Maureen Brownlee (1960- ) is a Canadian fiction writer. She is the author of two novels: Cambium Blue (Harbour Publishing, 2022) and Loggers’ Daughters (Oolichan Books, 2013).
Born and raised on the western slope of the northern Rocky Mountains, Maureen has lived and worked in several BC communities, always returning to her mountain home. A former journalist, she started writing fiction as child, on a manual typewriter with sticky keys in the office behind the post office in her parents’ general store. In her twenties she paid monthly instalments for a home study writing course and wrote a handful of unpublished children’s stories. Then life intervened and she learned how to write about other topics during a decade spent running a weekly newspaper. After selling the newspaper in 1994, she moved to a small farm and spent the next ten years building fences, working at assorted day jobs, taking university courses by correspondence, and learning how to write fiction.
Her writing education has included workshops at Island Mountain School of the Arts, Fernie Writers Conference and Sage Hill Writing Experience. Additionally she studied English, History and Creative Writing, first through B.C.’s Open University and then at the University of Northern British Columbia. In 2008 she began a joint BFA through UNBC/Emily Carr College but after a year of online classes returned to writing full-time. Early short stories were published in The Collective Consciousness (The Writers Collective, Winnipeg), and she had a near miss with a postcard story that was short-listed in the Writers Union annual contest.
When not writing or farming Maureen gardens, growing much of her own food. When not weeding she runs for the fun of it, dabbles at the guitar and pencil sketching, and reads, reads, reads.