Where to buy MY ANIMAL KINGDOM by Rebecca Brown
Thanks to everyone who orders it directly from us
Rebecca Brown adopted a baby squirrel, and it changed her life.
This warm, funny, poignant memoir explores the mystery of aliveness, the nature of time, and human relationships with the creatures who share our world.
Organized by animals the author has encountered, from a bear in the Cascade Mountains to monkeys in Japan, My Animal Kingdom draws a vivid portrait of life in a changing world, teeming with cats, dogs, otters, monsters, a goose, a turtle, and some chickens with a secret.
Designed by Corianton Hale and illustrated by Levi Hastings, My Animal Kingdom is currently available in an extremely limited, hand-numbered first edition.
About the Author
Rebecca Brown is the author of 16 books published in the US and abroad, including The Gifts of the Body and Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, the linked short story collections The Terrible Girls and Not Heaven, Somewhere Else, the novel The Dogs, the essay collection American Romances, the essay cycle You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe, and most recently the multi-genre work Obscure Destinies. She has also written reviews and criticism and plays and a libretto for a dance opera and catalogue copy for a hardware company.
She is the author of “The Toaster,” a play commissioned by New City Theater and produced at On the Boards; the libretto for “The Onion Twins,” a dance opera produced by Better Biscuit Dance; and a one-woman show, “Monstrous,” about Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, the movies, and being gay, commissioned and produced by Northwest Film Forum. Her visual artwork has been shown at the Frye Museum, the Hedreen Gallery, and elsewhere. She was the cofounder, designer, and first curator of the Jack Straw Writers Program in Seattle. She is a former artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Her awards include the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Boston Book Review Award, the Washington State Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishers Triangle Award, and a Stranger Genius Award.
She recently retired from 40-plus years of teaching in a variety of places: colleges, universities, prisons, an old folks’ center, an encampment of homeless people, public schools and writers conferences in the US and Uganda, a safe place for “at risk” youth, and private creative-writing circles.
Before she was a teacher, and sometimes while being a teacher, she worked as other things including: bartender, coffee-cart girl, copy-machine girl, receptionist, house staff for a wealthy lesbian couple, house staff and cleaner for an old guy in a big house, cleaner of hotel rooms, envelope stuffer, carpenter’s assistant, data entry (before there were really many computers which meant adding up the colored little circles on forms then writing down how many there were on other pieces of paper), concession girl in a red hat at a baseball stadium (filling mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise squeeze bottles from big cans of it), bookseller, and camp counselor. Once for a couple months, she received unemployment. Once she was a volunteer cat-petter on the Pozenboot, aka The Catboat, a floating feline sanctuary in Amsterdam.
About the Illustrator
Levi Hastings loves drawing dinosaurs, whales, and any creature with fins or feathers. Growing up on a farm gave Levi an early affinity for animals, and he often felt more at home daydreaming among the livestock than he did on the playground. He is an Emmy-nominated illustrator, artist, author, and visual designer whose work spans publishing, editorial, brand development, and event design. He lives in Seattle with his husband Demetrios and their dog Gordon, always on the lookout for whale sightings in Puget Sound.
About the Designer
Corianton Hale is an award-winning creative director, designer, and the art director of FrizzLit Editions. He has founded two design agencies, and is currently the owner of Headquarters Creative and the art director of The Stranger and The Portland Mercury. An enthusiastic explorer across artistic disciplines, he’s also a musician, ceramic artist, world traveler, and animal lover. Thoughout his life he’s cared for cats, dogs, hamsters, gerbils, mice, guinea pigs, turtles, tree frogs, toads, lizards, snakes (including a newborn ball python that bit his sister), all kinds of aquarium fish, a hermit crab, chickens, and even a desert blonde tarantula. Some relationships ended better than others.
About the Editor
Christopher Frizzelle is the founder of FrizzLit Editions. His first word was Cookie, the name of his family’s black lab. A few years later he got his own kittens, a gray tabby and a ginger tabby, whom he named Pearl and Fern. He worked at The Stranger from 2003 to 2020, including nine years as editor-in-chief. On a shoestring budget, he led The Stranger to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 and to being a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2014. He created the Silent Reading Party in 2009, inspiring a worldwide trend. His work has been featured in the New York Times and his writing has appeared in the Washington Post. His mother used to be a docent at the Los Angeles Zoo. He wishes he were an orca.
