Novelist Carrie Brown compares the process of writing a novel to hauling a gingerbread house around in the back of her car. “It’s terrifying,” she said. “You feel as though you’ve created this elaborate thing made out of spun sugar, and it might fall apart at any moment. Who wants to be carrying that around with them all the time?”

Novelist Carrie Brown will read from her latest book, "The Rope Walk," on April 18 in Pannell Gallery.The similarity struck her one holiday season as she sat watching the annual gingerbread house contest at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn with her children. During the program, one woman described the tedious process of getting a baked, frosted and painstakingly decorated structure from Point A to Point B.

“The thing that stuck with me the most, actually, was one woman’s description of having to get this thing – you know, the pieces of it – into the car … and the elaborate way they had to pad their car to get this thing there,” Brown said. “That is very much like working on a novel, I think.”

Brown, a visiting associate professor at Sweet Briar College and wife of novelist and SBC professor John Gregory Brown, is familiar with the process. She has five novels and a collection of short stories to her credit, including “The Rope Walk,” to be released by Pantheon Books in May.

She will read from her latest book at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18 in Pannell Gallery at Sweet Briar. The event is part of the College’s writers series and is open to the public. Admission is free.

Brown talked about her latest book one late February morning in her office at the academic resource center. She was dressed comfortably: an un-tucked button-up shirt – white cotton with an earth-toned print – dark pants and black, yoga-style shoes. Her curly salt-and-pepper hair was piled on her head, a steaming mug of tea in her hands.

The parent of three children, she said the idea for “The Rope Walk” came to her shortly after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. “After that incident, and then in the wake of everything that has followed from that, I started wondering whether or not it felt terrifying to be a child in the world today,” she said.

Brown, who grew up in Vermont, Connecticut and England, recalled Cold War drills from the 1960s. She wondered how her youthful experiences compared to those of today’s children.

“When I was young, children were still being trotted down to the basement of their schools and made to kneel on the ground with their bottoms in the air and their hands over their heads, as if that would protect us somehow,” she said.

“It was a very silly proposition, really. I realized how safe my own childhood had felt compared to the world my kids have grown up in. If there were perils out there lurking on the horizon, I did not know about them. Part of that was probably information technology, but part of it was the state of the world … other than the Cold War, it didn’t seem to be so perilous a place.”

In “The Rope Walk,” 10-year-old Alice, the motherless daughter of a Shakespeare professor, meets Theo, a mixed-race boy who is living with his grandparents while his parents sort out marital problems.

Sad, scary things transpire as Theo’s grandmother has a stroke, and the children befriend a man who is dying of AIDS. In the backdrop looms a world scarred by 9-11, hurricanes, tsunamis and war.

“I started writing the novel as a way of imagining childhood in the presence of all these terrible things,” she said. “I wanted to have that be in the background of the story and then put these children in the presence of this shadow and see what happened.”

What happened, however, was not what the author expected. Brown, who considers writing a “process of discovery,” said, “I discovered really quite soon into the novel that I’d made a really significant miscalculation.”

Her characters, like her own children, seemed no more terrified by current events than she did in the 60s. “And so the novel ended up becoming in some ways a study of the way in which childhood itself can be a kind of an inoculant against what is terrible out there in the world,” she said.

When she began writing “The Rope Walk,” Brown had no idea how her story was going to end. It was a method she was comfortable with, straying from it only once for her third novel “The Hatbox Baby.” For that book – set in and around the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair – she’d planned everything.

After months of research and tedious preparation, Brown sat down to write “The Hatbox Baby.” Almost immediately, the story took off on its own path without regard for her detailed outline and chapter notes.

“Within about the first ten pages of the novel a character that I had not accounted for … literally leaps into the path of the character I had imagined would be the main character for the novel,” she said. “He took the story away from him.”

So Brown did what any sensible writer would do – she killed off her old character and ran away with the new man. “I had to have him murdered early on because there was no more use for him,” she said, laughing.

“Just as readers read partly to find out what’s going to happen, I think some of that same principle applies for me as a writer also. In fact, that sense of discovery is vital for me. If I know what’s going to happen, if I have it all figured out, then I’m not very interested in it.”

In addition to “The Rope Walk” and “The Hatbox Baby,” Brown is the author of “Rose’s Garden,” “Lamb in Love,” and “Confinement,” winner of the Library of Virginia Book Award. She also penned “The House of Belle Isle,” a collection of short stories.

Among other honors, she is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow.

A former journalist, Brown also writes book reviews for The Washington Post and other newspapers.

For more information on the writers series, contact John Gregory Brown at brown@sbc.edu or 381-6434.

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer