{"id":218621,"date":"2025-06-27T12:45:13","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T12:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/218621\/"},"modified":"2025-06-27T12:45:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T12:45:13","slug":"writers-room-evanthia-bromiley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/218621\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer\u2019s Room: Evanthia Bromiley"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard to be a human inside the system,\u201d Evanthia Bromiley says from Colorado as we speak over Zoom about her lyrical debut novel, Crown<\/a>, which tells the story of resourceful nine-year-old twins Virginia and Evan and their pregnant single mother, Jude, who live in a trailer park near a river in the Southwest. The book unfolds over three days during the coronavirus pandemic. On the first day, Jude receives an eviction notice while she\u2019s out of work and on the precipice of going into labor with her third child. She has no health insurance.<\/p>\n

Focused on making ends meet, Jude frequently needs to leave her children to their own devices\u2014there are a few harrowing episodes in the novel, especially after Jude goes to the hospital to deliver the baby at night, leaving the twins in a car parked in a field nearby to wait for her. (They don\u2019t.) Much of the novel\u2019s suspense arises from the question of whether these three have a chance at making it. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only imaginative prowess that shapes the psychological realism and the compassionate vision that lie at the heart of the novel. Bromiley spent the past 20 years of her life teaching in Title I public schools, where a significant percentage of the children live below the poverty line. For a while, she taught a program for kids she identified as creative and talented, working with them from third through fifth grade. \u201cI knew their families intimately, and I knew the kids, and all we did was read great books and write great stories based on the craft, based on the great books.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listening to children\u2019s stories was part of how she discovered their resilience, Bromiley tells me. For instance, one of the little boys was unhoused and lived with vouchers in a hotel room with his family but began breeding salamanders and selling them to other children at school for $5 or $10. This kind of teaching experience awakened her to the importance of showing Virginia\u2019s and Evan\u2019s resilience too. \u201cIf they\u2019re hungry, they find food,\u201d the author says. \u201cIf they need some information in their life, they make it up. Their intimacy with each other is how they not only survive but find a lot of joy.\u2026 The life of a child is resilient and full of joy, regardless of the structures around them crumbling or creating the ceiling that they\u2019re banging against.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crown stands out not only for the sincerity with which it approaches its characters\u2019 struggles with housing, food, and medical care\u2014the way in which people are both individuals and parts of families\u2014but also in its stunning formal choices. First, the structure. The story originated with Virginia and her voice, but initially, Bromiley wrote the book with an omniscient narrator, only to realize later that the story was intimate and \u201cvery rooted in the body\u201d and should therefore be in the alternating first-person voices of Virginia, Evan, and Jude. The author also wrote a great deal of backstory, much of which she carved away from the novel, including Jude\u2019s personal history\u2014we receive a snippet about the twins\u2019 father, but Jude is in survival mode, where she doesn\u2019t often have time to reminisce about her past romantic life, Bromiley says; the kids are living more in the moment. \u201cIt was a prismatic account,\u201d Bromiley explains. \u201cIt felt like a triptych, where they were bouncing off each other in this particular time period.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bromiley is not a twin, but growing up, she and her brother had a childhood that was \u201cpretty free and unlimited\u201d and influenced by landscape. The setting of the novel is the blue-collar Southwest or more specifically, a sagebrush-heavy corner of Colorado\u2014full of cottonwoods and touching Utah and New Mexico and Arizona\u2014that Bromiley, who lives in that corner, says has diverse landscapes: \u201cYou can be in the desert in half an hour here on the Colorado Plateau, or you can be up in the San Juan Mountains, or right outside my door is the river that runs through the novel, which is really important to the characters, especially the children, as they kind of undergo this nightlong journey.\u201d Bromiley sees Crown as a novel of the West. \u201cWhile writing it,\u201d she says, \u201cI hesitated to name the specific town and landmarks. I think that\u2019s because I felt like the systems that the characters were encountering are American systems that they could have encountered in any town in the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

An inventive technique she uses is to intersperse the unattributed dialogue of people around the principal characters as a way of creating an unusual aspect of setting: the sounds of what it\u2019s like to be alive in that place. Bromiley remarks that she loves \u201cthe terroir, the language around here, the dialogue of the people who live around where I live, and so I wanted to capture that energy on the page.\u201d Sometimes that dialogue is \u201caligned right on the page to show texture and energy.\u201d This unusual formatting can also convey on a more visceral level the dark severity of what\u2019s happening in the book, as in this oblique passage, which comes after we learn glancingly that social workers once took Virginia and Evan:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re hungry. We\u2019re hungry, and it is your job to feed us!
Make something, says the door.
There\u2019s nothing to even make.
There\u2019s a ten and a five in my purse.
So what? So what?
Go to the store. Get whatever it is you want.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One has the sense, reading these dialogue snippets, that Bromiley is keenly attentive, as poets are, to how things feel. Her process with the book involved many decisions about what kinds of friction she wanted to create by setting one section against another and \u201cwhat kind of shock or surprise or what kind of intimacy\u201d would be generated by different placements. Also like a poet, she seems to appreciate white space in which \u201cnobody\u2019s talking and the reader gets to pour herself in there.\u201d Her writing habits reflect a kind of porousness around language and sense impression too: She writes early in the morning, never at night, but also says that she can write anywhere if she shows up and doesn\u2019t talk too much or interact too much with the world ahead of time.<\/p>\n

Bromiley\u2019s intent was to depict the \u201cincendiary event of an eviction\u201d that will lead to a family\u2019s becoming unhoused from land that they love. While the situation is painful, in Bromiley\u2019s telling, it\u2019s still suffused with beauty. Here is how Jude sees the trailer park, even after the sheriff adheres the eviction notice to the door: \u201cI like at night how the naked windows show each trailer\u2019s bright heart, lit up from the inside and how all the human ordinariness is exposed.\u201d There is darkness in the looming threat of the state coming to take the kids, the mysterious absence of the twins\u2019 father, and whether the family can survive within a system we see is harsh. But throughout threads a raucous joy that the twins find and make for each other. <\/p>\n

As Bromiley points out, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of hope at the end of the journey too, because there\u2019s this new baby coming, and that regardless of what kind of world that child\u2019s born into, that child\u2019s going to be loved.\u201d\u2022<\/p>\n

CROWN, BY EVANTHIA BROMILEY<\/p>\n

\"<i>CROWN<\/i>,<\/a>Related Stories\"Headshot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s hard to be a human inside the system,\u201d Evanthia Bromiley says from Colorado as we speak over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,1329,86466,1331,77,1381,86465,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-218621","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-content-type-feature","10":"tag-contentid-cac1893c-17df-4728-88ee-4da0b2a43533","11":"tag-displaytype-standard-article","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-locale-us","14":"tag-shorttitle-writers-room-evanthia-bromiley","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114755399135238038","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}