Rebecca Brenner, cofounder and president of Mindful. Summit County, a nonprofit focused on moving mindfulness from self-care into community care, is ready to unfold and open the doors to “Paper House.”

The book, which she calls a “memoir-in-verse,” is Brenner’s way to honor her mother, Patricia Pearson. It is available now for preorder at wayfarerbookstore.com and will be on hand where all books are sold on June 25.

“It’s poetry,” she explained. “And the reason why I did that was because I inherited a box of my mom’s unpublished poems and journals.”

Brenner, who is also a reporter for the TownLift, originally wanted to write a traditional memoir about her mother.

“But when I sat down to write, what came out were more poems in response to my mom’s poems,” she said.

That’s when Brenner’s insecurities began filling her head.

“All of these self-criticisms came in — ‘You’re not a poet’ and ‘You can’t write poetry,’” she said. “So I had to kind of trick myself mentally and tell myself that I’m just writing an outline, and that turned into a memoir in verse.”

Brenner, an elected member of the Leadership Team of Summit Pride, working closely with city, county and state leaders to ensure equality and safety for the Queer Community, began the memoir journey 20 years ago, two years after her mother lost the struggle with addiction.

“This coming October will be 22 years since she passed, and if you had asked me if I wrote poetry before I started this project, I would have said, ‘Absolutely not.’ But it was how the story wanted to come out as a memoir.”

Unlike some relationships in which a child is dealing with a parent’s addiction, Brenner and her mother shared a close and loving bond.

“I adored my mom,” Brenner said. “She was an English teacher for 20 years for the Diocese of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. She was funny. She was creating. She was loving. She was kind, but she struggled with addiction. So, I did grow up in a home with a lot of chaos and a lot of poverty.”

Brenner watched her mother struggle. 

“She was always really forthcoming and didn’t try to hide behind closed doors,” Brenner said. “She was vocal and out in the open about asking for help. She was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 20 years. She was in and out of Narcotics Anonymous.”

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Parkite Rebecca Brenner, cofounder and president of Mindful. Summit County, has penned a poetic memoir, “Paper House,” which will be released Wednesday. The book is Brenner’s tribute to her mother, who passed away 22 years ago. Credit: Photo courtesy of Rebecca Brenner

Her mother always made sure Brenner knew she was loved.

“I adored my mom, even though it was a challenging upbringing and relationship,” Brenner said.

For the first seven years after her mother’s death, Brenner refused to open her mother’s box.

“I was too afraid of everything because I had a lot of anger over the way she died,” Brenner said. “I had a lot of grief, and I had some unresolved trauma that I was unaware I had at the time.”

Brenner mustered the courage to go through the box when she became a mother herself, after the difficult birth of her daughter.

“Everything went awry, and it triggered all of this unconscious trauma of how I lost my mom,” she said. “I was desperate to talk with my mom and learn about what I was like as a baby and how she navigated motherhood. That’s why I turned to the box — and then found some things that happened when she was little and wasn’t able to process, which probably fueled her addiction. I pieced things together and talked with my dad when he was still alive, and he filled in some of the other pieces.”

Brenner developed a deep compassion for her mother after working with the material in the box over the past 20 years.

“That was my journey, and it will hopefully be part of the journey for the readers,” she said.

Brenner does realize “Paper House” opens the doors to many events and emotions she considers sacred.

“When I was working on the book, I really didn’t think about that at all, because it was this whole beautiful and hard journey of being in conversation with my mom, discovering these things,” she said. “Now that the book is coming out, for the first time I’m like, ‘People are going to read this,’ because this book is my deepest heart and souls is this book, and it will be out in the world.”

Still, working on the book was healing for Brenner.

“To play with my own poems in response to my mom’s poems was a way to process what I was going through, and know in my bones that the work that my mom and I did together over the past 20 years was healing for her, wherever she is now,” Brenner said, her voice filled with emotion. “We were able to do in this book what she couldn’t do in her life. So, I feel that I can communicate with her and have her in my life in a way she couldn’t do on her own in her life.”

Brenner hopes readers will use the book as a guide as they take “deeper dives into our psyches and our emotional bodies and nervous systems.”

“‘Paper House’ is a map for people who are practicing mindfulness at every level during some of their hardest times,” she said. 

Brenner will talk about her book and do some mindful exercises with Nan Seymour, a fellow poet on July 12 at the Kimball Art Center.

“Nan is from Salt Lake City and is the founder of River Writing,” Brenner said. “She has kept vigil at the Great Salt Lake during the last few legislative sessions.”

The two will walk people through some mindful practices, medication practices and presence practices and talk about their work, according to Brenner. 

“We are similar in that we both poke at the aliveness — her in nature, me in psyche and hard spirit,” she said. “I think sometimes people think mindfulness is just being present, but it’s much more than that. It’s more subtle. It infiltrates every aspect of your life.” 

For information about Rebecca Brenner’s memoir, “Paper House,” visit wayfarerbookstore.com.

Also:

Walking and Writing Into the Living World with Rebecca Brenner and Nan Seymour