A Place Called Tula: Shane Brown Finds His Own Voice

by Davis Coen. Photographs by Megan Wolfe.

For Shane Brown, writing was not always part of the plan.

His father, the late Mississippi writer Larry Brown, was the novelist in the family. Shane grew up watching him write, publish books, and develop a literary reputation that would eventually make his name closely associated with North Mississippi. Shane took a different path, working, raising a family, and spending time with his brother Billy Ray at Brown Family Dairy.

Over time, however, Shane began writing his own stories.

Those stories have now become A Place Called Tula, a collection of fiction and nonfiction published by Oxford’s Cofield Press. The book includes an introduction, 13 stories and an afterword by Allen Boyer. Its pages move between rural Mississippi, family memories, work, loss, addiction, friendship, and the ordinary moments that can take on greater meaning with time.

Brown will celebrate the release with a reading and signing Tuesday, September 29 at Off Square Books.
The book is deeply connected to the landscape around Yocona and Tula, where generations of the Brown family have lived. Tula is also the place where Larry Brown built The Shack, a small cabin intended as a writing retreat. For Shane, the setting carries both his father’s literary history and his own memories.

Shane Brown with daughter Tula at his writing desk at The Shack. Photograph by Megan Wolfe.

Yet A Place Called Tula is not simply an extension of Larry Brown’s work. It is Shane Brown’s effort to make sense of his own experiences and the people around him.

The stories that follow cover a wide range of characters and situations while keeping that connection to rural Mississippi. “George,” Brown’s favorite story in the collection, centers on a man who drops by the narrator’s house and begins unloading his personal problems. The narrator listens despite having problems of his own, and the encounter repeats itself the next day. “People at the Park” focuses on the observations people make about strangers during the course of an ordinary workday. “Slick” follows a homeless man who unexpectedly gets a role in a movie after wandering drunk onto a film set. Slick had never acted before but “nailed every shot” after agreeing to stay sober during filming. His success is short-lived, however, as he returns to drinking afterward.

“George is probably the best one,” Brown said when discussing his favorite story.

The collection becomes darker in several other places. “The Shot” deals with addiction and suicide, while “Judy” examines a collapsing relationship and the character’s inability to escape his own behavior. And, “The Bridge” changes the form of the collection and reads almost like a poem or song, presenting a spare and painful account of a child’s death in a creek.

Other stories take a quieter approach to the same themes. “Quincy” begins with a hitchhiker picked up on I-55 south of Grenada and evolves into a story about generosity and recognizing the comforts that people can take for granted. “Tula Memory” uses a familiar place to explore the way family experiences remain attached to the landscape. “Changes and Time” considers the inevitable movement of life, while “I Don’t Like” uses a more direct and conversational voice to examine judgment and personal opinions.

“Brothers” returns to the relationship between Shane and Billy Ray and the familiarity of siblings who work together. “Billy Ray’s Farm, Now” focuses on the dairy and the realities of agricultural work. “Time on the River,” the final story, turns toward children and the passage of time, reflecting on the way ordinary family moments can become more meaningful as children grow older.

Shane and Katie Brown help at the family’s dairy farm, making ice cream and other products. Photograph by Megan Wolfe.

The collection’s emphasis on work comes naturally from Brown’s own life. He began helping his brother with the dairy about a decade ago and continues to milk cows, make deliveries, and help with the family’s growing ice cream operation.

“I wouldn’t have to do anything else but make ice cream,” Brown said, describing how much the business has grown.

Shane’s relationship with his father also extends into the music connected to the book. Shane and his brother wrote a song called “Joe” after riding around together with their father’s book and its movie adaptation. The song was recorded at The Shack, and portions of it are incorporated into the design of the book.

“I’ve seen all this, these aspects of life that I’ve talked about in this book really happen,” Brown said.
That may be the best way to understand A Place Called Tula. The book makes no effort to glamorize rural Mississippi, or pretend that difficult experiences do not happen there.

Instead, Brown writes about people dealing with real problems alongside ordinary moments of humor, family, work, and friendship.

A neighbor can become a source of unexpected reflection. A hitchhiker can become a lesson in gratitude. A homeless man can unexpectedly become a movie actor. A farm can become a place where family history continues to live. A day spent with children can become a reminder that time does not stop.

Brown writes about people who work hard, make mistakes, drink too much, lose people, argue with family members, take care of children and do it all over the next day. Some of the characters make terrible choices. Others offer unexpected kindness. Most of them are recognizable because he allows them to remain complicated.

In that way, A Place Called Tula is also a book about inheritance—not simply being the son of a well-known writer, but the inheritance of a place, a family, a way of working, and a collection of stories waiting to be told.
That connection could have been intimidating, especially for a first-time author whose father remains such a major literary figure. But A Place Called Tula works because Shane does not seem interested in becoming another Larry Brown. The stories are rougher around the edges, conversational, and often deliberately unpolished in voice. They sound like someone telling you what happened rather than standing at a distance and explaining what it means.

That may be the book’s greatest strength.

For Shane Brown, those stories have been close by all along, but now the experiences have finally found a place on the page.

And for readers who know the Brown family, the Yocona area, or the rural North Mississippi landscape that runs through the collection, the September 29 book release event will offer an opportunity to hear him read from these stories in his own voice.