Ellen Emerson Brown

I wrote a thesis on Family Lore for a Masters in Folklore and Mythology. I was looking at narratives that families tell in order to keep a cohesive feeling among them, a belonging. I also studied how individuals in folktales had to get away from their family and form a new one for themselves. Lastly, there was the tension between the individual and the family, each one has to differentiate, and weather the storm of separation, transformation, and reincorporation. I was writing short stories during that time too, and kept writing, sometimes for magazines, about Catholic culture. Religious belief plays a big part in my stories, whether it is a metaphor for resurrection, or a woman's dilemma in finding a new family, or a prayer answered from a saint. I am married and I taught Reading to children with learning disabilities. I like to be a homemaker now, and to have coffee or lunch with friends when I'm not reading or watching British Crime Dramas, or going to a Latin Mass.