photo credit: Madison Bay Photography
I grew up in the shadow of mountains, along the mucky edges of the Nisqually River Delta on the outskirts of Olympia. On a rare clear day, you could see the Olympics to the West. Mount Rainier towered to the East.
Our rambler abutted a tract of undeveloped forest land near Luhr Beach. Expansive, wild, and beyond human intervention, those brackish waters and overgrown woods were an endless source of inspiration and awe.
This forest was the setting of my first creative writings. They were predominately ghost stories—haunted places and lost children, creatures hidden in the moss. Perhaps it was something about the gloom, the pervasive smell of sulfur wafting from the bay that inspired me. Perhaps the murky waters reflected my loneliness back at me. Whatever it was, I felt compelled to personify this unmapped territory, to make some sense of this overwhelming feeling of beauty and terror that characterized my childhood.
***
I was an introspective, quiet kid, and I was afraid of everything: natural disasters, intruders, the dark. Even that forest, which I loved, held an air of foreboding. The yellowjacket nests concealed in the trees, the nightshades hanging red and heavy, the unsettling silence in the dusk. Charting these realms of discomfort granted me a small measure of agency during a time I desperately needed it.
As a kid, you are constantly confronted with your own powerlessness, your smallness in the face of the world. When my dad got a new, better job in Williamsburg, Virginia, we moved. It was the first time I’d been further than California. I desperately did not want to leave, but I was 12, and no one asked my opinion.
The day before our departure, I buried my diary in the forest, among the roots of a massive tree. I wanted to leave something of myself behind. Of course, I had already.
***
I never felt at home in the Mid-Atlantic, where I spent most of my teenage years. I was bored by the battlefields, the colonial callbacks. I was learning that there are precious few places untouched by people. In Virginia, I turned further inward, stayed indoors all summer. I couldn’t handle the humidity; my hair curled under the weight of it. I missed the mountains, the moon snails, the huckleberries. I missed feeling rooted to a landscape. Being able to go outside.
I left as soon as I could. Moved back to the PNW for college, first to Portland, then eventually returning to Olympia. After I graduated from Evergreen (go Geoducks), I headed to Washington, DC, for law school, solidifying my bicoastal status. I met my husband, and later my daughter was born. That cataclysmic event prompted my return to writing, rooting my stories in another wild landscape: motherhood. I tried to chart my way through this unfamiliar territory, to embody some of the disorientation and anxiety and unknowns that comprise life with a newborn.
About a year after my daughter’s birth, I returned with my family to Washington State. Maybe it was just the post-pregnancy hormones, but I wanted to go home. And once home, I continued writing, culminating in my first book, the short story collection It’s No Fun Anymore. These stories traverse the dark edges of domestic life, the wild underbelly of the relationships and institutions we hold dear. Like my writing as a kid in the forest, it’s an attempt to pin down a particular place in time; if not necessarily a geographic landscape, then an atmosphere and a feeling, an awe and discomfort surrounding the unknowable and our tenuous place in the world.
***
My family and I live in Bellingham now, but a few years ago, I took them back to the house I grew up in. I hardly recognized the place. They’ve built a golf course down the street. The woods are gone, replaced by larger and larger homes angling for a view. Anything I might have buried in the ground is long forgotten.
I guess that’s how it goes.
But the beach remains, and the loading dock, and the small visitor center. The bluff is eroding, like it had been since I was a kid, moving further and further in on itself. The fishing dock has been cordoned off, crumbled by an earthquake and never repaired.
I take my family into the nature center with its murky aquariums and taxidermied waterfowl. It’s only open a few afternoons a week, same as back then.
My three-year-old runs to a table with a touch tank filled with sand and seashells. I remember my siblings and I finding tiny crabs on the beach, holding them up, watching their claws clasp futilely.
We’re the only ones here besides a young man behind the desk, scrolling on his phone. “I used to live right down the street,” I say. “It’s so different now.” He smiles and nods, then goes back to his phone. He’s heard it all before, I imagine. I turn and look out the large window that showcases the bay, Anderson Island in the distance. No mountains in sight today, but I know they’re there, casting their long shadows as the sun edges towards the horizon.
Brittany is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of the short story collection It’s No Fun Anymore (Apprentice House, June 17, 2025) and the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her poems, essays, and short stories appear in a variety of publications, including Ninth Letter, Witness, CALYX Journal, the Non-Binary Review, Hobart, Identity Theory, Literary Mama, Briar Cliff Review, Typehouse Magazine, Variant Literature, and elsewhere.
A former victim’s rights lawyer in Washington, DC, Brittany turned to writing after the birth of her first child.
Preorder It’s No Fun Anymore with Village Books in Bellingham and Lynden, WA.
Attend the book launch event at Village Books in Bellingham July 3, 2025 at 6:00 pm.
