantasy
Work 3 - Cover
Work 3 - Description
His second novel, The Hole in the Bone, is set along the Old Silk Road in The Land of Fruits and Melons in East Turkestan where the Tarim Basin Mummies were discovered. An archaeologist falls into the tomb of an ancient shaman buried in the Taklamakan Desert. He learns he must complete his mission from a previous life 3800 years ago and is given a second chance reincarnated as Nick Taylor.
Work 4 - Title
Mooncalf
Work 4 - Genre
(Fiction & Literature) Poetry
Work 4 - Cover
Work 4 - Description
MOONCALF is a collection of thirty-three poems. It is an outsider's journey through a world that is both devastating and wonderful. The poems come from dreams, close encounters with the bending sickle, and a search for social justice. Available in print/ebook/audiobook.
Work 5 - Title
Driving With Poppi: A Patremoir
Work 5 - Genre
(Nonfiction) Memoir
Work 5 - Genre (Other)
Novelette patremoir
Work 5 - Cover
Work 5 - Description
Author's note --

My father had the wanderlust and moved our family nearly every year and a half. We lived up and down the U.S. East Coast, in Sweden, and in England. The plot is woven around the places we lived. A common thread in the story is his driving, at times humorous, and sometimes terrifying. My father had a mind like a steel trap, but his braininess also got him into trouble. He loved life - perhaps too much.

His mind was always crunching away on something else. He was not mentally in the same place where his body was. Dad said on several occasions he wished he had become a college professor and not an engineer. He enjoyed getting in front of an audience and lecturing with near perfect recall of dates and facts and gesticulated dramatically when speaking. This is okay if you are giving a lecture, but not if you are doing over sixty down the highway and take your hands off the wheel. He had driving tickets. Lots.
 

Additional Works - Add title, genre, URL, description, and publication year in free form text here.

Additional Works
J. Thomas Brown’s short story, Breaking Them with Words, appeared in Scarlet Leaf Review and Press 53’s Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet. A memoir, Valium Dream, was a runner up in Streetlight Magazine’s Memoir/Essay Contest 2021, and a micropoem, Nascence, a Sunspot Lit quarterfinalist. Two creative nonfiction short stories, Hard Cider and Thumb Tacks, appeared in Journal of the Virginia Writers Club Spring 2021 and Summer 2021. He is a contributor to Lingering in the Margins: A River City Poets Anthology (In a Dark Dream, Conversations With a Coat), North of Oxford (Hart Island), and Rising Voices: Poems Towards a Social Justice Revolution (Poetry, Healing, & Growth Book Series, University Professors Press). Poems and hybrid work appeared in The Closed Eye Open (Nascence), New Verse News, Rattlecast, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal (Landfill Doggerel), and several Moonstone Press anthologies (27th Annual Ink Anthology, Remembering Woody Guthrie, Haiku 2023, World Laughter Day 2023, Traitor/Patriot). Their Names are on Skyscrapers, a short story, appeared in Virginia Writers Project Winter 2023 journal. Quantum Angel and Paphiopedilum (sci fi and horror fantasy) were published in the Summer 2024 edition. Dr. William Ferguson Reid: A Legacy, appears in The Virginia Writers Project Winter 2024 Vol 3 No 2.
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