Scotty and I sat at his kitchen table, drank apple juice and talked for a couple hours. It was a relaxed and, at times, quite entertaining interview.
Despite working on the same campus for a year, I didn't know Scotty prior to interviewing him. Before coming to UCSC, I worked as a freelance writer, a counselor, and an interviewer on AIDS studies, so I was comfortable turning on a tape recorder and asking him lots of questions.
Scotty seemed to enjoy the process as well. He was generous with his time and his work: I left that night with an armload of Lavender Readers that he retrieved from a back closet. Letellier : Can you please tell me a little bit about yourself, your academic background, your life, like where were you born? Brookie: I did. My mother still lives in the house I was born in. In trying to decide where to go to college, I looked through What college students did at the time, they got the big, thick book from the college board that listed all the colleges and universities in the country.
I read the whole thing and picked out two, Colorado College and UC Santa Cruz, because they were both kind of "alternativey. Colorado College sent me their catalog, which was a bunch of pictures of ivy-covered buildings and I thought, that's far too traditional, I'll go to Santa Cruz. Brookie: Narrative evaluations, no grades. I visited here, and you got the feel of a very different, non-traditional kind of place. It's a little hard to remember exactly, but the narrative evaluation and the lack of grades was big.
Letellier : So, the non-traditional part was appealing. Did you grow up in some sort of traditional environment? Brookie: Oh, I grew up in a solidly middle-class family with my mom and dad and my sister. My parents stayed together until my dad died in We were Presbyterians, regular, church-going folks. I sang in the church choir. I was a boy soprano in the San Francisco Opera. I wouldn't say we were rigidly, oppressively traditional, but maybe that gives you a bit of a picture.
