About

Francie Brown has gypsied around the world coaching films for more years than she can quite account for and figures she must have left some in airports along with a variety of jackets, pens, lighters, charging cables, tissue packets, sweaters, earbuds, amenity kits, notebooks, electrical adapters, Chapsticks, small domestic change, large foreign change and one really good sock. (Don’t ask about that sock; it is a sore point.)

Lately, she’s been off the road more often, and finding her body still thinks it has a pre-dawn call time, is brewing coffee when husbands, dogs and everybody but the neighborhood coyotes unaccountably elects to stay curled up in bed. What do you do alone in the 5 a.m. hush when you’ve spent a lifetime talking — in dripping jungles and close-packed cities and mountain blizzards and storms at sea; in prison cells and hospital rooms, hoosegows and meatlockers (way too many meatlockers)? You’ve read aloud to your children and silently to yourself and a lot into recorders for actors who need their lines in a schizophrenic medley of this planet’s accents and also some other planets’ because screenwriters don’t think anybody else’s job is hard enough.

What do you do with your M.F.A. and your funny accents and your professional logorrhea?

What else? You keep reading.