About Us
A Storyteller’s Sojourn
When Mama died in “08, I was in the middle of a divorce. The agony of losing her alongside a broken marriage had dragged me into a cruel depression. I needed something to help me cope and to put this blackness into some sort of order before it consumed me.
Once in grad school, the Professor had given the class an assignment to write a story focusing on a particular object. After some pondering, I wrote about the time Mom went on a boat ride. As the story goes--when she stepped out on deck for some fresh air, a strong sea breeze swept the wig she was wearing off her head. Helplessly she watched as her hair sailed across the ocean.
I was surprised to receive an A for this work. Writing has always been challenging since I’m dyslexic. Each word, sentence, and paragraph I wrote was accompanied by a persistent lump in the stomach, a knitted brow, and it took hours to get my thoughts together. But as I wrote this tale, the knots began to soften, the lines on my forehead gave way to a smile, and my ideas flowed easer.
Because this was Mom’s story!
In that enchanting moment, my desire to write was born.
I couldn’t repair my doomed marriage. But I could certainly resurrect my beloved Mother each time I wrote about her.
And so, began my years-long sojourn of storytelling that has illuminated my life. And the tale, that once was a five-page grad school essay has grown into a milk crate brimming with non-fiction prose. This work, I’ve christened Hairalujah.
About O’la
Hairalujah is a memoir that portrays one woman’s knock down drag out fight to be. Set in the baby boomer years, O’labumi Brown, an African American woman with Caribbean roots, fisticuffs a life of addiction, abusive lesbian relationships, and battles self-destruction, fueled by the impalpable, and haunted memory of incest. All of which sends her spiraling downward into the rock-bottom, drug infested streets of New York City. Struggling to cope with her distraught life are her loving mother, siblings, friends, and a few good men.
The Yoruba name O’labumi means “A Gift Given From God.” Ms. Brown balances the established profession as a Crisis Prevention Trainer at a nonprofit with the emerging craft of Memoir writing. She has attended the literary workshops of Michel Marriott's, Soul's Sojourn Memoir Writers Workshop; The International Woman's Writer's Guild; Gotham Writers Workshop; and The Yorkville Writing Circle. She is a long-time resident of Brooklyn New York.
