• Home
  • Events
  • About Brandy
  • Snapshots
  • Books
  • In The Media
  • Media Kit
  • Contact

Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano

author, editor, teacher, survivor of life, baker of bread, churner of butter, and she's funny too. she done wrote a book that she's sure you'll enjoy. and she's gonna write more. just watch and see.

Feeds:
Posts
Comments

About Brandy

10845994_10152870746961183_95981301273322373_n

Long Bio

I don’t like writing about myself in the third person most of the time, so I’m not going to do it here. Hi. My name is Brandy Liên Worrall, and I am a human being who thinks about writing all the time, would love to write all the time, but only writes about 25% of the time because I have things like a husband, three kids, two cats, and 35 (and counting) snails (we’re the Duggars of gastropods, yes), all of whom I love. I grew up in Amish country Pennsylvania, which isn’t exotic as it sounds, but now I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Vancouver, British Columbia, as a struggling writer because being a writer isn’t as Hollywood as everyone thinks it is.

So what do I write? Stuff. I’ve written a bunch of poetry, starting my career as a poet trying out limericks when I was 7. My first award-winning work as a short story submission to a Kellogg’s cereal contest back in the 80s, when pro-literacy and anti-drugs campaigns were big (“Here’s your brain on drugs”: a delicious-looking fried egg just begging for a few squirts of Tabasco). Kellogg’s sent me a certificate basically saying, “Way to go! You wrote words!” Somewhere out there is a person who gave me that first award, and that person has no idea that their minimum-wage job would someday propel a budding young writer to quasi literary stardom.

One of the reasons I loved writing was because there was nothing else for me to do. As an epileptic child of an overprotective Vietnamese mother and a substance-loving American father—both of whom were traumatized during the Vietnam War where they met and got married—I wasn’t allowed to go out of the house very much. So I stayed home and paid attention to things everyone was trying to ignore or forget—mostly, what happened during this war no one was supposed to talk about but which brought us together as a family.

I hightailed it out of that small town as soon as I could. I went to Regis College, an all-women’s Catholic college near Boston. I was never Catholic, and I didn’t care either way if the school was all-women or not. I went to Regis because I loved New Kids on the Block, and they were from Boston, and I wanted to be close to them. Lucky for me, Regis turned out to be a terrific college, and I graduated summa cum laude with degrees in English literature and French. This is where I became seriously interested in the literature of my Asian heritage, delving into Asian American and Vietnamese French works. I went to Boston College for my MA in English for one year, but that didn’t work out when I tried writing a post-colonial, people of colour critique of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and didn’t get the grade I was expecting.

But the UCLA Asian American Studies MA Program called my name, and off to sunny southern California I drove. For those of you keeping track, this was during the early years of the Internet when all that existed was the dial-up modem. So I got my Masters (of the Universe) degree and became an editor at Amerasia Journal, the leading journal for Asian American Studies. Loved working there, but the Universe had bigger plans for me that included kids, Canada, and cancer.

Once in Canada with my two babies and their father, I decided to take my writing career seriously, and the world-renowned UBC MFA in Creative Writing Program was so thoroughly impressed by my portfolio that they let me in. Yes! That was awesome.

But then I got diagnosed with stage III multifocal Triple Negative Breast Cancer (BRCA2-positive, for those of you in the know), and that was the opposite of awesome. I did my treatment and got back to life as usual. Except life wasn’t the same anymore. It was a whole new beast. And I was traumatized by it.

More bad things happened, and then a funny (not “funny, haha”) thing happened. I started understanding better what my parents must have felt during my childhood—the isolation of having gone through a horrifying experience that most of one’s young adult peers could not even imagine. And all those things I paid attention to when I was a kid—those things that everyone else tried to ignore or forget—started making more sense. My memoir, What Doesn’t Kill Us, goes through all that pathos with the bravado of a Lifetime Network movie. (Oprah, I’m waiting for your call, girlfriend!) This is the part where I’m supposed to write something like the book is Margaret Cho meets Eat, Pray, Love meets Oliver Stone movies meets Miss Saigon meets Fault in Our Stars, in some last-ditch attempt to sell you on all these personae that made their authors/creators a buttload of fame and fortune, but really, to have all those people in one room (or book) wouldn’t be fun, methinks. But yeah, this book is like all that.

Now I’m working on my second memoir while doing my undercover crime-fighting gig. I’m also owner and editor of Rabbit Fool Press, a teeny tiny family-owned-and-operated publishing company. I also teach writing workshops, and omigod, I love baking bread.

That’s me—Brandy Liên Worrall—in a coconut shell. My kids think I’m funny and interesting, and they have high standards, especially The Tweens (even the emo one). I hope you think the same thing and read my books (I got poetry too—no limericks though) and check out Rabbit Fool Press. Bless you for reading to the end. My hand cramped up, so I hope it was all worth it.

Oh yeah, I’m represented by these amazing people: Anne McDermid & Associates Literary Agency.

Short Bio

Brandy Liên Worrall is author of What Doesn’t Kill Us, a groundbreaking memoir about growing up in the din of her Vietnamese mother and American father’s trauma from the Vietnam War, and how it related to her breast cancer experience as a young adult. She is also the author of eight collections of poetry (the podBrandy series), as well as having served as editor of numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies. She is the owner and editor of Rabbit Fool Press, a small family-owned-and-operated publishing company based in Vancouver. Brandy received her MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA in 2002 and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in 2012. She is represented by the Anne McDermid & Associates Literary Agency.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

  • Brandy’s Other Webstuffs

    • Cancer Fucking Sucks
    • Poem of the Day
    • Postcard Stories
    • Rabbit Fool Press
  • Archives

    • September 2022
    • June 2022
    • February 2022
    • September 2021
    • May 2021
    • February 2021
    • June 2018
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • November 2016
    • August 2016
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • July 2012
  • Topics

    • Books
    • Events
    • News
    • Poetry
    • Rants d'Être
    • The Write Stuff
    • Uncategorized
  • Brandylien

    Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.

  • Brandy on FB!

    Brandy on FB!
  • Brandy’s Pinterest

    Follow Me on Pinterest
  • Brandy’s Goodreads

  • In the Family

    • Rachel Britcher
    • Irene Suico Soriano
  • Friends & Allies

    • Deborah Campbell
    • Andreas Schroeder
    • Rhea Tregebov
    • Michael Christie
    • Claire Tacon
    • Jamella Hagen
    • Sheryda Warrener
    • Ray Hsu
    • Wayson Choy
    • Larissa Lai
    • Larry Wong
    • Rita Wong
    • Todd Wong
    • Kristina Wong
    • Allan Aquino
    • Alexis Kienlen
    • Ugly Chinese Canadian
    • Emilie Allen
    • Kari-Lynn Winters
    • Jen Luce
    • Victoria Namkung
    • Michael Tora Speier
    • Kaori Kasai
    • Janice Wong
    • Afuwa Granger
    • Karin Lee
    • Ann Marie Fleming
    • Jeff Chiba Stearns
    • Roland Nguyen
    • Sumiko Braun
    • Shauna Swaine Woullard
    • Melissa Dex Guzman
    • Susanne Uliana
  • Cooking, Crafting & Crazy Stuffs

    • Smitten Kitchen
    • Babble
    • Instructables
    • Personal Excellence
    • Planet Sark

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


  • Follow Following
    • Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano
    • Join 44 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: