38 Fiona Young-Brown: writer, historian

Fiona Young-Brown is a writer and historian. Originally from England, she has lived in Lexington, Kentucky, for more than 20 years with her husband and rescue dogs. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including A Culinary History of Kentucky and Secret Lexington: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure. When she's not going down research rabbit holes, she is probably cooking, painting, or planning her next trip.

Fiona is on the board of directors of the Lexington Writers Room (https://www.lexwritersroom.com), a coworking space for writers in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. 

Follow Fiona on Instagram @fionayb30

www.fionayoungbrown.com

Kathie’s note: Fiona and I were members of a local group of writers called the Coffee Consortium back in the late aughts, early 2010s. A dozen of us, give or take, would meet at the library or a coffeeshop and talk shop, and usually bitch and moan about editors and assignments, hahaha. It was wonderful. Camaraderie is one of my favorite things in life! 

Writers Rotation intro/outro recorded at Dynamix Productions in Lexington, Kentucky.

Transcript

Fiona [00:00:01]:
My name is Fiona Young-Brown. I am a writer and author, and writing is my way of learning and teaching.

Intro [00:00:09]:
Hi, welcome to the Writers Rotation podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Stamps. I love words and writing and people and talking. So I'm talking to people who write all kinds of things in different professions. It's a Writers Rotation. 

Kathie [00:00:26]:
Fiona, how are you?

Fiona [00:00:27]:
Hello.

Kathie [00:00:28]:
How is everything in the book publishing world?

Fiona [00:00:31]:
It's good. I'm doing what I enjoy and I'd rather be doing this than stuck, you know, 9 to 5, counting down the days until retirement or something.

Kathie [00:00:41]:
So how many titles do you have under your belt?

Fiona [00:00:45]:
I think. And I. Although, no, no, no, because now I've got this one…

Kathie [00:00:51]:
There's so many I have to stop and count!

Fiona [00:00:54]:
It's 17 or 18. I get confused because I did one for UK that then never actually got published because of, you know, politics and government and all of that fun stuff.

Kathie [00:01:07]:
Do you have fiction and nonfiction?

Fiona [00:01:09]:
No, it is all nonfiction at the moment. But I've got two completed first drafts of fiction.

Kathie [00:01:18]:
Ooh, what genre?

Fiona [00:01:19]:
One is a cozy mystery.

Kathie [00:01:21]:
Love it.

Fiona [00:01:22]:
I felt like writing something quaintly English. And the other is kind of more of a, Nic calls it my literary novel. A woman's parents die and she discovers that they were not who they thought they were or who she thought they were. And it kind of leads her to question everything she thought she knew about herself as she's trying to track down the secrets.

Kathie [00:01:51]:
Sort of a life espionage.

Fiona [00:01:55]:
Exactly. I like that title as well. Life espionage. I like that as a genre description.

Kathie [00:02:01]:
Where are you from?

Fiona [00:02:04]:
I am from Kent, down on the south coast of England.

Kathie [00:02:08]:
How did you get from Kent to Kentucky?

Fiona [00:02:10]:
I married a Kentuckian.

Kathie [00:02:12]:
How did you meet the Kentuckian? Where?

Fiona [00:02:15]:
In Japan, of course, because that's the logical spot where you go and meet a Kentuckian, of course. I moved to Japan after I finished undergrad. I had plans to join the diplomatic service, and that sounded very interesting and lots of travel and so on. But I thought at first I'd take a year off and just take a break from college, learn, maybe learn a language. And I ended up in Japan on a government program teaching English in a very rural junior high school. And then I ended up staying for three years because I enjoyed it, I liked Japan. And while I was there, I met a guy from Kentucky who was in another small town and who had a car, which made it much easier for us all to meet up and get around at weekends. And we started dating after that. He came back to Kentucky to finish his MBA. I moved to Iowa to go to grad school and then we got married and I've been here ever since.

Kathie [00:03:21]:
What is your degree or degrees?

Fiona [00:03:23]:
My undergrad degree was American Studies, which always makes Americans nervous because they.

Kathie [00:03:29]:
What did you study about us?!?

Fiona [00:03:30]:
I guess they figured I was sitting there with a notebook, taking little notes about everything they do. It was mainly history and literature and some politics and so on. And I chose it mainly because I loved doing literature. But I wanted something different from, you know, I love Shakespeare, but I wanted something different for college. And I think there was probably a part of me that was rebelling against my very old-fashioned English teacher at school who was, you know, American is not proper literature and so on. So I decided, right, I will go and prove that it is. So that was my undergrad degree and then my graduate degree was in women's studies and medical anthropology with a focus on Japan. Just to keep things interesting and mix it all up.

Kathie [00:04:25]:
And therefore you are a writer.

Fiona [00:04:27]:
Yes, because I have too many interests. For example, travel, food, history. I'm really into history. And let's see, last year it was seaweed and farming and cows. Nuclear power, which I was a terrible science student, but if I had the chance to learn about it now as an adult, why not? Eleanor Roosevelt, media, soccer history. Why not? If it's something that sounds interesting?

Kathie [00:04:57]:
There you go. That's so fun. What did reading and writing look like in your childhood?

Fiona [00:05:03]:
I loved reading and writing. I was very much a shy loner kid. I grew up in a single parent family for a few years until my mom remarried. We couldn't afford to buy a lot of books, but instead we had the library. And so as soon as I was about 4, my mom took me to the library and I got a library card, which was great because I just remember every week I would get piles and piles of books. As many books as I could as I was allowed to check out at a time. And the very first book I checked out was Dr. Seuss, the cat in the Hat.

Kathie [00:05:41]:
Yes!

Fiona [00:05:44]:
And then by the time I was about 11, I told the library that I was bored. I'd run out of stuff in the kids section and so could they please let me join the adult section? And they checked with my mom. And she said she's reading, so yes, she can. She can read stuff. And so I checked out stuff from there. When I was about 5, I started writing my own little books. I'd sort of get little bits of notepaper, and I wrote one about the birds in the garden and just kind of my little guide to what the birds were. My grandmother was really, really into westerns, and so whenever she babysat me, I was watching cowboy movies. Then I wrote a little book about the different types of American Indians and the kinds of houses that they lived in. And so, yeah, books. Reading and writing was something I loved from an early age. And then when I was a teenager, I was sitting there reading books rather than going out and doing teenage type stuff. But I never considered that it would be a career.

Kathie [00:06:54]:
Do you still have any of those early writings?

Fiona [00:06:56]:
I don't, and I wish I did because they'd be fascinating. I also used to sit and write scripts for, like, my favorite TV shows. I'd write these really detailed episode scripts for making up my own stories. I wish I had all of those now. They are somewhere, lost in time.

Kathie [00:07:15]:
Did you start writing magazine articles and then books?

Fiona [00:07:19]:
I wrote a few magazine articles, and that started actually when I was still in school. I did the school year book and that kind of thing. And then when I was in Japan, again, a few pieces, we had a little kind of newsletter zine thing that would go out among all of the English teachers. And so I wrote a few things for that. And again, never really considered writing as a career. When I was in grad school, I quickly was taught publish or perish, they drill into you in grad school, that all you'll have to do is write because otherwise you won't have a career. But it got to be writing that everyone else tears apart. That was the other thing I picked up that I really didn't like in grad school. It seemed to be that idea that you couldn't read for fun. You had to read just for the sake of tearing down someone else's arguments, which actually really killed my love of writing for several years after I left grad school.

Kathie [00:08:20]:
Peer review? Peer torture!

Fiona [00:08:23]:
Exactly. I wrote a couple of pieces just for encyclopedias while I was still in grad school and then left and as I said, went through a couple of years where I couldn't even look at a bookstore because the idea of reading for fun had sort of been drummed out of me. Everything you read, you had to be reading very, very intense stuff and constantly looking at the flaw or looking for a flaw in the argument, which just destroyed it for a while. And so instead I went, I moved to Kentucky and I became a teacher for a few years at UK. I taught women's studies and Japanese language.

Fiona [00:09:07]:
And I loved teaching. I'd been teaching in Japan. I loved working with students. I loved seeing them get fired up about something. I loved helping them figure out ways to solve a problem for themselves rather than telling them how to do it. But I hated the bureaucracy. I really disliked that side of it. But I taught there for three years as an adjunct and was still kind of trying to figure out what I do with my life or when I grew up.

Kathie [00:09:40]:
Yes.

Fiona [00:09:40]:
And I'm still trying to figure out what I'll do when I grow up.

Kathie [00:09:42]:
But I hope I never do.

Fiona [00:09:44]:
That's never going to happen. I toyed with the idea of going back and completing my PhD, but at the same time, after being away from it for a while, that sort of distance and realizing there's a life outside of academia. But I just enjoy all the different topics learning and then telling other people about them.

Kathie [00:10:06]:
Do you have a process? Is it different with every project? How does that work?

Fiona [00:10:11]:
It's usually different with every project. For about 10 years I worked on nonfiction, short educational books for middle graders. And so it depends a lot what information I have going in. Some of them are very clearly laid out. Here is your plan, here is your outline, and so on. Whereas others, and especially the stuff I've been working on more recently, has been much more free-flowing for what I'm interested in doing. So my plan typically involves lots of procrastination.

Kathie [00:10:45]:
Yes, the pro!

Fiona [00:10:47]:
Lots of notebooks and lots of making notes of this is how I'll do it. And then procrastinating and coming back and writing a different plan of saying this is how I'll do it. Now doing that repeatedly, which I know a lot of people would say is really, really bad and just putting things off. But I've also found I write best when I'm under a really tight deadline.

Kathie [00:11:12]:
Sure.

Fiona [00:11:13]:
And so what works best for me a lot of times is lots of planning, lots of thinking about it, then changing it all in my head until I'm kind of down to the wire and then writing it. And I usually find that when I do that, I've written something very different to what I would have done if I'd started and just writing it all along.

Kathie [00:11:36]:
Do you use dictation or do you just type it? Do you handwrite it?

Fiona [00:11:41]:
I handwrite some. I type a lot in terms of the actual. When I'm actually writing a manuscript, I am typing and I find there's something about writing by hand that makes it stick in my brain more. I feel more attached to the words if I'm actually writing them with a pen and paper.

Kathie [00:12:00]:
How do you go back and find what you, “I know I wrote this. I think it was on the lefthand side of the page. I know I wrote that.” How do you go through all the notebooks and say, Where did I put that?

Fiona [00:12:10]:
I make sure every project has a different yellow legal pad.

Kathie [00:12:14]:
Oh, you're a yellow legal padder.

Fiona [00:12:15]:
I'm a yellow legal padder. I tried the white legal pads, but there's just something about the yellow ones that feels so special.

Kathie [00:12:22]:
What about the back of it? You just flip it over and then you lose a solid two inches.

Fiona [00:12:28]:
I don't write on the back of the pages.

Kathie [00:12:31]:
What do you do with the backs of the pages? They're just blank?

Fiona [00:12:34]:
They're just blank. I don't even look at those.

Kathie [00:12:37]:
Oh my gosh.

Fiona [00:12:40]:
And I'm also addicted to notebooks. I have, you know, two drawers in my filing cabinet that are filled with notebooks that I haven't yet used.

Kathie [00:12:49]:
I like the 25 cent ones, every back-to-school sale, the spiralbound.

Fiona [00:12:55]:
I like every kind of notebook. And this is my problem because I like the little thin Moleskine ones that I can just carry with me everywhere. I like the cheap ones. Then I've got lots of fancy ones that I've seen when I've been somewhere and I'm like, oh, that's a pretty notebook. And I'm trying to train myself to get over that idea of that's too nice to write in. I'm working my way through that. The fancy ones should be written in as well.

Kathie [00:13:19]:
Good. Good for you. When you sit down to type, do you automatically spell words with O-U-R or O-R? 

Fiona [00:13:30]:
After nearly 30 years in the US I typically type O-R mostly. I've dumped my U's for the most part. Just because I've been writing for so long now for American magazines, American outlets. But I do write a British travel blog. And when I do that, I just instantly go back into British spelling. So it's just kind of that one just clicks. That okay, now I am being British again.

Kathie [00:14:02]:
It's cancelled with two Ls.

Fiona [00:14:04]:
Yeah, there are still some words where I'm sitting and trying to. I have to think. Okay, is that with an S or a zed?

Kathie [00:14:11]:
Oh, a zed. That's right. What's your latest project? What's your new book?

Fiona [00:14:17]:
Secret Lexington, came out September of ‘25.

Kathie [00:14:20]:
What are some of the secrets in Lexington?

Fiona [00:14:23]:
So the book is 84 different obscure places or things in and around Lexington. And it was one of those things where I knew that whatever I wrote, there will be locals that come to me and say, well, everyone knows about that. And so I was trying to find that balance of things that locals will probably already know, but visitors won't and some things that locals won't know about as well. And when they approached me this time, the first thing that came into my head, there is a pig statue in town. I didn't know why there was this pig reading a bunch of books.

Kathie [00:15:03]:
Wait, do I know the pig statue?

Fiona [00:15:07]:
On Alexandria Drive. It's hidden away in the shopping center. It is a pig called Hamingway.

Kathie [00:15:13]:
Hamingway!

Fiona [00:15:14]:
He has the white beard and the big sweater. He is the Ernest Hemingway of the pig world with a huge pile of books. And if you look really carefully, some of the paint's fading now, but all of the book titles are plays on famous pieces of literature. But with pigs.

Kathie [00:15:33]:
I love it.

Fiona [00:15:35]:
It's all places in and around Fayette County. There are some historical buildings. There's the house that artist Henry Faulkner lived in. I had no idea that Lexington and Fayette County had prehistoric mounds from pre Columbian people. So it's kind of an interesting mix of things. And what I liked as well was a lot of the places I found almost by accident. You go to look around one place and mention to someone that this is what you were doing. And then they would say, Oh, well have you heard about this or did you know about the story behind this? And so it kind of one thing led to another as I was doing it.

Kathie [00:16:17]:
What's on your agenda for ‘26?

Fiona [00:16:19]:
I have the two novels that I, well, one took me 20-plus years. I've had the idea for ages and would write a little bit and then tell myself I'm not a novelist and get distracted by other things.

Kathie [00:16:34]:
20 years was in this millennium. Mine was in the 1900s.

Fiona [00:16:38]:
Okay, now you've just made me feel better about the fact that it took me 20-plus years. But now that I have a complete draft of both of them, I'm working through edits on those and we'll see what happens if I then decide they're terrible or if I decide that I want to keep pushing on with those. I've also got an idea that I've been working on research and going down lots of research rabbit holes for a locally related history book that would be much more in depth than the local histories that I've done so far that I'm really fascinated by. And so I'm hoping that I can maybe come up with a couple of sample chapters and see if I can find a publisher that would be interested in it.

Kathie [00:17:30]:
There you go.

Fiona [00:17:31]:
Or at least use it as an excuse to spend hours and hours and hours more time in the Kentucky Room, searching through records and all of that fun stuff.

Kathie [00:17:45]:
The library downtown.

Fiona [00:17:46]:
I love that room.

Kathie [00:17:47]:
That's such a cool library.

Fiona [00:17:49]:
And I love where I started going down this rabbit hole. It meant I got to play with the microfiche machines again, which I haven't played with in years. And I just love those. I'm so glad they still have them.

Kathie [00:18:01]:
Yeah, I do love me some research. I can get in a rabbit hole with best of them.

Fiona [00:18:09]:
I foresee many hours in the Kentucky Room and down on UK's campus in their Margaret King archives because I working through those as well.

Kathie [00:18:19]:
Yes. Of course, I love a good boot camp because, you know, one more boot camp and maybe I'll finally realize or figure out how to do it.

Fiona [00:18:26]:
Well, yeah. I think I've spent the last 20 years thinking, if I do that one more workshop and that one more webinar, this will have the magic answer.

Kathie [00:18:35]:
Because there's only the one answer.

Fiona [00:18:37]:
I just haven't found it yet.

Kathie [00:18:39]:
The right one. Exactly. Everybody else has found theirs, but I haven't found mine yet.

Fiona [00:18:47]:
But it must be here somewhere amongst this pile of recordings that I have to listen to at some point.

Kathie [00:18:52]:
Yes! We are a silly bunch. Well, this has been so much fun. It was so good to catch up.

Fiona [00:18:58]:
Oh, I'm glad you asked me.

Kathie [00:19:00]:
Thanks, Fiona.

Fiona [00:19:01]:
Thank you. Bye.

Outro [00:19:03]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Writers Rotation. Like and subscribe for more. And remember, writing is a marketable skill. Smiling is a remarkable skill.