A veteran faculty member of both the University of Delaware and Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop, Brown has penned 14 previous books, including the Indie finalist Flying through a Hole in the Storm (2021) and award-winning prose poem collection, Doctor of the World (2025). And she shows no signs of slowing down!

She is, however, paring down in her most intimate book yet, The End-of-the-Line Club a diary which offers a raw portrait of moving from independent to retirement community living; a terrifying, and in someways, comforting process whose national numbers are on the rise. In fact, a whopping 17.7% of the U.S. population was 65 or older in 2023. That encompasses more than 1 in 6 Americans, both Brown and her husband included.

“Many of us have considered whether we want to radically upend our lives and move into a place that does most everything for us,” Brown noted. “So many people my age are asking the same questions: Who am I now? Shall I make this dramatic move? Who will I be if I do?”

Fueled by those questions, the accompanying anxieties, “and to adjust myself to a different image of who I am,” Brown noted, she turned her musings to the page. From there, it didn’t take long for her to realize that she wasn’t just reflecting but writing a book.

Penned in a “white hot blaze during the early months of disorientation,” the collection—that Brown calls a wonder child—offers a spiritual and psychological chronicle of whittling down a lifetime’s worth of precious belongings to the essentials and making a move that seems ordinary until you’re in it.

Divided into more than 70 topics including kitchen inventory and strength training class, it’s an utterly authentic diary in which Brown leaves no thought-stone unturned, from Covid and the death of the family cat to the fellow-feeling authors she’s reading, to eventually make peace with this new phase of her life, and—hopefully—help readers do the same.

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