While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris' life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown's youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family's oral history and tell us who she was.

Colleen Brown is known primarily as a sculptor. if you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is her first book. Colleen created visual artworks related to the book when she was the Artist in Residence at the Ranger Station Gallery. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver and an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has participated in recent exhibitions and events at Western Gallery, Bellingham; Shelfed, Vancouver; Hedreen Gallery, Seattle; Airbnb, Seattle; and The Apartment, Vancouver. Brown is the recipient of a 2016 Portfolio Prize. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Colleen Brown's profile page

"Colleen Brown's riveting memoir is a lyrical meditation on loss and an interrogation of a largely narrative genre that, despite its ascendency, has been relatively slow to change form. This tendency to hold form is analogous to Brown's observation of how in death her mother's life was hardboiled by the media and sold to the world as true crime. If You Lie Down is, to my mind, the finest debut since Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries: A Memoir and ranks with Annie Ernaux's The Years as a life-changing event."
- Michael Turner, author of 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven
"In memory, everything seems to happen to music." - Tennessee Williams. Colleen Brown's If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is a contemporary symphony of recollection, discovery, and acknowledgment of the things we think we knew but forgot. There is a stunning urgency in this work. Brown has an exacting way of composing a score of curated memories that tonally shifts with each voice, while disrupting the impulse of the reader to romanticize or fall into a lull of melancholy, by deftly shifting the rhythm and flow of the narrative. If you lie down, feels, at first, like a conversation with a friend, but lands with the brutality of human wholeness."
- Johnny D Trinh, Artistic Director, Vancouver Poetry House
"Colleen Brown has found a new way to approach memoir. Her method is to attend to the sharp, intact memories that have inexplicably remained with her, while resisting the temptation to fabricate forgotten or unwitnessed events. The result is an account that enacts the loss she knows as a person who is rendered motherless at a young age. Relying on a structure of interruption and incompletion, her narrative accepts the fact that aspects of the family story will remain obscure while other parts are indelible. The beauty of this writing is that there is no exploitation of emotion here, rather, the author has taken possession of her shards of memory and polished them into poetry. This is a unique and insightful work."
- Liz Magor, visual artist